St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, April, 2003
By Michael Depp

It's spring! A last chance to enjoy the fading vestiges of life-affirming weather while summer's murderous heat is revving up its jumpers, ready like a cat set to pounce as Jazz Fest's first tents are pitched by the end of the month. It's a season of renewal and fertility, and as March's histimine haze lifts, April is our best month to cleanse the palate and purify the G.I. with the kind of produce that compels you to ask yourself why you don't eat fresh fruits and vegetables more often. In April, healthy is easy.

Colors and textures are bursting out of farmers' markets like trippy fireworks, and smart chefs are taking advantage of the sudden bounty on their menus. In Covington, Torre Bagalmann-Solazzo, the co-chef and co-owner (with her husband) of Ristorante Del Porto, is bringing spring vegetables into her Tuscan-meets-Louisiana cuisine. One of her main suppliers is Jim Core at the Covington Farmer's Market (he's also a Crescent City Farmer's Market regular) from whom she's gotten a bassonet full of baby carrots, lettuces and turnips.

(And lest I let the Tuscan-meets-Louisiana description slide without qualification, Bagalman-Solazzo explains: "We're trying to cook as if we were in Italy by using local ingredients we can find in the style of Italy.")

Also in Covington, Etoile chef Mike Schneder has been stocking up on Jim Core's small specialty lettuces for his salad mixes. His enthusiasms are also running toward tomatoes this time of year: "Tomatoes are available year round, but they're a lot nicer in the spring," he says.

But the real clincher is the strawberry shortcake he floats on to his menu, a genois cake loaded with strawberry compote and topped with a strawberry champagne sauce, which leads me to consideration of the month's most singly-vital offering.

Strawberries

If you let April pass without picking up at least a pint of Louisiana strawberries then you might as well forfeit your right to buy produce. Strawberries are everywhere this month - on the backs of trucks parked on roadsides, at farmer's markets and most notably, at the annual Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival in Tangipahoa Parish, the strawberry capital of the world.

Strawberries generally have two pickings in Louisiana, first after Christmastime and then in April, where the most luscious of the lot make their debut at the festival from April 11-13 (the fest has added Friday night activities to the roster this year). If you head up to Ponchatoula, get ready to fight off 350,000 - 400,00 like-minded folk with a yen for strawberry pie; strawberry shortcake; strawberry lemonade; strawberry sundaes (with strawberry ice cream); hand-dipped chocolate strawberries (in white and dark chocolate); strawberry pancakes; strawberry jams and jellies; powdered sugar strawberries; and the coup de grace, fried strawberries.

That's right, fried strawberries. Rolled in a sweet, beignet-like batter, they're fried in hot oil and come out looking like a pinkish hush puppy. "They sound absolutely horrendous," admits Linda DePaula, publicity director for the festival and a past grand marshal, "but they're wonderful."

That weekend, Ponchatoula restaurants also make their own worthwhile contributions to the festival, especially Paul's Café, a favorite local joint praised up and down every year for its strawberry dacquiris made with (no surprise) freshly-harvested berries and N.O. Rum.

And a last note on the strawberry front: Henry Amato, best known for reviving the old Italian tradition of strawberry winemaking a few years ago, is bringing back another old practice to strawberry farming - the use of actual straw. Yes, the berries take their name for the pine straw mulch that was once used to grow them. Back then, strawberry farming was a year-round cycle that required manicuring the pine woods for a clean supply of pine straw, but it was abandoned long ago in these parts until Amato set aside a quarter acre of his farm for the task last year.

Early this month, Amato will be bringing out a limited supply of straw-mulched, heirloom Tangi berries which he'll be selling at the Crescent City Farmer's Market. "It's going to be a different flavored berry," he says. "It will be smaller and sweeter." And worth checking out if you can get a pint before his limited supply disappears.

The Devil Inside

One of the most enduring culinary icons of my youth was Orange Julius, a surreal and terrifying spokesdevil for orange drinks and hot dogs, an improbable combination if ever there was one (befitting, I suppose, such an unusual mascot). When I first moved to New Orleans, I was astonished to see the shopping mall fast food chain still survived at the Lakeside Mall. Soon, it was gone though, like so many of its brethren across the nation, left only to the annals of kitsch food memory.

Or so it seemed. That was until the Crescent City Farmers Market sponsored an Orange Julius contest in February when shoppers were invited to recreate the recipe from memory. The turnout surprised even the contest's organizers, and the winner's recipe I include below in the spirit of food nostalgia. Judy Serice, mother of Brennan's cook Mark Serice, took top honors for the Orange Julius drink below.

Orange Julius

Ingredients
2 cups fresh squeezed orange juice
1/4 cup powdered milk
1 tablespoon honey
1 egg white
1 tsp. Vanilla
1 cup ice cubes

Directions
Mix all ingredients in blender. Serve with orange slice.