On Mardi Gras day, we said farewell to meat with a beef blowout. All steak, all day, with a few sides: green salad so we wouldn’t fall into a meat coma, black beans and corn for fiber, and a fennel & orange salad to reduce the palate fatigue brought on by too much fatty, corn-fed beef. It WAS Fat Tuesday, so we had an excuse to over-indulge in ribeyes, and to laugh out loud as we thought of the rest of the country, where it was just plain ol’ Tuesday.
My dad’s shiny new gas grill (well, not so shiny since I set it on fire when it was less than a month out of the box) has an infrared side burner. Now, I’m an admitted hardwood lump charcoal partisan, but this infrared thingy is an excellent searing tool. Thin, lean cuts of meat (like pork medallions or flank steak), fish, shrimp, or chicken satay cook in the blink of an eye, developing a serious char.
Wonder if I can find a stand-alone infrared burner?
Bouillie 
We had so much Mardi Gras at my office I almost felt as if I were in Louisiana — king cakes from Randazzo’s all month, most likely sent to the NOLA expats in our legal department, who shared with us. On Fat Tuesday we had enough king cakes to feed all of downtown Phoenix, plus a brass band — called the Bad Cactus Brass Band! — and a second line around the unfinished 20th floor, and Richard Adkerson handing out beads by the armload. One of the attorneys brought a Russian cake from Haydel’s, a new phenomenon for me (and not one I plan to seek out again). But it made me miss the real thing, especially that clean, washed peace that falls over the city after it’s all over.
Don’t think I ate any beef all week.
I got the last king cake baby of the season @ my office. I’m impressed that Phoenix has a brass band…pretty cool.
Russian cake is a old NO “treat”. They’re just an efficient way for bakeries to use up leftover, stale cake. And you know how locals love anything soaked in liquor.
There is NO WAY you could make me give up meat for lint. I’d starve, lol.