Mom on the Run for Feb. 2, 2012
Eye-opening event
Show in BR to stir national taste buds
I just knew I was going to be asked to eat eyeballs. Given my many years of Southern home training, where one must at least taste a tiny bit of what is offered to be polite, I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it. Every response I could come up with sounded like, “Why on earth are there eyeballs on my plate and what on earth is wrong with you for serving them?”
Just where, you may be wondering, would I be served eyeballs? At the food truck Wround-Up held in conjunction with a filming of Andrew Zimmern’s “Appetite for Life.” Though Zimmern’s new series doesn’t concentrate on bizarre food, he did make his name eating all sorts of unpalatable things. And this was a contest where the food truck chefs would be doing their best to catch his attention. And I do have an active imagination, which led me to the eyeballs.
Fortunately for me, the dishes served up by Curbside, Taco de Paco, Ignatius Reilly’s, Freshjunkie, Cuban Connection and A Coffee Truck were low on bizarre and high on taste.
Taco de Paco went first with a gumbo taco, which was not as messy as it might seem. Andouille and seafood were served with a gumbo sauce on top of a bed of rice, all wrapped in a warm flour tortilla. What really made the dish, though, was the crispy cornmeal-battered okra on top. I could do with a whole basket of just that.
Cuban Connection served the next dish, a spicy seafood paella topped with a blackened catfish fillet.
The catfish was cooked to perfection, and its salty-spicy kick paired well with the sweet shrimp and peas in the paella.
Ignatius Reilly’s offering of fried soft-shelled crawfish atop smoked pig trotters in switch (pig tails) gravy, served on a bed of warm coush-coush (so very reminiscent of my beloved Hot Water Corn Bread), stole the show. The sweet corn coush-coush was a perfect counterpoint to the smoky notes in the gravy, while the crunchy-yet-tender crawfish balanced the gravy.
A Coffee Truck brought out its king cake latte, a coffee spiked with praline and raspberry syrup and topped with a cream cheese foam, providing a pleasant break in the contest.
The next dish, prepared by Curbside, was incredible. It was The Porkduckin, a pork, chicken and duck sausage which was basted in duck fat. It was then nestled on a bun along with fresh Creole-seasoned potato chips and topped with a cream cheese foam and smoked paprika. It was enormous. It was rich. It was genius in a red-and-white checkered cardboard tray.
The last dish, from Freshjunkie, was the perfect capstone — a light and bright salad with shrimp, candied pecans and blue cheese. It went down very well after the richness of earlier dishes.
To say the judging was difficult would be an understatement of the highest order. In the end, the judges, which included Lauren Westbrook of WAFB, Brian Haldane from Talk 107.3FM, Jay Ducote from Jay D’s Bite and Booze, Rachael Upton from 225, came to an agreement and awarded Ignatius Reilly’s best overall dish, Curbside most creative, and Taco de Paco best use of Louisiana ingredients.
Congratulations to all the entrants for their hard work, and especially to Ignatius Reilly’s for getting me to eat eyeballs (Soft-shell crawfish have eyes, right?) and like it.