Mr. Lake's New Orleans Forum

One more year! Not really. PC and I celebrated our 6th anniversary yesterday. We've been having fun buying gifts with the traditional and/or contemporay theme for that year. This year was iron and wood.

I hope someone covets my new Staub Cocotte. I seriously broke out into La Marseillaise when I opened this.

PC also gave me a pretty wooden cutting board. I gave him a European beechwood muddler (for Mojitos, of course!) and some cedar sheets for grilling. This was my "iron" gift to him:

Liver (in the form of a goose liver mousse). We had apps in the New Orleans room:

I made a Michael Chiarello recipe last night: swordfish en papillote. PC chronicled it.

First you put some cooked linguine on parchment:

Then you put some lovely fresh tomato sauce on it:

Then you put the perfect hunk o' swordfish on it from your favorite fishmUnger:

More sauce:

Into the oven, cut open the parchment, et viola:

Served with PC's wonderful collards:

Dessert, quickly thrown together. Two types of cheeses we bought at our winery last weekend (garlic cheddar and smoked cheddar), dried fruit, nuts, port. Damn, out of port, but Madeira wasn't bad with this.

Oh Paula, I LOVE your cocotte. The gifts are wonderful. I love your "iron" idea.

That swordfish in parchment has me drooling.

Happy anniversery. You are going to make such a cute old couple. Drinking mojitos and smoking ceegars. Yeah baby

Happy anniversary! Everything looks wonderful. I loved your New Orleans room.

I had to look up the traditional gift for our anniversary next month. It's ivory or gold! Lucky me. Just kidding. We never give the traditional gift. We do a fishing trip or expensive dinner out.

FishmUnger - I love it!

At least Paula and Fury, you're not to the boring washer and dryer or other utilitarian gift yet like me.

Happy Anniversary, you two! I love your gifts.
We don't do gifts at all, but do have a blowout dinner somewhere each year.
Many many happy more.

Thanks, y'all.

One of my favorite bloggers, Clotilde, was also very excited to get her cocotte:

http://chocolateandzucchini.com/archive ... ocotte.php

Methinks I'll be using it this weekend.

Hold on..google says a cocotte is a female prostitute??? I am cornfused.

LOL - lots of words have different meanings, just like English! I know cocotte in French as chicken-related, but I just looked it up in my French dictionary and this is what it says:

chicken
sweetie, darling
saucepan

Mind you, my dictionary is PG-rated. My favorite term of endearment in French is "chou" which also means cabbage.