This Saturday, January 12, the producers of ‘Treme’ will host its fourth annual fundraiser, “My Lil’ Darlin’ All-Star Revue.” It’s no secret that ‘Treme’ is a music show, so when it comes to fundraisers, it should come as no surprise the same holds true: It’s all about the music.

The night will boast performances by some of New Orleans legendary artists: Robert Parker of the 1965 R&B hit “Barefootin’,” Clarence “Frogman” Henry of “Ain’t Got No Home” fame, Blues guitarist Little Freddie King, vocal harmonizers The Pfister Sisters, and local favorites, Guitar Lightin’ Lee and Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, just to name a few.  And because in typical New Orleans fashion anything worth doing is worth overdoing, there will be special appearances by Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew, two Rock-n-Roll Hall of Famers who collaborated on a string of hits in the 1950s and ‘60s, including “Blueberry Hill” and “Ain’t That a Shame.” The band leading the night is far from your average house band. Paul Sanchez and the Rolling Road Show is more like an all-star jam session of New Orleans top musicians assembled to rock the house. There’s Paul Sanchez on electric guitar, Matt Perrine on bass, Alex McMurray on guitar, Jermal Watson on drums, Craig Klein and Mark Mullins on trombone, Bill Malchow on piano, and Arsene DeLay and Debbie Davis on vocals. 

The proceeds from the night will be split between two local nonprofits whose mission is to preserve the musical heritage and culture of New Orleans by instilling that culture in the city’s youth. The Roots of Music provides an after-school program for at-risk youth that enriches their lives through music education, instrument instruction, and ensemble performance, all free of charge for the kids who participate. Likewise, Tipitina’s Foundation supports all that is New Orleans music through childhood music education, as well as through the professional development of adult musicians in the community.  Our goal Saturday night is to make a meaningful contribution to both Roots of Music and Tipitina’s Foundation so they can continue to do the vital work of supporting the New Orleans music community and preserving one of the main things that make New Orleans, New Orleans – the music.  

‘Treme’’s own musicologist, Music Supervisor Blake Leyh, sums it up best: “We’ve had great ‘Treme’ charity fundraising events in the past, but the music was playing second fiddle to the auction. Not this time – now it’s about the music.  With such an incredible lineup of musical guests, this will be a night for the history books.  Don’t miss it!”

For tickets and more information: http://www.tipitinas.com

One of the challenges of narrative writing is trying to determine when or whether your established characters will intersect. Of course, reality has no such constraint. In real life it is both highly unusual and quite commonplace for people from opposite sides of the track to encounter each other. But in fiction, if it happens too often, it seems as if the writer is manipulating his or her characters. From the writer's point of view, sometimes it's a matter of efficiency. If established characters never meet, new characters must be created at a pace that can leave relatively few faces with which the viewer is familiar.

For example, in Season 1, Daymo, the missing brother of LaDonna Batiste-Williams (Khandi Alexander) is also a friend and employee of Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens) and Jacques Jhoni (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine). Daymo's plight also connects Desautel patron Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo), LaDonna's lawyer.

In this season's finale, there's a benefit for Gigi's, LaDonna's night club. It brings together lots of our characters and musicians. You might have thought that that scene was our way of tying everything up in a neat bow; our way of putting everyone together on stage to accept their applause in a grand finale. But there are so many questions unanswered.

Will LaDonna reopen Gigi's?
Will Janette mend fences with Tim Feeny (Sam Robards)?
Will Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) un-retire?
Will the medical treatments succeed for Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters)?

It's official now. We will have a fourth season, albeit an abbreviated one. We don't have an air date yet. But we're already busy at work writing and producing new episodes. If you want to know what's going to happen next, watch this space.

When David Simon and Eric Overmyer first started talking about a series about New Orleans, they wanted it to revolve around the city's rhythm and blues tradition. Both of them are fans of the music  and they dreamed of creating a show that would feature it. Years later, as 'Treme' started to take shape, the failure of the federal levees offered up several story lines that helped add a bit more heft to their original idea. But, as David sometimes says, if you're fast forwarding through the music performances on 'Treme' to get to the plot, you're missing the plot.

The final determination of which songs will be chosen for each episode is a job shared by the executive producers and the writers of the respective episodes. But much of the credit for the quality of the live performances and the selection of the music included in the show goes to Blake Leyh, our music supervisor. He's worked with David and Blown Deadline Productions for years so he understands the producers' musical sensibilities and high standards for authenticity in sound design.

Like so many titles in television, it's hard for outsiders to know what in the world a "music supervisor" does. I put that and other questions to Blake recently.

When it comes to his risotto, "It's all about that rice," says Donald Link. "It's the most unique rice I've ever cooked with."

The chef is talking about Cajun Grain rice, a jasmine rice grown in Louisiana by Kurt and Karen Unkel. It's a brown rice that includes stray bits of wild red rice that most farmers discard. Seldom is risotto made with brown rice. The slow-cooked dish is usually made with stock and short grain, white Italian arborio rice. Grated cheese is often added, which, when melted, lends a creamy texture to the dish. But Link's approach is to use acorn squash to add a note of creaminess. And, he says, the rice itself has a creamy texture. It's the rice and the seasonality of acorn squash that led to the creation of this risotto.

"It just has this super nutty flavor and I realized how creamy it was when we first made it," he says. "I noticed it lent itself to that preparation of risotto. It's kind of a classic Italian dish, the squash and rice. I'm sure it was the fall when I did it, so that's probably why I put the squash in."

In the second season of 'Treme,' Link visits chef Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens) in New York at Lucky Peach. At that point, she hadn't decided to move back to New Orleans and open Desautel's on the Avenue, so she couldn't ask for any advice in that regard. But Link would have been a good person to consult; he has two James Beard Award-winning restaurants, Herbsaint and Cochon. Soon he'll be opening a third, seafood-oriented eatery in New Orleans Arts District.

"I don't have a name yet. For some reason we just can't quite figure one out," he says. "It's on Magazine and Julia streets. We've been tossing around this idea for a seafood place for some time now. Our trip to Uruguay set it off in another direction with all the open-flame cooking they do there." Further research will take place in San Sebastian, Spain. "A lot of the restaurants there, the asadors, have these hearth-type grills," says Link. "You get different ranges of temperatures and ranges with height of the grill. Ours will be a New Orleans seafood restaurant, but a lot of the cooking will be over coals and fires in a hearth."

There's no date yet for the opening of Link's as yet unnamed restaurant. But you can get a taste of things to come with this recipe which will appear in our forthcoming book, Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans.

Cajun Grain rice is the best choice for this dish, but other kinds of brown rice can also work. Depending on the size of the shrimp you use, they may well melt into the dish and become more of a seasoning element. Folks in New Orleans tend to like shrimp cooked longer than is the national fine-dining norm. Cooking time with risotto is always a tricky thing -- the key is to keep tasting it as it approaches doneness. Once it gets close to al dente doneness, pay close attention. Trust me, the dish tastes great.

One of the stories we try to tell on 'Treme' is the role that culture plays in New Orleans' long recovery after the federal levee failures. With all the commemorative CDs and all-star performances, even people outside of the city are aware of how our music and musicians helped tell the New Orleans story and make the case for rebuilding.

In a similar way, our chefs re-dedicated themselves to demonstrating that New Orleans food is an emblem of this city. Our food is necessary for our identity; our city is the necessary nurturing space for our food.

Kim Dickens' character Janette Desautel is meant to embody much of that story. In the first season, a combination of infrastructure failures and mounting bills forced her to close her restaurant. She spent most of Season 2 in New York, working with real-life chefs David Chang and Eric Ripert, and with the fictional psychopath Enrico Brulard. Season 3 has seen her back in New Orleans in a new kind of restaurant hell. Throughout this turmoil, Kim Dickens has done an amazing job of conveying Desautel's hope and humor. I spoke to the actress recently about her role as Janette and her own restaurant background.

If you arrive in New Orleans from the North (meaning anywhere north of south Louisiana), much of New Orleans food seems strange. But most of what we eat has connections to other parts of the world. It's just that our emblematic foods are very different from the standard American diet. Take mirlitons, for example. They are known as chayote in Latin America, christophene in most of the French-speaking Caribbean, and cho-cho in Jamaica. They are known as mirliton in only two places, Haiti and New Orleans. That makes sense: The population of New Orleans doubled in the decade after the Haitian Revolution. So many of our ancestors, black and white, slave and free, hail from Haiti.

The Lambreaux family serves stuffed mirliton as part of their Christmas dinner. Not only that, they serve a variety of other dishes that would seem somewhat redundant even to New Orleanians.

"Gumbo and crab soup. Stuffed mirliton and stuffed peppers. Turkey and pork roast.  Now sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie too," Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) observes. Fearing that Albert's illness is serious, his kids have put together a very special dinner. Perhaps they went overboard.

If you'd like to go overboard, we have an extensive essay on mirlitons in our forthcoming cookbook, 'Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans.' (You can pre-order the book at the HBO store).

In the meantime, here's a recipe for stuffed mirliton that you can make for Thanksgiving, Christmas or whenever.

Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown) sits in with Delfeayo Marsalis and the Uptown Jazz Orchestra at Snug Harbor during the second episode this season. We get to see Delfeayo wearing one of his hats, but there's much more to the work and music of the fourth of the six sons of Ellis and Delores Marsalis. Delfeayo is playing music out on the road now, as is often the case. We conducted this Q&A in a series of email exchanges.

My first memories of you are as the family recording engineer. The trombone came later, as I recall. You've produced some of the most important albums of our generation. Do you still do any of that work?

Delfeayo Marsalis: I started trombone and recording simultaneously, but since you don't need technique or tone to start recording (just check out 96 percent of today's pro-tools home studios), I was able to work immediately. As I see it, I had two major advantages over everyone else: One, I wanted to produce/record acoustic jazz and two, no one else my age wanted to produce/record acoustic jazz. The process I use can be costly, so I seldom produce anymore. When I do, it's usually a soundtrack or just as a favor to someone local.

The Vietnamese have made New Orleans their own. Thanks in large part to the efforts of the late archbishop Philip Hannan, thousands of Vietnamese men and women have come to south Louisiana in the years since the war. They have formed enclaves in several different sections of the metro area, most famously in Versailles, the section of eastern New Orleans served by Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic church and its affiliated community development organization.

New Orleans is a logical place for the Vietnamese to settle. Vietnam is largely surrounded by water; fishing is an important part of the livelihood, and fish are an important part of the diet.

When Sonny (Michiel Huisman) falls in love with Linh (Hong Chau), he gets a sense of the challenges facing the fishing community. He also gets a taste of Vietnamese food. Though at one point he tells Linh, he's tired of eating pho, the emblematic Vietnamese soup, he doesn't say anything about the beef and vermicelli noodle salad that is also a staple on Vietnamese tables.

We have our own delicious recipe for this dish in our forthcoming cookbook, Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans. Even though the book won't be published until spring, here's a foretaste:

'Trouble the Water' received an Academy Award nomination for its incredible, real time depiction of the federal levee failures of 2005. In the hours leading up to Hurricane Katrina, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, the subject of the film, interviewed her neighbors as they prepared, or didn't prepare, for the approaching storm. Though she has no training as a journalist or filmmaker, Roberts raised many of the questions and captured many of the images that a more seasoned journalist would have chosen to depict. During the storm, she kept her camera rolling as she and her husband, Scott, struggled to survive the winds and rains. Working with filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, Roberts' video footage became one part of a larger story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. During the festivities, Roberts, then pregnant, gave birth to her daughter Skyy.

Desautel's and Desautel's on the Avenue are very different restaurants.

As Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens) would be quick to tell you, both feature seasonal, local ingredients, the buzz words of contemporary fine dining restaurants. But, as befitting its location on St. Charles Avenue, the fanciest street in New Orleans, Desautel's on the Avenue is more polished and more formal than its predecessor. Both might serve rentier de cochon, the Cajun pork backbone stew, but it's unlikely that Janette's first restaurant would have served it tableside by waiters using the two-spoon method as she does on the Avenue. (Incidentally, that's a dish our writer, Anthony Bourdain discovered filming in Louisiana for his show, 'No Reservations'. You might even see a couple of familiar faces from the 'Treme' family in that episode.)

The Asian influence is obvious on the new menu. If you'd spent the better part of a year cooking at the church of David Chang, your cooking would develop an Asian accent too. A lot of the recipes from both these menus will appear in the forthcoming 'Treme Cookbook: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans.'

Here are Janette's two menus, so you can keep up with what everyone is eating.

                                               DESAUTEL'S                                                                     DESAUTEL'S ON THE AVENUE