I miss Louisiana

So I finished the Charleston Grill cookbook, and I gotta say, uninspired.  The recipes were too simple to have been real restaurant recipes, yet the book was of no use to the home cook because they kept calling for things like microgreens and demiglace.  I don't have a problem with the demiglace thing, except that there was no recipe in the back for it...  Bullshit.  Worst of both worlds.  (Stole a couple of good ideas, though, see previous post.)

Anyway, I started my next book, Real Cajun, by your uncle Donald Link.  I just read the intro, and it is so well written that I wanna be sitting in a lawn chair in someone's back yard drinking a long neck of Dixie and eating boiled shrimp and corn like its my job.

Apart from making you want to be there, he is doing a great job of writing, really writing, how to cook.  For instance, when he talks about paprika, he says he prefers hot to sweet.  He also says either one will work.  He also says, and this is the kicker, that if your paprika doesn't say sweet OR hot, its no big deal, go ahead and use it.  Its a little thing, but it means a lot to me.  I get so obsessed with doing a recipe just right, that I could see 24-year-old me stopping what I was doing and driving over the river to Whole Foods (cause they are the only ones that have sweet AND hot paprika) with my kitchen destroyed and the chicken part-way seasoned on a cutting board in my kitchen, with D totally pissed at me, and getting the stuff when the stuff I had at home that I got for $4 at Piggly Wiggly would HAVE DONE JUST FINE.  And you are cut from the same cloth, Boo Bear, so I know you know what I'm talking about.

So anyway, I have been inspired JUST FROM THE INTRO to write a short list of things I miss, food-wise, about living in Louisiana.

1) Steen's cane syrup, and its bizarre by-product, cane vinegar
2) A million cases of satsumas for 20 cents a pop at the French Market
3) Zapp's Chips, especially Dill Gator-Taters and Cajun Craw-Taters
4) Stock crabs at the grocery store
5) Fried chicken at gas stations
6) Crab boil potato salad... How can the potatoes at a crab boil taste better than the crab?  And yet...
7) Boudin, and boudin balls
8) The two schools of po'boy thought: wet and gravied, crispy and fried, plenty of mayo on either
9) Turtle soup
10) Barbecue shrimp at Pascal's Manale
11) Corn pudding and a Vietnamese iced coffee at Pho Tau Bay
12) Little greasy bags of fried pork skin at Swamp Fest at the Zoo on St. Charles
13) Every restaurant having red drum on the menu all the time
14) Creole mustard being the standard mustard for everything
15) And lastly, although I didn't even know about it when I lived there... Slap Ya Mama hot sauce.  It is the gold standard by which all Louisiana hot sauces are to be judged...  In the words of New Orleans drag-queen rapper Big Frieda "When the Queen come round everything shut down.  You hoes, get back, all you hoes bow down!"

(What, you are a member of Louisiana gay culture and you don't know about Big Frieda???  Go to youtube and type in "Na Who Mad" right now...  You'll hate it, but its awesome.)


(And in the interest of equal time, a very, very short like of things I DON'T miss about Louisiana)
1) 24 hour liquor stores.  You know me.  Sometimes I need someone to tell me its time for bed.
2) Chickory coffee.  Gross.
3) Mirlitons.  I have never completely understood mirlitons.  Texture of apple, flavor of potato.  Why do coonasses love them so much?


Anyway, that's all I got.  Great fishing weather, but I'm working 1000 hours a week, so no go....
Talk to you soon...