Posted in Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, Outdoors, tagged blue catfish, Cajun, catfish courtbouillon, courtbouillon, opelousas catfish, tomato sauce on May 30, 2008 | 10 Comments »
If you’re a regular reader, you might have the impression that I’m a tomato hater. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Fact is, I believe that there’s a place for everything, and the best place in the world for a tomato is in one of my favorite fish dishes…the catfish courtbouillon [...]
Posted in Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, Friends & Family, Fun, tagged black iron pot, Cajun, Creole, Gonzales, jambalaya, Jambalaya Festival on May 27, 2008 | 13 Comments »
What the hell is jambalaya? This was a question posed years ago to the sixth grade version of myself by a distant pen pal, named Carlos. Since this pen pal was foisted upon me by my Kum Ba Yah singing Catholic school teacher in an idealistic attempt to expose me to the outside world, [...]
Posted in Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, tagged Cajun, Chow Chow, coonass, Crystal Hot Sauce, Hot Sauce, Louisiana Hot Sauce, Tabasco on May 22, 2008 | 8 Comments »
Some say that variety is the spice of life, well they’re wrong …hot sauce is the spice of life chére. Just ask any self respecting Coonass. Whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner, a bottle of hot sauce is never far away from the kitchen table. When it comes to hot sauce, no [...]
Posted in Culture, Friends & Family, Fun, Uncategorized, tagged Breaux Bridge, Cajun, Cecilia, High School Football, Jake Delhomme, Kevin Faulk, Louisiana, Marshall Faulk, NFL, Terry Bradshaw on May 19, 2008 | 11 Comments »
On Friday nights between August and December, small town Cajuns can be found enjoying the local high school football game all around Acadiana. They go for different reasons, but whether it’s to root for a relative’s son, or support their home town, high school football is cheap, fun entertainment for the whole family. It’s [...]
Posted in Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, Fun, Outdoors, Uncategorized, tagged Fox Squirrel, Gray Squirrel, Second Squirrel Season, Spring Squirrel Season, squirrel, squirrel day, Squirrel Hunting, Ville Platte on May 15, 2008 | 12 Comments »
If it’s got four legs, a Coonass will shoot it, clean it, throw it in a pot and make a gravy out of it. This saying even holds true for the tastiest member of the rodent family, the squirrel. And while these critters are scrumptious, they’re even more fun to hunt.
Squirrel [...]
Posted in Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, Friends & Family, Fun, Outdoors, Uncategorized, tagged boucherie, cracklins, fried pork skin, graton, gratton, hog butchering on May 13, 2008 | 9 Comments »
Crunchy, salty, and almost 100% pure fat, cracklins are the original Cajun snack food. Cracklins, also known as grattons (grah-tawns), are the result of a poor people’s desire to use every part of the pig. Years ago, Cajun families and neighbors regularly got together for boucheries, or community hog butcherings. Every family pitched in [...]
Posted in Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, Friends & Family, Outdoors, Uncategorized, tagged Burned House Down, Cajun, Deep Fried Turkey, Fried Turkey, Peanut Oil on May 9, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Cajun people loved fried food. Name a food, and it can probably be made ten times tastier by dropping it in a vat of hot oil, at least that’s the Cajun culinary philosophy. Okra, eggplant, boudin and pig skin all benefit from deep frying, so it was just a matter [...]
Posted in Cajun, Culture, Friends & Family, Fun, Louisiana, Outdoors, tagged Atchafalaya, Atchafalaya Basin, Atchafalaya River, Louisiana, Louisiana Wetlands, Outdoors on May 7, 2008 | 9 Comments »
Cajuns love the outdoors, the fresh air, being surrounded by wilderness, and there’s no better place for this in south Louisiana than in the Atchafalaya Basin. The Basin’s our backyard, a place we can get away to on the weekends and wind down with a little camping, fishing, and beer drinking — everything a modern [...]
Posted in Boudin, Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, Friends & Family, Fun, tagged Breaux Bridge, Cajun, Crawfish Bisque, Crawfish Boudin, Crawfish Capital of the World, Crawfish Etoufee, Crawfish Festival, Crawfish Race, Parc Hardy on May 4, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Louisiana has more festivals than you can shake a stick at, but having grown up in the neighboring town of Cecilia, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival. Since being crowned in 1959 la capitale Mondiale de l’ecrevisse, or the Crawfish Capital of the World, by [...]
Posted in Cajun, Culture, Food & Drink, Lafayette, tagged Cajun, Cajun bread, carb on carb action, Evangeline Maid Bread, Lafayette, spinning sign on May 2, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Growing up in Louisiana, there was only one brand of sliced bread that graced my mama’s counter top, and that was Evangeline Maid Bread. On every trip to town, I remember looking out the car window for the giant spinning Evangeline Maid sign, a fixture that’s been a constant part of the Lafayette landscape for [...]
