Mayhaw Man

I am pretty sure that some heavy handed post deleter was jealous of my fabulous red beans and did not want them to be shared with the world. I have now corrected this situation. On the other hand, Rachel is probably right.

Well, we are waiting........what is this food you loathe so? Inquiring minds want to know, otherwise we cannot start the ridicule correctly.

Ok. OK OK Dammit. Here you go. I will now go stick this in the recipe archives so that I will not have any more trouble with Rachel. Red Beans and Rice w/sausage (or pork rib meat) 2 lb. good quality smoked PORK! sausage or some good chops 2 lb. dried red kidneys (1 large bag of Camellia Brand will work nicely) 2 tbls worchestershire 2 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp salt 1 tsp cayenne 1 tsp cumin (cumin, not chili powder!) 2 tbls italian seasoning 4 tbls olive oil 2 bay leaves 2 tbls olive oil 2 large YELLOW onions 1 large green bell pepper (if ya got money go for red) 3 stalks celery 5 (or 6 or 10) toes garlic 1 bunch parsley 1 jalapeno (seeded, don't forget) Soak beans overnight in large (8-10 qt.) pot with first 8 ingredients Coursely chop onions, b.p., celery. Fine chop garlic, parsley, jalapeno Put pot on stove without draining beans, cover and bring to a boil. Once beans come to a boil cut down to a medium simmer. You may need to add water as you go along. While starting beans sweat onions,celery,and bellpepper in olive oil. When onions are bordering on translucent, add garlic and cook for another minute or two. DON"T BURN THE GARLIC! Add vegetable mixture to beans and add jalapeno After you are done with the vegetables, halve sausage length wise and cut into 5 inch pieces (basically the length of two bites. You can cut it into bite size pieces, but the smaller they are the more they break up while browning and cooking) and brown. Remember, this is browning! You need to put them into the pan wide side down and BROWN. That crust is the key to pork goodness in this dish (You can cook the sausage on a grill as well, if you are using rib meat-I reccomend the grill). Drain sausage and pat with paper towels. Add sausage to pot. Cook on low simmer WITH TOP ON AT ALL TIMES and stir occasionally, scraping the bottom of the pot as you stir. These will take about 4 hours to cook (you will need to test as you go). When you are about a half hour from done add the parsley. If you like your beans creamy, rather than "beany" scoop out a bowl full and mash and add them back to the pot. Or take one of those swell boat motors and mix them up that way (but don't do it in the pot unless you are trying to make red bean dip, which, if you have never had it, is pretty damn good) Serve over rice with big honking hunks of bread. This whole pot of beans, even with reasonably good sausage, is not going to be much more than ten dollars and will freeze well. This will feed about 8 real hungry people or feed you about 8 times (or more if you go heavy on the rice). The warning about the top is because beans, cooked for long periods of time, will scorch badly if top is left off. You can also put all of these ingredients in a pressure cooker and do this a whole lot faster, but that kind of defeats the purpose of "slow food". This is a great dish and it is even better because you keep getting little reminders of your meal long after you are finished dining

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Blah, Blah, Blah. I am posting a recipe in recipe gullet now, but I still say I put it somewhere on this site. Sorry for the trouble. You made a valiant effort.

When I used to judge homebrew contests I was usually slotted in strong beers (which I love) and "weird beers" which often included things like chile beers and chocolate beers (and even weirder than that a combination of the two). I can't say that I ever had a beer including chiles that I thought was truly outstanding, although I would describe alot of them as interesting. I think that I have the perception that to a large degree most beers should be refreshing (although there are lots of notable exceptions to that statement) and chile beers tend to leave an oily taste in the drinkers mouth that leaves you wanting something to wash it out. As far as commercial products with chiles go, I thought that Ed's was pretty much undrinkable. On the other hand, I have had some chocolate barley wines that were damn good. The high level of alcohol and the nice chocolaty taste often worked out to be anice combination. Judging strong beers was always kind of fun though. I once sat through 19 flights and then a couple of flights for best of show. THis was about an 8 hour session and my memory of the end is pretty hazy . The best of show in that particular competition ( I think it was in Houston at the Texas Homebrew event in roughly 96) was an imperial stout that was as good as anything I ever drank. Man was it good, but at about 9% it also might have affected the other judging going on

Rachel, Now that you have challenged me I will start going back through all of my old posts and figure it out. It got stuck in a thread involving someone who was asking about things to cook for entrees as he or she was currently operating with only a hot plate (or something like that, hell, I can't remember. I am old and my memory is shot-too many beans out of aluminum pots I guess ).

Actually this beer does have an addition of "cocoa nibs". This is hardly a first. A number of brewers have used chocolate in the last few years, most notably Dixie Brewing Company in New Orleans marketed " White Chocolate Mousse" for a few years. I do not think it is currently being produced, but with Dixie's bizarre ups and downs-who knows? The link also shows a number of other chocolate beers that have been produced in the last few years by other breweries.

I suppose if there is a modern difinition of beer it would probably involve two things 1) The use of hops as a preservative (although it quickly became a prefferred flavoring ingrediant as well). Good hop history info here 2) The isolation of a single strain of yeast to use in brewing as opposed to just throwing open the windows and letting in the wild yeasts that are pretty much ever present in the air. Excellent yeast info from Wyeast.The Premier Purveyors of Yeast in North America

Last night I was enjoying a big hunk of Danish Blue and some toast points for a little snack while watching "The French Connection" for about the millionth time. THe long suffering Mrs. Mayhaw came walking into the room and stood there for a minute with a very unhappy look on her face and said, " I think somebody dumped out the catfood again". I just pointed to the plate with the cheese crumbs on it and she shook her head and left the room. Needless to say she ins not a big fan of stinky cheese. Incidentally, for all of you book fans out there-there is an excellent childrens book entitled The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Stories. The artwork is wonderful and my children loved this book when they were younger. I highly reccomend it.

The guy that runs the vegetable stand in my little town has always got a big pot of really spicy boiled peanuts (basically they are boiled in Zatarain's crab boil with about 10 heads of garlic) going. He throws them in as lagniappe if you buy enough tomatoes and satsumas. I love those things.

Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter and mayhaw (what else? ) jelly on wheat with a liberal sprinkling of Elmer's Chee Wees. A gourmet treat. Try one today!

Overall this is an excellent analysis of the micro industry as a whole. I would like to point out that some of the "shaking out" and "consolidation" that has occurred in the last three or four years is the result of two things 1) People getting into the business at the peak because money was cheap and easy to get. THese operators were just getting up steam when the stock market fell apart and 7 dollar six packs were not quite so attractive to their core group of drinkers. 2) Operators who saw steady growth during the nineties fell into the mistaken impression that they could sell lots of beer if they got far flung distributors and started increasing volume in markets they could not possibly work on an active basis. The intial appeal of micro beers was (and still is, to my mind) that it was being made, sold, and promoted by local guys and that the product harkened back to the days when all breweries were more or less local. Sadly, many of us lost focus after spending too much time with excited investors and spending way too much time around the table at conventions discussing with our fellow brewers how well we were all doing. There was a blindness that ran rampant in the late nineties that manifested itself in the purchase of unneeded equipment and over expansion into markets too far from the initial home base. Frederick Brewing in MD is the most spectacular example of this kind of greed based expansion. They took on a ton of debt with the erroneous expectation the their beer would be in demand just because they had nice packaging and were from Maryland. They were horribly wrong. The breweries that are now considered successful were the ones that handled their money well and did not get trapped in this pattern of expansion. The same success pattern that is followed by any operator in any business. The romantic notion that the beer business is fun and that people who loved the product and what they did for a living would ultimately be successful was dispelled quickly and in a pretty ugly manner. The beer business is unmerciful and cutthroat once the porduct leaves the friendly confines of the brewery. Do not forget that many breweries (including at least two you listed as successful and several you left out of your list) are still operating with pretty large debt loads (recently made much lighter by favorable interest rates) and HAVE to move X amount of volume to make ends meet. In short, microbreweries, to a very large degree, have been victims of their own success. The profit margins in the beer industry are low (operating costs are high and there is a limit as to how much one can get for a bottle of beer-no matter how good it is) and there is only so much money to be made. Take a look at the A-B balance sheet and see how they continue to drive their growth-1/2 of the money they make goes right back into advertising. Small brewers, on a smaller scale obviously, will need to continue to follow suit if they expect to be a success in the current marketplace.

This sandwich is also available as the Red Fish Grill's offering at the "Ain't Nothin like it nowhere-nohow Restaurant". And you are right, it is suprising how well all of that works together to make a great sandwich. You also might search the menu for oysters as several places have oyster offerings.

Make this. You will not be sorry.

Check out What's for Dinner? from last night and you will see some discussion about red beans and how to get them. If some of you "effective searchers" can find a thread that was around in December discussing a poster with no stove, you can find my red bean recipe. I don't seem to be able to find it at the moment and since I am supposed to be working, I can't spend the rest of the afternoon on it.

I posted my Red Beans recipe on the thread that involved someone who was cooking without a stove (which of course I can't find right now). I intended on getting it into recipe gullet, but so far am a failure in that regard. I will put a decent jambo recipe in recipe gullet when I get home this afternoon. Comfort Me- Where did you eat on your trip? Did you go to that Kosher place in Metairie we discussed?

Tommy, in a more perfect world we would all be like you. Does this mean you don't want the fries?

Would you like cheese on that burger? Fries with that order? Can I supersize that for you, sir?

I wonder if I can get those by mail order? Scott would love a pot of "real" red beans. With a computer and a credit card, all things are possible.

Red Beans (Camellia Brand, of course) and Rice Cornbread Butter Lettuce Salad with pink grapefruit and toasted pecans The redbeans were cooked with about two pounds of smoked pork butt that I had in the freezer. They are, frankly, fabulous. I wish everyone was here to enjoy them (but if you were I would hope that you would have left before the inevitable "aftermath" of eating tons of beans occurred).

Fritz is deserving of just about any honor that comes his way. He is an interesting guy who is interested in other things besides himself, and this is sadly a very rare combination. He took a crappy, run down brewery and in the course of 25 years or so has turned it into something to be truly proud of. I got into the micro game in 87 and he was still futzing around trying to keep Anchor afloat, but he was more than willing to offer help and advice to anyone who approached him and he damn near always paid for the beer (my kinda guy). The first time I met him I was a bartender in New Orleans at a place called Carrollton Station (roughly mid 80s) and this guy comes in with a couple of pals to kill some time before they went to a show across the street at Jimmy's Music Club (now sadly defunct). They ordered up some Anchor Steams and a couple of Porters and introduced themselves. It was Fritz Maytag and a couple of his brewers (including the now legendary Big Bob). To make a long story short, the beer was old and awful and they were on the payphone at the end of the bar immediatly calling the distributor wanting to know why all of the beer in the bar was out of date! ( a phone call I did not realize that I would emulate a bunch of times in later years-distribution sucks in the beer biz). Incidentally, he was the first guy I know about to use a clearly readable to anybody dating system. Fritz promised to have it all replaced (it was) and the best part was that several weeks the distributor brought by a whole bunch of Anchor gear and a pony keg of "Old Foghorn" a barley wine that (I don't think) had not even been released yet. A man of his word who remembers his promises. THis is a rare commodity in the world and rarer than hen's teeth in the beer biz. Good on him.

After the response from Bill Borders to the recent error in the Times on the number of stars given in a review (discussed in this thread), perhaps the NYT is looking for a change in focus and substance. His attitude seemed to be that the current official position of the paper is that their reviews don't have that much influence.

Jackal- Do you mean this tobacco from near my home? I know that it is also used in some strong, dark leafed cigars as well. Edited to correct link

The Kerry on Decatur St in New Orleans pours one of the best pints you will find in the U.S. THe place is operated by (and pretty much serves) ex pat Irishmen living in New Orleans. The combination of the Irish gift for gab and the New Orleans bar culture is a really nice thing if you are looking for a nicely poured pint and a place for a little good craic. When I lived in the Quarter full time it was my local and I highly reccomend the place. There aren't many like it in the US and certainly not many like it in the Deep South. A fine place for a lovely pint.