Mayhaw Man

I am making chicken and dumplings for a rainy Saturday night supper. Nice suggestion.

That tailgating guy is from New Orleans. Some of you may remember the New Orleans School of Cooking that used to be in Jax Brewery (they did half day classes on cooking a single dish -gumbo, ettouffee, etc.). It was run by Joe Cahn and his wife. He somehow ended up with a gig traveling by motorhome and cooking at tall of the NFL games (Miller or somebody, I can't exactly remember who). He travels all of the time now. Really nice guy. I am certainly no expert, and no real big fan of LSU football, but the Tiger tailgating scene is pretty amazing. Even other schools in the SEC give them extra room when the Tigers are coming to town. A walk through the parking lot at game time can be pretty good in the food department. Every kind of foodstuff imaginable.

What he said. Except that I would like to reiterate his thoughts on marble as I was a victim of an evil decorating plan that won out over practicality. Marble is, in fact, great if you do lots of candy type cookery. The problem is that I have all of these little spots all over my 3 X 4 island that are the result of laying out pralines and not cleaning up the oil immediatly after they were removed. I left it overnight (I was tired after making about a zillion batches) and the next day I could not get up the oil. I like granite and I also am a huge fan of some of the newer non natural surfaces (silestone, etc.). I liked the old corian as well, although it was pretty easy to burn with hot pots (trust me, I found out the hard way) and in fact wish that it was still covering my island in place of all of that stained marble.

Guinea hens are delicious fried as you would chicken. I would think that grain fed guinea fowl would be even more delicious.

As with many things, the key to solving the population problem is to get diners in the Northeast to start chowing down on them. The population will quickly drop as we ship them up to our Northern neighbors who are convinced that they are really missing something. A fine example of this would be Paul Prudhomme's use of redfish in the early eighties. Demand for what had previously been a fish of second rate value on the market (we ate them, but they were not really popular in other parts of the country) went through the roof and in a very short period of time the population of Gulf Coast Redfish dropped precipitously close to zero. Blackened redfish, that one single dish of questionable origin and quality, just about caused the end of the species. Blackened boar steaks anyone? Now if we could just do that with wild hogs and geese..........

Confirmed I believe that I referred to them in my post above as "shoe leather with fat attached". I stand firmly by this assessment.

This is an interesting web site about wild boars. The population here in Louisiana is out of control as it is in many parts of the South. I see them often in the woods when we are deer hunting and sightings are becoming more and more frequent in suburban areas as the animals search for new sources of food.

Beer labs tyically use millipore type discs to filter fresh beer and check for bacterial growth. Some kind of general media is used (there are ones that check for specific things, but that is not the oint-any growth means something was wrong downstream). I never really though about using them for food projects, but it might be kind of fun. Slime is an important component of the okra flavor profile. No true okra lover (that leaves you out, I believe) would ever think of employing any method to take out the slime.

You could filter the beans out of chili

Coots are inedible. Not only do they eat nothing but fish, but there is very little meat on the bird. They are fun to watch as they have to get a running take off and kind of skitter across the water as they get airborne.

If you are moving the sink to 1 , 3 is a good place for the dishwasher. Loading it would just be a left hand lean into the dish machine.

Geese are a problem all over North America, at least snows, blues, and rosses are anyway. They can destroy fields lying fallow in the winter overnight. They will land, pull up anything that looks like food and leave the field a muddy water holding pit. On the morning after New Year's day I was in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana and saw roughly 1/2 million (estimated that morning by the federal game warden we saw at breakfast who had seen the same flock) geese get up off of some rice fields right next to the highway. As a nature lover it was a pretty awe inspiring sight. The farmer that owned the field that had been occupied by the geese would not have felt that way. Our season on hunting them in Louisiana (it varies nationwide, but is more or less the same as far as the idea here goes) has been extended for the third year in a row until Feb 6. There are no limits. Hunters can use mechanical calls and any other method of attraction they wish. Shotguns can be carried unplugged (that's more shells per gun for all you non hunters) and you may shoot 1/2 hour before daylight and 1/2 hour after dark. The funny thing is the reason that they have all of the restrictions lifted is that no one hunts them. Eating a goose at this end of the flyway after it has flown a couple fo thousand miles is much like eating a shoe with fat attached. Hunters here (and other places I am sure) have very little interest in shooting birds that they can't or don't eat. Skeet are much easier to shoot and a hell of bunch cheaper as well, if someone is looking for is a chance to hit airborne targets. THis does not count for Canadian Geese. The limit on Canadians is one. THey are not overpopulated, quite the opposite.

In the early days of soft drinks local bottlers (and they sere ALL local bottlers) purchased franchise rights to individual territories. The Biedenharn family owned the rights in a large hunk of the Deep South. The Coke plant in Monroe is now part of Coca Cola USA and still a huge part of the local economy. It is a syrup production (there are only a few of these) plant and a bottling facility. It is one of the few places where the traditional small bottles are still produced. THe Biedenharns may will have purchased permanent rights from the gentlemen in Chattanooga. Old Coke plants, much like old milk packing facilities, are scattered all over the place in old downtown areas. The windows in these buildings were often made from glass blocks of the same color as Coke bottles and many of them still exist.

Hurrumph my foot. Perhaps calender years work differently in Chattanooga than in other parts of the country (I know that the time changes back and forth everytime you cross the state line , maybe that confuses the natives ). I am a huge fan of Moon Pies, as I just pointed out in this thread.

I heartily agree with the Representative from Texas. My colleague speaks the truth. Besides the accuracy in cooking issues, the expense of repairing an electric oven is much, much less (this should be taken with a grain of salt considering I cook on a 50 year old O'Keefe and Merritt that I wouldn't trade for a Thermador with a built in still and keg box), but having had both over the years and regularly cooking in a couple of nice Kitchen Aid electrics at our lakehouse, I say electric. I will now yield the balance of my time to my colleague from Houston.

Invented in Atlanta by a pharmacist, John Pemberton . Bottled in Vicksburg, MS and Monroe, LA (cool museum in Vicksburg if you are ever passing through on I-20) by Joe Biedenharn (who incidentally also helped found Delta Airlines which started in Monroe, LA as a offshoot of a crop dusting service). This was actual classroom learning where I grew up, as it had a great deal to do with the history and development of Monroe, my humble hometown. Incidentally, just to get back on topic-I like Coca Cola basted ham. And for those of you that have it (I saw it over and over again in the cookbook thread, so I assuming at least some of you do) The Cotton Country Collection has a recipe for Coca Cola Chocolate Poundcake. The cake is o.k. but I make the icing all of the time for a number of different confections. It is pretty knocked out.

Recently I posted a recipe in this thread. I get lots of ducks this time of year (and when I say lots I mean, literally, a freezer full), mallards, pintails, wooducks, the tiny and delicious green wing teal, etc. There are many recipes I enjoy, but the one listed in the thread above is really, really good. It is a bit unusual for South Louisana cooking, but you will see it at parties pretty regularly (often the meat is stripped and the meat and gravy are kept in a chafing dish and served along with small bisquits or toast points). The recipe listed is for four ducks, but it can easily be cut in half.

I am going to answer this question in long (and still, admittedly incomplete) form. Louisiana is an incredibly diverse place, much like out neighbor to the west, Texas (they're big ). There are both historical ( I am a historian, so I believe that this is most important) and geographical reasons for the diversity. The topic of the thread is North of I-10, but it is not that simple to draw the line between the places that many of you think about as Louisiana and the other two thirds of the state. New Orleans is another planet from the rest of Louisiana. One of the largest seaports in the worlds (if you count Southwest Pass at the tip of the river up to Baton Rouge as a single port, it is, in fact, the largest port in the world based on mixed tonnage). Immigrant groups of all sorts flocked here and outside of the New York Corridor, was one of the largest jumping off points for the immigrants that came to America during the nineteenth century. The New Orleans working class accent and the Bronx/Brooklyn accent is basically indistinguishable due to the fact that all of the same immigrant groups were learning a new language at the same time. The food in New Orleans represents many cultures and socio economic groups and today can be pretty well generalized into either French Creole or Italian Creole. Going Northwest out of N.O. up through Baton Rouge and across the remainder of the state, everything to the South of I-10 is basically classic Cajun Country. Up to the time of the 1927 Flood (Mississippi River flowed over and into the Atchafalaya River Basin and displaced a couple of hundred thousand people) the majority of people here spoke French as a first language and there are still pockets where it is spoken among families as a first or at least a "close second" language and their English is heavily accented. These people are primarily Catholic and did not miigrate much out of the area where their ancestors originally settled after they got run out of Canada. THis is where the food consists mainly of what most of you call Cajun cuisine. Central Louisiana (let's say west of Baton Rouge-east of Lake Charles-South of ALexandria is a mixed bag. Lots of French was spoken here and the English you here today has a lot more in common with their neighbors to the south than the ones up north. It is often called the Western Prairie (a holdover from the early nineteenth century when western and central Louisiana WERE the wild west). This is some of the finest farmland in the world, fed by ten thousand years of floods on the Atchafalaya and Red Rivers. Today you will see mostly sugar cane, corn, soybeans, rice, and as you get a little farther towards Alexandria, cotton. Here you are most likely to find a combination of the foods of South Louisiana and some influences from the Mississippi Delta(classic soul food-for lack of a better descriptive term). At Alexandria you can draw (pretty much, I am being very general) an east-west diagonal and use Hwy 165 as an east west division. To the east of 165 (going north through Monroe and Bastrop up into Ark.) is the Louisiana portion of the Mississippi Delta. It is essentially no different than Northwestern Mississippi, Eastern Arkansas, Western Tennessee. People North of here are primarily Protestant. The accents don't vary much throughout the whole area (not geographically anyway, clearly there are economic and social differences in the way people talk). The the west of 165 you will find miles and miles of piney woods on sandy red loam. Bad dirt. Grows almost nothing. This area has much in common with any other timber area in the South. Pulp wood mills dot the towns and pretty much define the economy, although there is a fairly large military presence in both Alexandria (Ft. Polk) and Shreveport (Barksdale AFB). West of Ruston and on into Texas (basically above I-20)are oil fields. The East Texas, South Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana oilfields were the sight of some of the biggest discoveries in the teens and twenties and even today the Hunt Family owns huge tracts of real estate as a result of some of the strikes and the land acquired around them. Monroe sits on top of what has been the largest producing gas field in the world. Virtually all of the natural gas that all of you Northerners hold so dear passes in pipelines just north of Monroe through a little town called Sterlington. During the Cold War, when I was growing up, they used to tell us the Russians had bombs aimed right at us so they could "freeze out the Yankees and make 'em surrender to the Ruskies". I always found that both terrifying and entertaining. Part two (the part about the food with some links is coming next. maybe tonight. There will be a test on this material the next time the class meets, so be prepared.

What are you looking at for a rangetop? I apologize if I missed it somewhere in this short concise thread

I stand corrected. The last time I was in there a couple of Yankee Tourists were asking about shipping their just purchased bounty home. The price we were quoted was per pound, not per order, and it was pretty dear. Incidentally, it is usually sold here by the link when purchased hot and judging by weight of individual link, I would say roughly $4 a pound sounds about right, but as I am about to go to Rouse's I will check the price on theirs and let you know this afternoon.

There is an excellent article in the current Saveur about the Sazerac Cocktail. It has a very accurate history and a photo series about how to concoct this age old drink. THere is an excellent side piece about the addition of absinthe and the subsequent change to herbsaint. I was in THE Sazerac bar on Tuesday afternoon and saw many patrons enjoying a post work Sazerac. It is fun to watch all of the swirling, shaking, pouring, straining, and subsequent swilling. If you are ever in New Orleans it is well worth a stop. This link will lead you to the Sazerac Website. You will find some rye info as well as an interesting history of Peychaud's Bitters.

In virtually all cases with all spirits (I know that there are exceptions, but I don't think that there are that many) the spirit is proofed back just before bottling and after blending (in the case of bourbon and I am guessing other blended spirits). Watering back in the aging stages would be very inexact, as much evaporation occurs during aging. Taxes in the US are based on abv and distillers are very exact in what goes into the bottle, as taxes are much higher than the price of distilled water.

Yes they do. And keep in mind that they also charge pretty rediculous prices for shipping (but I guess not much more than other shippers of fresh foods) and that will add substancially to the price. Me. I just drive over and circle around awhile until I find it.

No, bt I'm glad they do. I love those things, especially bannana. You know one thing that they throw in Mobile that I have NEVER seen in New Orelans is rolls of serpentine paper. It is a great throw (both for the thrower and the throwee ). I don't know why it never caught on. I was going to try to throw some in Tucks one year and Accent Annex didn't even have it.

For those of you who are interested enough to maybe want to give distillation a try ( I would reccomend homebrewing first, they are not really similar except that you produce something alcoholic, but home brewing does require a fair amount of applied scientific method and is a fairly inexpensive way to find out if you have the patience for the hobby) this website is an excellent resource. When I first started looking into this there were no materials available to me (internet did not exist in a useful way 15 years ago) and we used lots of folkloric type material. In fact the first still we built was straight out of The Foxfire Book-Volume 1. We built a very nice, but highly improved, still based on the design in the book. It is a classic still and a great story in the book goes along with the building of it. There are also a bunch of very safe, very small units that look much like the one that Beans remembers from TV. I believe that Sharper Image had one at some point, but the problem with distillation is that you are only going to get <10% alcohol out of whatever you distill (generally speaking it will be some kind of beer or wine or something else made from fermentable sugars) so those table top things are basically working you to death for a couple of shots.