Mayhaw Man

No-I give those to people I don't like Yes. The thorns are trimmed and the top is cut off of the artichoke.

Breakfast this morning consisted of lots of coffee (Community Dark Roast made in a French Press) and a scone from an excellent local bakery, Zoe's. Lunch will be a rib meat sandwich, sliced tomato with pepper and salt, and some delicious Elmers Chee Wees (a superior cheesy poof made in New Orleans). A Heavenly Hash egg will be my afternoon treat (a gift from a co worker).

Second question about the artichokes. If they are so popular, why only throw in a couple of them? They are really bulky and they take up alot of room is the reason for not so many per pot. They are trimmed, but basically thrown in whole.

Mudbugs! Mudbugs, crawfish, crayfish-call em what you want, but they are still fine eating by any name. I am making a peach pound cake tonight using peaches that were canned last summer (two months too early for Ruston Peaches). It is not quite the same, but if a little bit of the preserved ones are pureed and added to the batter it makes for a very moist and flavorful cake that smells awesome while it is baking.

Part 2 As we move along the crawfish have been soaking and now comes the fun part (actually it's all pretty fun). Our host, Michael, and his able assistant heave out the first basket of the day. There were 5 or 6 more to come. This is one picture that is hard to screw up. It never turns out bad, those bugs just look so good coming out of that basket onto the newpaper. Pigs at the trough. Here are the rules-Don't push-don't grab anyone elses beer-no fighting over the goodies-be nice-there's more coming! Mrs Mayhaw at the head of the table. She is a true trencherman when it comes to crawfish. She is also rude and will eat the last mushroom without asking anyone else Those are my boys chowing down. They are not timid at all (they take after their Mom ) and will elbow in with anybody. Incidentally there were four of these tables going simultaneously in a beautiful backyard. Everyone enjoys a good party in their own way. John is taking a light nap in a really cool Gazebo being serenaded by the stereo and the frogs. He's always the life of the party. Me and the other host, Robin. I resorted to well timed crude humor to get her to laugh in this photo This was a great time and everybody enjoyed it. Wish you coulda been there.

Another Sunday afternoon in Louisiana. Crawfish and beer consumed. Kids playing underfoot (although we are all reaching the age where the children are likely to be grandchildren for some of my friends just a few years older than I-which is kind of weird for all of us aging Southern hipsters ). There was lots of other food including some crawfish cornbread that was, seriously, as good as anything I ever put in my mouth. And yes. I got the recipe. It will be in recipe gullet before I go to bed. It is too good to keep to myself. Unbelievable. Life changing. Stunning. Tasty. There were also crawfish pies made by a local judge, various kinds of herb salads made by old hippies, and lots of wine and beer. All in all a pretty good menu. For many of you it would have been a once in a lifetime, hell I'm gonna move, kind of experience. It was a GOOOOD party. I am going to post a few photos of the boil, I took many more but they are going to go into an egci project on Seafood Boils that I am working on. This blog is a catalyst to get going on that, as I generally require wither panic or a big kick in the ass to get moving on stuff that doesn't pay very well (although I do appreciate the yogurt-thanks buddy ). This is a photo of the boil masters getting the water ready to go. They have already added lemons, garlic, salt, and water. In this photo they are adding Zatarain's Brand Dry Mix Crab Boil (they already have added a measure of the liquid). This will be allowed to come to a good hard boil and potatoes will be added first, as they take longer to cook than anything else involved. A little more garlic being added, as Russ, the boilmaster at today's event, deemed it short on the pungent pod. A bad day for these bugs. We cooked 200 lbs. this afternoon (fed about 40 people) in batches of 40 pounds each. They will be brought to a covered, rolling boil. Crawfish just into the pot. They don't scream much Crawfish just at the boiling point. Corn, big button mushrooms, a couple of artichokes, and some really cool looking sweet peppers are added at this point (you can see 'em on top). They are going to be boiled for just a couple of minutes at "full steam ahead" and then the heat will be turned off and the crawfish will be allowed to soak for a while. The longer they soak, the spicier they are. We like em pretty zippy. The corn picks up the spice like a sponge as do the mushrooms. The peppers kind of lose their skin and become very tasty. The artichokes and asparagus cook perfectly and the artichoke heart becomes a fiery chunk of heaven. I have seen people come to blows over those hearts. Part two coming up. I left some stuff out of image gullet and must go repair. I am afraid to jump around on the computer as I might lose this if I get too happy with the technology. Back in a minute.

I met the lady's daughters when they showed up at my front door one day wanting to look at the house. They told me all about all of those cool concrete trellis that are all around (they are really neat-poured concrete made from molds the guy built in the yard-the reinforcing material is what ever he had lying around-mainly old fencing and barbed wire) and showed me where the phone was built into the wall in the hall. They also showed me where the outside kitchen was and where the outhouse stood (there are roses there now-a major improvement over an outhouse ). The boys did ok with the sale of the drinks. They really cleaned up selling their junk, though. People will buy anything that is not nailed down from little kids. There were four 14 year olds and two 11 year olds and they made a little less than 600 bucks selling crap. Crawfish later. My 11 year old is down there helping them set up (for an 11 year old this consists of playing with tubs full of live crawfish and not much else- but it makes him feel good so who cares?).

WooHoo! Watch out world! I have reached another plateau in eGullet skills!! Food Peauxrn on the way!

This is the front of my old, rediculously large, house (circa 1895). It is all cypress construction and was built by a guy for his daughter who lived here with her family for 75 years or so. There is a twin of it down the road that was built for her sister. There are some very old roses of various sorts out front and over the concrete trellis over the the gate. That spirit house that you can kinda see was hauled back from Indonesia by our sometimes roomate Frank (my cousin-one of a dying breed-he is an American Merchant Marine-there aren't many left) who brings me all kinds of stuff. I am just posting the pic to see if I have got this imagegullet thing figured out. Let's see if this works: The front of my house on a nice Spring morning in South Louisiana

Looks good!(especially for a bunch of Yankees ) How was the slaw? Jon didn't mention it ( I don't think anyway, I looked twice).

I might be with you if the thing makes a decent cup. One of those would make a handsome addition to my bar top (now that the cocktail gear seems to have more or less permanently dissappeared).

That's hysterical. Thanks for the link. I think.

Not that I am trying to change the subject (but of course, I am ) what's up with vacuum coffee makers? They are really cool looking (always an important factor). Do they make decent coffee?

A lttle bit, but the crawfish tails that you are seeing in Ottawa are probably of Chinese origin. The chinese crawfish are nicely sized but they are steamed unspiced and packed in very little fat (hugely important to the flavor profile of frozen tails). Louisiana Crawfish (the commercially packed ones) are steamed over spicy water and packed in copius amounts of spice and packed in their own fat (mmmmm). As an aside there is also a business in Baton Rouge that buys very large select crawfish and steams them in salt and dill. They are then packed with a sprig of dill and put through a cryovac tunnel -then they are shipped to Sweden. Apparently this is a big product in Sweden. Yumpin Yiminy! Who knew! As far as Southern Food goes as a general thing probably the way I learned how to cook and what I eat now are still directly related. I learned to cook from my mother, grandmother, and various cooks who worked for them and the food that they prepared was the food of the Mississippi Delta region with much seafood and fish thrown in. Certainly there was the usual array of fried stuff and lots of vegetables out of the garden (more or less year round-mainly greens of various sorts in the dead of winter). My first real job was as a line cook in the largest seafood restaurant in Louisiana and I learned a hell of a lot . I eventually became a line manager and then a general manager of the place and got a grip on mass food preparation on a huge scale. The main thing that I took away from there was the way to indentify, prepare, and serve really fresh (sometimes out of the water less than twelve hours) seafood. I especially learned how to fry (it is a skill that apparently escapes many) and boil crustaceans (shrimp, crabs, crawfish). I also spent some time as a seafood buyer for the same place and that was quite a learning experience as well. We bought HUGE amounts of fresh seafood and also quite alot of crabmeat (lump, backfin, and clawmeat-blue crabs only) and crawfish tails in season to freeze for the rest of the year. I don't know if any of you have ever seen a million dollars worth of crabmeat in a freezer, but it impressed the hell out of me.

A lovely frame often adds positive value to the art (although my photographic skills probably could not be improved with 100 kilos of gold leaf )

Jensen contacted me earlier in the week and asked if I would take over the Foodblog for the coming week. I agreed with the caveat that I would not start until Sunday night. I am still standing by that, but I thought I would go ahead and do some kind of intro as I am at work and have nothing better to do . This blog is going to begin and end with crawfish boils (kind of a compare and contrast thing). It is that time of year down here and everyone with a hundred bucks and an 80 qt pot is having a crawfish party sometime in the next two weeks. They are really fun social events and take absolutely no prep other than getting out all of the cooking gear, cleaning up the yard and the patio/deck/barn/dock, going to the seafood market, and going to the grocery store. All of the action (cooking and eating) occurs outside so you don't even have to spend a day shoving all of your junk into closets and under beds in order to fool your friends (who know better anyway) that you live a "Martha Life". Tommorrow's boil will take place in the backyard of my old next door neighbor (she moved, I stayed) and friend Robin. She has a beautiful house by Lake Pontchatrain in Mandeville and her swell new husband is a great cook (as are many men in Louisiana-it is very common here for men to be the primary food preparers in a household-always has been). This will be a small operation (150 lbs. of bugs or so) and about thirty people. Lots of beer, soft drinks, and laughter. Simple and easy and everyone will help with the set up and the cleanup so the hosts don't have to kill themselves and besides, that's half the fun of this type of entertaining. Next Sunday's boil (end of blog) will be a giant deal. It is my company party and there will be a huge trailer set up to boil TONS of crawfish. There will be a couple of hundred people there along with a band, tents, kid games, and the rest of the trappings of company parties. An entirely different vibe than a party in someone's back yard. Still prety fun, though. In between I will keep you up to date on the daily food doings in the Mayhaw Household. I will be roasting a turkey in a very unusual manner early in the week (so that we can eat it for the rest of the week in various disguises) and then I will take the carcass and make a little gumbo out of it. I will also be making some shrimp ettouffee one night, chicken creole another, and at some point I will be doing a little bbq'd redfish (it depends on when I get the fish). If I take a day off during the week and have the time I will probably do some kind of real BBQ on my open brick pit (that thing is da bomb ) over pecan wood. Probably brisket. I will also throw in some baked goods (I bake alot, much to my wife's and my waistline's dismay) and this week, for the sake of the blog, I think that I will just do the Southern thing-chess pie, pecan pie, peach pound cake, and probably some yeast rolls one night. I would imagine that you will see a fair amount of vegetable sides as the market down the street (awesome veg. stand 2 blocks from my house) is starting to fill up with spring veggies. Fear not- we will have some okra. You won't be seeing much about breakfast food or lunch except on the weekend, as I am not home when the boys eat it (I leave for work at 6 a.m.) and none of us are there for lunch (which is usually, for both my wife and I, a brown bag affair consisting of leftovers) and both of the boys take their lunch to school as well (even though they are both in private schools, the food is uniformly uninteresting and generally awful and they won't touch it). Incidentally-I have been married to my wife Mrs. Mayhaw (Robin) for 20 years and have two boys, Miles (14) and Graham (11). My children are unusual in that they will eat damn near anything (except blue cheese and one of them, inexpicably, does not like okra in any form-and they don't eat escargot-it's a long story) so they are very easy to feed. Frankly, I am not sure that he is mine and have been considering a DNA test to prove paternity ). I will do my best to provide regular photographs but I am not promising anything-even though I make my living using all of the new technology, photo gullet is still something of a mystery to me and I may be pm'ing some expert or another for a little help. Anyway, I am looking forward to the week and I hope that you enjoy it.

Pot of Community Dark Roast Pancakes (recipe out of Southern Sideboards/Jackson, MS) Richard's Hickory Smoked Bacon Steen's Pure Cane Syrup A couple of papers and a quiet morning.

Actually I am sure that there is existing film of HPL giving a speech about this very subject (I believe that it is coupled with the famous "Highpappalorum/Lowpappahiram" story). I seem to remember seeing it a couple of times. I am almost sure that it is available somewhere on the web, I will contact someone at the Southern Culture Center who may be able to provide me with a link. And you are right. It did turn into a silly but interesting discussion in the context of common manners versus the Upper Crust (or Winnfield, LA vs Hyde Park, NY-whichever you prefer ).

Every child I know in this part of the world does this with adults who are reasonably close friends of their parents. I have always kind of liked it. And you are right, it does seem to be a more or less Southern phenom.

Actually I found the editors at TDG to be brilliant. Caring, friendly, and not too quick to hit the delete key. What a bunch of great people they are. I am, however, still waiting anxiously for my yogurt. An example of some of the fine editing available at TDG

I agree that it should ultimately be the editors decision to include or not to include information in a writers work (actually I don't agree with that at all as I am a writer and not an editor and have found myself on the short end of the stick more times than I care to think about ) but it is up to the writer (at least in the situations we are discussing here) to disclose possible conflicts of interest to the editor (many times, no matter the amount of editorial research done, there is no way for the editor to know about personal or professional relationships of writers). Inclusion is, I agree, up to the editor. And incidentally, I am not indicting Hesser at all. Who knows? It may well have been an editorial error. I like to read her stuff. It may not be the deepest food writing ever done, but it can be very entertaining.

I suppose that for me it all comes down to the readers ability to trust the reviewer to be objective. As there are so few "degrees of seperation" in the restaurant industry (and that certainly, in this day of Websites and Travel and Food Magazine proliferation goes much farther than just locale-so many chefs and food writers get around the country and see each other at industry events regularly that they all know somebody who knows somebody else) it is incumbent on the writers of the reviews to keep some kind of air of objectivity when doing reviews (some do and some don't). Surely something like this situation should have been disclosed (as it occurred recently and was bound to be noticed by many) and I am sure that she wishes she would have done it. On the other hand I believe that the reader should always read a review with a jaundiced eye (to some degree anyway) and get more than one opinion if a potential diner is going to give a place a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" based on written reviews only. Personally I would generally rather find out for myself. For example if I based my potential dining experiences on writers in the New Orleans Times Picayune (particularly when Gene Bourg was there, as our tastes are totally different) and stuff that I read on the web, I would have never gone to NOLA, a place that got absolutely mediocre reviews in the press (still does in some circles), but one that I like very much. I learned over the years when reading his pieces that he and I were looking for different things when we dined out and learned to read his excellent reviews to look for specific things that would appeal to me. Current Picayune critic Brett Anderson apparently have alot in common as far as dining goes, as I generally find that I like the same places that he likes. Read the reviews and form an opinion-but don't knock it til you try it.

1st) I don't think I wold be so quick to blame shoddy service on the fact that it was a table full of women. Bayona is owned and operated by Susan Spicer (one hell of a woman as a matter of fact) and I don't think that she is going to put up with any chauvinist crap from any of her staff. Perhaps the service just wasn't that great? Off night? Who knows? 2nd) I like Bayona but it is far from my first choice around town. It's lovely but there are just places that I like better. Peristyle for example (yet again-owned by a woman-Anne Kearney) is one of my favorite places in town and I just like it better than Bayona-but that is not to say it's better-it's just my choice. 3rd) For that Bayona kind of dough I cannot reccomend Restaurant August with Executive Chef and current "Hottest Name in Town" John Besh. The place is gorgeous and the food is better. Pastry chef Kelly Fields makes some seriously badass deserts to boot. All three of these people have awards coming out of the wazoo (seems like New Orleans could run a branch of the James Beard House, actually) and know what they are doing and how to run a decent place. As far as bad service goes I will always chalk it up to a bad night before I go for anything else in the excuse dept. On a lighter note. I love Frankie and Johnny's. As I recently told somebody in an email "it is what it is. Neighborhood joint where most of the customers behave like they are with friends and having a good time-because they are. Hell, half the people in there on any average weeknight know all about "your mama and dem". Great boiled and fried food and down to earth but efficient as hell service. That's all anyone can expect out of a superior neighborhood type restaurant in New Orleans.

New Orleans is not exactly a low carb kinda town, but we're trying. And for the Passover celebrators among us eGulleteers Matzo Luck Marcelle Bienvenue takes her soup and salad outside Patio Chow Eggs are lucky Here are some recipes to increase your luck!

I just put my mother's dill pickle recipe into recipe gullet. Brooksie's Dill Pickles They are easy and the recipe was designed to let the pickle maker make a few jars a day (as the cukes are pulled from the garden, which is what my Mom does) or you can go to the farmers market and get the goods and go home and make a ton. Full credit for this recipe should go to Trudy Aarron (my mother changed them a little bit (added lots more peppers), but really this is Mrs. Aarron's recipe) my next door neighbor when I was growing up. She was raised in East Texas the daughter of the owner of a General Mercantile, and was about as good a cook as ever existed. Ya wanna talk about Jews and the South? She molded her two native cuisines together as well as anyone ever has (she was truly a master baker) AND to top it all off-after her boys were grown and gone she missed seeing them shoot fireworks for holidays and she used to go out and buy them for my brothers and I. Now that, my friends, is a great neighbor. In a world where many people hardly even know their next door neighbors I feel blessed to have had her around.