My Confusing Horoscope

What's good at Vicino? The white pizza, the veal roast, the sausage dishes. My wife loves the marinara sauce there. For pasta, especially ravioli, try Sergio's on Colesville Road in the Hilton Hotel. Ravioli is a specialty there. Cost is a notch up from Vicino and portions are smaller, but worth it. And Sergio is a friendly guy.

Richman: "You’ve heard about the cuisine, of course, but you’ve probably heard wrong. Meals are rarely accompanied by washboard thumping and zydeco bands. That ritual goes along with Cajun food, fundamental and spicy, brought down from Canada—good Lord, are we trying to save food from Canada? —by Acadian farmers and their spokesmodel, Longfellow’s Evangeline. What has been said about one-pot Cajun cooking being tasty is true, except nobody goes to New Orleans to eat it. It’s best appreciated in Lafayette Parish, a three-hour drive west. Folks out there call themselves Cajuns, and I promise you they do not behave like the rest of us." Well, you are actually more likely to see Zydeco bands on Bourbon Street than you are in Lafayette or Lafayette parish or most Cajun restaurants in the SW. Some touristy places like Randol's in Lafayette and Mulate's in Breaux Bridge have Cajun music (hope he didn't confuse Cajun music with Zydeco music like a lot of people do!), or even places in the country like D.I.'s Restaurant outside Basile or Bubba Frey's Restaurant in Mowata, but the food at those places is seldom as good as the regular Cajun restaurants, grocery stores, plate lunch places, etc. A notable exception is Cafe Des Amis in Breaux Bridge (zydeco brunch on Saturdays). I ate there in peace and quiet on a Sunday and loved it! To me, you can get a better idea of Cajun eating in the SW at the New York Times article, It Takes More than Crayfish (sic) to Make a Cajun Wiggle Hope that URL works for you. I didn't take the line about Cajuns not being like the rest of us as an insult, but they are actually very Americanized after all, I think.

C, It might be a bit of a hike (half hour?) from the SS metro, if you start there. That corridor of GA Ave has Jackie's, Vicino, and Crisfield's, all worth checking out, but I wonder if they are benefitting from the foot traffic associated with the hubbub downtown proper. Call ahead about lunch hours on the weekend.

Well, it's not up there with 2 Amy's but I always enjoy the white pizza with fontina cheese and garlic at Vicino's on Sligo Avenue off Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring. Across the street from Jackie's. Thin crust, lot of flavor.

Manhattan. ← Good one, but I bet some were sent to Washington DC.

It's hard to believe Richman couldn't find roux-based gumbo (with or without okra) in NOLA! I wonder if he was referring to that gumbo that looked like chicken soup with some bits of okra thrown in? Perlow posted some great pics about it. From one of NOLA's top restaurants, but dang if I can remember it or find it. Richman sounded as if he liked the Lafayette gumbo better. Never mind, though. Lafayette and Cajun country are off the radar for most people. You won't see your average GQ reader at the Sunday quarter horse races in Opelousas any time soon. I don't know what they'd think "a cockfight in Kaplan" means! Still it reminds me of how far rural LA has to go before being on the radar. There was that question I read on either Chowfood or Roadhound, "Can you find any Cajun food in the Lafayette area?" The Cajun/Creole thing is complicated, but Anderson points out that Richman could have done much better with it. Cajun food from Canada indeed! Anyway, with Firefox tonight I can't reach the Richman article anymore. Maybe I should count myself lucky.

Since I am a Cajun from southwest Louisiana, my ears perked up when I read his remarks about gumbo in Lafayette parish. It's not the same. Not to get too far off the subject, but it's not even so clear what Cajun is. Is it just the people who descended from Acadians in Nova Scotia, or is it a new mix of those people and other French immigrants, other cultures, etc.? For an interesting book, see Carl A. Brasseaux (1992). Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a people, 1803-1877, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. For an interesting book on the Americanization of the Cajuns, see Shane Bernard (2003). The Cajuns: Americanization of a people. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Must be the male. No udder.

If you have a car, it's not really too far to cross the river west for Joe's Dreyfuss Store Restaurant in Livonia. See http://www.joes-dreyfusstorerestaurant.com/

Baked shrimp we used to do in Cajun land one pound shrimp peeled, seasoned one onion diced one bell pepper diced can of Rotel tomatoes or your preferred liquidy tomato concoction tablespoon of flour to thicken 2 tablespoons butter to grease the casserole dish bake covered at 350 for 45 minutes to an hour Simple. Great with rice, deviled eggs.

I really recommend the cooperative extension service at a nearby land grant university. They are often associated with the university's agricultural school. They have Web sites and they are authoritative for your area. Good luck! Fresh peaches are hard to beat!

Hey FistFulla Do you remember garfish roast? How in the world did they get a roast size piece of fish out of that thing so hard to clean? It needed a lot of help, as I recall. Stuffed with plenty of garlic, roasted on the stove in a chaudiere.

Couche couche, the Cajun breakfast of champions! If you're not from there and you like it, I have to ask "who's your daddy?"

Recently saw Cool Hand Luke again. "Why 50 hard boiled eggs?" "Well, it'd be something to do!"

Perhaps the photo is deceptive but the Pesce Bandiera looks like a ribbon! Garfish have more girth. The face looks familiar, and the teeth! In Cajun country we used to catch garfish in canals and make what we call a roast (pot roasted on the stove) stuffed with lots of garlic. Or the meat would be rolled into boulettes (meatballs) and fried. Wonderful stuff! You don't see that very much these days, unfortunately, and I suppose restaurants can't serve them for some reason (never seen it in a restaurant). I would be curious to know how this fish is cooked elsewhere.

Yep, right across from the Peabody where we're staying. Sounds like fun with entertainment on the weekends.

Thanks for the replies. I will be in Memphis next Friday and wish I could eat 5 times!

I'd search for its etymology on Yahoo, but yahoo means yokel, another derogatory term.

That's part of learning sauces. ← I figured the fellow must have meant it that way, though to me, it is different. It can be totally unrelated to sauces when it is the base of a gumbo, but I see that he's trying to simplify things, so c'est la vie! It' not part of the other 19. But maybe there are other skills in other cultures?

What about making a roux?

That was true on the farm in Louisiana. My parents were of that generation. The main meal would be mid-day, and it'd be something lighter in the evening. How about Sunday dinner? That would be at 11:30-noon in our house. Maybe I was sheltered but I never saw a Sunday dinner (or holiday dinner) in the evening until I moved away.

That's interesting. I didn't know langoustines looked so much like crawfish. Do they have "fat" like crawfish and is it used in the cooking? It's used in Cajun cooking, but gone are the days when you could buy a pack of tails with a little container of fat on the side. Today it's all mixed together, and if I remember there's not as much in the pack now as their was in that separate container.

Pie is not about fruit. It's about crawfish. Oh, and crabcakes? Now, they say where I am from in Louisiana we talk funny. But they're no better in Maryland. My first time here, somebody said I should try a crabcake sandwich. I thought to myself what insane Duncan Hines monstrosity is that? And then to put it on a bun! When I was served it, I set them straight. "Oh, you meant a crab burger!!! A crab patty!!!" The answer is cake. Gateau syrop, and pineapple upside down.

Thanks for the link, Jason! Coincidentally I was just reading about Yugoslavian Cajuns in Southeast Louisiana at http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articl...tians_s_la.html It mentions Drago's restaurant. I had never made the connection with the Croatian oystermen. Those oysters look great!

That's good to hear! I am going to pass this along to the wife. We get them directly from a shrimper in Lafayette, or from Seafood Express in Delcambre, or even at the docks in Intracoastal City. Not sure how Delcambre and Intracoastal City made out with Rita, though. The lower part of Vermilion took it bad (flooding from the Bay).