Down home eatin'

I'm often asked what a Cajun holiday meal looks like. Somewhere between my grandparents' day and what we eat now, the Christmas meal has become very similar to what the rest of America eats. The traditional turkey and ham is accompanied by peas, corn, broccoli casserole and candied yams. The method of deep frying a turkey was developed some time while I was in the Navy I guess, because I don't remember ever having fried turkey until coming home on leave one holiday.

A few uniquely Cajun dishes add local flavor to our traditional American Christmas meal. The centerpieces of both Christmas and Thanksgiving meals are gumbo and dirty rice. Dirty rice is a combination of white rice, ground beef and pork meat, gizzards and giblets. If you have a squeamish stomach you may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph. . . Gizzards are the ground up parts of a digestive organ found in poultry (we use chicken gizzards). Giblets are ground up organ meats from the chicken, especially the liver. We almost always have two varieties of dirty rice (AKA rice dressing) at the holidays; with and without oysters. I didn't like oysters growing up, but I've developed a taste for them as I've gotten older. I'm even eating them raw on the half shell now (with a little dash of Tabasco sauce!).

Gumbo is the other unique dish you'll find available at a Cajun holiday get-together. It's ubiquitous at Thanksgiving and Christmas meals and comes in may forms. Although we all love shrimp/okra gumbo, we usually have chicken & sausage gumbo for the holidays. As you can see from this picture, authentic (at least authentic to Bayou Blue and the Daigle family) gumbo doesn't look like what you're usually served for gumbo outside of Louisiana. For some reason, non-Cajuns insist upon putting too much rice and leaving the okra in huge chunks. The okra in our our okra gumbos are cooked down so much, you can hardly distinguish the okra in the liquid. It's more like seeds and greens left over. Depending on which bayou you're from, the gumbo can be brown or red. My family never adds tomatoes to their gumbos making it red. My aunt who is of Italian lineage however, grew up with her momma's gumbos being red. The one mandatory gumbo side dish is potato salad! Quite a few folks down here like to mix their potato salad into their gumbo, but I'm a purist and like to keep them seperate. They can mingle in my stomach if they want to, but not on my taste buds!!!

The holiday variety of desserts includes pecan and apple pies, chocolate cake and cookies. The favorites in our household is usually the peanut butter and chocolate fudges, peanut brittle and pecan pralines. My sister Monica's birthday is Christmas Eve and she always requests my mom make an apple pie for her!

Whenever I get a chance while I'm home, I like to make a trip to New Orleans. Andy and I love Cafe du Monde beignets and cafe au lait, so getting him to accompany me there isn't usually a problem! Andy, his girlfriend Lauren and I all piled into the car and headed north to the city. Unfortunately, it ended up being a disappointing culinary day in New Orleans. We ate at a restaurant in the French Quarter called The River's Edge because it was directly across the street from Cafe du Monde. Lauren had a nondescript fried shrimp po-boy while Andy tried to spice up his bland gumbo and bisque with Tabasco sauce. The cup of red beans and rice I tried to eat was the worse I've ever had. How can you screw up red beans and rice? And in New Orleans!

The saving grace of the whole meal was the half of a muffuletta I ordered. The muffuletta sandwich is the delicious result of Italian immigration into the French Quarter in the early 1900s. Muffuletta is actually a Sicilian bread much like focaccia. The round loaf is sliced in half then piled with various forms of Italian meats. The version I had consisted of salami, provolone cheese and the heart of an authentic French Quarter muffuletta; a marinated olive salad.

After dutifully consuming a lunch, we marched across the street for the long-awaited beignets and cafe au lait. Man do I love that light, airy fried dough covered with powdered sugar. I used to bring Andy here every time I'd come home on leave just to wait until he got the beignet close enough to his face that I could blow the powdered sugar everywhere! After finally placing our order, we were presented with the coveted beignets. I picked one up- hmmmm, this feels kind of heavy. I take a bite- hmmmmm, it's not supposed to be crunchy! This was the ultimate disgrace of New Orleans cuisine, a bad beignet! I looked around and suddenly felt sorry for the hordes of tourist sitting around in their newly bought beads draped across their football team t-shirts. This was probably the only time they would get to taste this uniquely New Orleans original! And it was terrible. This was an affront to all that is good about the Crescent City. A so-so meal is one thing, but bad beignets?! Ughhh!

After that, we didn't have the heart to do much sightseeing. We drove back home and decided that we had better gumbo and beignets right here on the bayou. We didn't need to drive an hour for them! We did our part for New Orleans' economy, but next time we'll pump our money into Terrebonne parish by buying some of the best beignets on the bayou at Big Eddie's!!! Not to worry though, I've still got another 4 days down here, I'm sure I'll eat enough great food to diminish my disappointment over the New Orleans cuisine dissapointment!

Not sure if I'll do another post while I'm in Louisiana. I'm enjoying spending time with my family and may have to post when I get back to California!

Home for the holidays

My parents have never asked much of me, but coming home for the holidays is one of them. During my overseas Navy years, that was a hard request to fulfill, but now that Uncle Sam doesn't determine my geography, there aren't a whole lot of things I consider to be more important than for me to be in my parents' house for Christmas! As you can see by this picture of my mom & dad, they are happiest when all their chicks are in the nest (kids and grandkids)! In fact they've picked up more "chicks" over the years; Dave came with them to the airport to pick my up last Thursday! I love the way my family and Navy worlds have meshed together over the years!

In our house, Christmas morning has always been about the kids. For the smaller kids, it's all about the gifts. Julia & Gavin must've been really good this year; it seemed like they opened gifts for a solid 15-20 minutes! For the grown-ups, it's all about enjoying the rare event of having all of our immediate family in one place for a joyous occasion. I'm still not sure that I'm a grown-up though since I ended up at the kids' table for Christmas dinner again this year!

As usual, Christmas was an all day event of eating and visiting. Dwayne brought Julia & Gavin over in the morning and we played with their new toys until the rest of the gang showed up for dinner (that's lunch for those of you not from the South!).

You know your getting older when the nephews have to split their time between here and the girlfriends' families homes! Andy & Lauren and Philip & Jessica hung out and played board games well into the evening with us. It's become a tradition that the girls take on the boys in a round or two of the game Pictionary on Christmas evening. For the third (or is it fourth?) year in a row, the girls have been victorious. My sister's boyfriend Dean thought this would be the year for the guys, but I think he wants to switch to a sports trivia game next year. Now, now Dean, how about a game that involves mechanics in some way just to keep it fair?!

With Christmas 2007 behind us, I'm savoring my last week at home leading up to New Years. On the first, my mom will be flying back to California with me to help me unpack all the boxes and set up in my new apt. on Coronado.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and a low-stress week before New Years!!! For my foodie friends out there, not to worry- I'll post some pics of home cookin' later this week!!!

December snow

De je vue. . . I'm in Colorado and it's snowing! I flew into the Springs late Monday evening for a week of meetings. The week started off in the 60s and even 70s at one point I think, but progressively got colder and wetter as the days clicked by. Today it's 16 degrees and it's been snowing since yesterday morning! I'm sitting at the airport right now waiting for my flight back to California. So far, there aren't any delays, so I'm hoping to get out of here before the weather gets any worse!

The last 5 days have been busy but fun. All USOC Performance Services team members converged upon Colorado Springs from Lake Placid, Chula Vista and Marquette. There were close to 60 of us brainstorming, team building and enjoying our once a year meeting of the minds. Although we work in what most would consider a corporate environment, our work is so unique and hands-on that it keeps us passionate about what we do. With the 2008 Beijing Games less than a year away, the New Year will get off to a full sprint start and won't let up until we're analyzing the final Games results.

I'm pretty excited to get back to San Diego. I just signed a lease on an apartment two blocks from the beach that I'll be moving into on the 18th. It's small, but I figured out a long time ago that I don't really need much space anymore. The only thing I'm not looking forward to is having to use coins to do laundry again! But hey, I'm sure I'll forget all about that roll of quarters when I jump on my beach cruiser and peddle towards the beach!

I leave on the 20th for two weeks of holiday vacation back in Louisiana; I'm soooooooooo excited! Hopefully between the move, vacation back home, and my mom coming back to California with me after the holidays, I'll have some pics to post with. Until then, have a great week!!!

November update!

Wow, time is flying by! I hate to post only narrative without pictures, but it's been a while so I figured I'd bring yall up to date even without graphics!

I'm finally getting settled in at my new work place. Furniture arrived last week and it took me three days to build it all and put it where I wanted it. Maybe it's from moving around so much during my life, but I need to have things in their place and pictures hung on the walls before I feel like I'm settled. Since my last post, I've gone back to Colorado Spring for meetings. Didn't have any time to do much outside of work, so no stories or pictures to report. I spent Thanksgiving here in San Diego with Whit & Kathie and had a good time. We did a little cooking, a little drinking, and like the rest of American, a lot of eating!

You know what they say about house guests being like fish. . . after about a week they start to smell! You'd never know it at Whit & Kathie's house, not once have they held their nose! I've thoroughly enjoyed having someone to come home and share dinner with when I'm not working late. Even though living out of a suitcase is never easy, I feel so at ease and at home with them; it's pretty much like staying with family. As fun as it is however, I need to have my stuff out of storage and a place to park my bed. I signed a lease on a cute little apartment on Coronado and will move in on Dec. 18th. It's two blocks from the beach and I'm very excited! The few years I spent in the mountains was enough to make me crave the sound of the pounding serf and the smell of salt air. My soul seems to be made of water, so it's time I feed my soul by having a tide near by!

It's been over a month since I left Colorado Springs and reduced my worldly possessions to only one mode of transportation. You'd actually be quite surprised at how chilly it's been here in southern California. I have to chuckle to myself as I ride home from work in the evenings and there's dew in the air and the temperature is in the mid-fifties. Although chilly, it's certainly better than mid-thirties and snow!!! Having the Harley as my sole mode of travel has actually been quite fun. It's only rained twice since I've been here and both times it was on a weekend. Each time, Kathie insisted I take one of their vehicles, so I've not suffered much in the transportation department!

Every now and then, the universe allows a little piece of my Navy past to merge with my present USOC life. A couple of days ago, a Navy buddy that I used to fly with rolled into town for a conference. We met up for dinner and had a great time telling sea stories and talking about the good old days. I always feel like a young kid posing as an adult when I say we reminisced about the "good ole days", but as Sloper and I hung out telling stories, it occurred to me that the stories we were remembering were from over a decade ago! Once again, it was an enlightening experience for me to catch up with someone I haven't seen in a while and hear about the "good ole days" from a different perspective. I'm usually struck by how unique we all are, and how our shared experiences are viewed through the filters of our past. I have a lot of respect for the men I've served with and for the paths their lives have taken since our paths have parted, especially those who have continued to stay in the Navy. For some reason, I feel strangely obligated to staying in touch with these shipmates from my past. Not an unwanted obligation, but one which I welcome and continually learn from. These random meetings always leave me a better person than I went in.

Tomorrow I take a flight back to Colorado Springs for a week of meetings. I can't say I'm looking forward to being at altitude during winter, but I am excited about seeing friends and checking in on my house (which still hasn't rented yet). I'll try to take some pics and do a post to keep everyone up to date. Until then, have a great week and drink in the surroundings in which you find yourself, you'll never be in that exact moment in time again in your life1