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!