Red Beans & Rice...Let's Get Dirty

I was finally put to the most arduous task of making red beans and rice and be critiqued by the native masses.  This is no small task.  I am from the South, I understand how serious things like this are.  If you don't make it like they remember there grandmother's making it, then it is wrong.  At the same time, there are no two recipes that are alike, thus continuing Sisyphus' trip up the hill. For me, there is really only one way to make grits, fried chicken, or collards, yes, there are variations on additions, but at the core there is only one way.  One way.  So, I began by doing my research.

Red beans first came to Louisiana via the Haitian Slave Revolt that began in 1789 and flushed out all the refugee plantation owners and eventually freed and slave Africans up the Mississippi to New Orleans.  Now this emigration brought so much to New Orleans, variations on voudoux, new musical instruments, and sugar cane know how.  It shaped the depth of culture and tradition in the city in so many ways.

Red Beans and Rice is traditionally served on Mondays--it's all about leftovers.  As well, as something mindless to make that you can ignore to clean the house, wash the clothes, etc.  Also, the sausage is traditional served on the side, but this is not how my recipe goes, I cannot give up the unbelievable flavor of pork fat from beginning to end.

1 lb Camellia Brand red beans, its a good Louisiana company.  Soaked overnight and drained. If you have the money add some white wine to the water you soak them in overnight.  You can also add an onion quartered and some dried peppers to infuse more flavor into the beans.

1 lb Louisiana Jasmine rice

1 ham hock
1 1/2 lb smoked sausage, halved and sliced

1 vidalia onion, minced
2 celery stalks, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 bell pepper, minced

1/2 c. white cooking wine
6 c chicken stock

1 t. cayenne, depends on how hot you are ready to go!
4 bay leaves
8 sprigs of fresh thyme
salt and pepper

2 Tbl butter

• Sear the ham hock on all sides in a large pot.  Add the halved and sliced smoked sausage and get a good sear producing pork fat to suate the vegetables in.
• Lower the temperature on the stove unit and add the vegetables, being careful not to burn anything. 
• Add the well drained beans.
• Deglaze the pan with 1/2 c. white cooking wine, and cook until almost all of the wine is gone.
• Add the chicken stock, you can also just use water here or a vegetable stock depending on monetary and dietary restrictions.
• Add the cayenne, bay leaves, thyme, and a little salt and pepper.  This will be cooking on low for about two more hours so you don't want to add too much salt too early, the taste will intensify.
• Let it ride on a slow boil for about two hours.  Make sure the beans are neither crunchy or smushed.
• In the mean time, about 20 minutes before the beans are done, cook the rice.  Slightly season with salt and pepper.
• Add butter to the beans when it is done, stir until the butter melts, taste for salt and pepper and add more if needed.
• Garnish with green onion if you are going for flare

Halloween: Costume Your Face Off...In New Orleans!!

By:  Amy Thomas

In a town that thrives on masks, parties, mischief, and mayhem, Halloween is just the kind of holiday for New Orleans--and the nerve center of all this mayhem culminated in an exploding atom on Frenchmen Street.

 I work on Frenchmen so Halloween weekend meant a lot of work and long days and nights watching others on debaucherous jaunt in the street.  It also meant I had an excuse to wear ridiculous costumes at work, one night I was an overdosed disco chick and the other I went Tori Spelling in her Saved by the Bell Years. 

The payoff to all this work and no play was that I somehow had Halloween off. This was going to be trouble.  My costume for the big night was a murderous bad-ass Mayan forecasting the end of the world.  It took my a hot minute to get this costume together. I had chicken feet hanging from this giant neck piece/top I had, along with fake ears, cryptic writing, and blacked out eyes.  Like I said, costumes are taken very seriously in these parts.

I started out at R Bar, which is always nice, and conveniently is at the end of my street. People were spilling out of the bar in any and every type of costume.  The streets were starting to fill and cars were starting to be completely blocked from passing through.

 I didn't know what to expect at this point walking around the corner off Royal to Frenchmen and getting slapped in the face by thousands of people packing the streets for blocks and blocks.  It was a leviathan sea of enunciated inebriation.  There were unfortunate cars being danced on, DJ's in the street, bearded women, jello shots, kegs, a lot of men dressed as women, Tobias in blue men phase, glow sticks, elicit drug exchanges, trumpets and saxophones dancing into the streets from every bar, and Jersey vampires giving it to you with attitude.  It was a completely beautiful party. 

See you on the Halloween flip side, as Elvis says goodbye to the Leprechaun.

Catching Up

I haven't posted in a couple months...and I have been contemplating over the root of my complete lack of ambition towards writing things about settling in to New Orleans.

And I still couldn't tell you.

Isaac came and went, we spent a good week without power but nothing too horrible happened to the house.  The best part was the communities reaction to this event.  This is something you roll with down here, but it helps when there is a neighbor to help you collect branches, bring in trash cans, make sure you have water, and the ever present food trucks that majestically appear in your hood so you don't have to travel twenty minutes to wait in line at McDonalds or awful Rally's for another hour or so just to be disappointed and ridden with guilt and gas for the rest of the day.  The food trucks and Verti Mart kept my tummy full, and the Spotted Cat came through with a generator, a band, and cold beer.

We got disaster food stamps, went to the arena, saw the army corp, registered to vote in Louisiana-it was an experience, but after losing our entire fridge and freezer and a week of work, it was worth it.

Getting through a hurricane on these coasts is like making it through your intitiation to become an official resident.  Now, a couple months later, you can share stories with others.  Conversations have something in them like, "I ate there during Isaac" or "We met them during Isaac".  That means you've been here, you aren't a tourist, you aren't one of those tourists that stays on extended stay, which means you stay for a couple months contemplating moving here. You live here. 

There have been more incredible parades, more festivals, more anything in the world you can do outside once the weather went from hot wet wool blanket to the cool breeze of paradise. 

I have settled in to my job on Frenchmen Street, and we feel like we have friends, the ability to navigate the town without the GPS, the exact location of our favorite chicken fingers (Today's Cajun Seafood on St. Claude, believe me), po'boys (we stick to Frady's), pizza (Sugar Park), daiquiries (behind Gene's), bar (ever revolving), and so on.  We live in an incredible and unique paradise. It is now our home.

The part that is hard to write about New Orleans are the social issues.  The school system here is to shit.  The roads in neighborhoods off the Quarter or Garden districts are shit.  The mental health hospital for all of New Orleans shut down and moved and there have already been three deaths attributed to released patients.  There are gun shots, drive-bys, the constant threat of getting jumped.  The constant game in your head...look them in the eye when you walk by, say whats up, look straightforward, angry, assured, on a mission.  Watch out for groups of teenagers. Keep open businesses on your walk so you have somewhere to run if something happens.  These are all things that you have to consider every time you go somewhere. We live in the Seventh Ward, this shit gets serious.

If you write this out like this it looks like you would have to be a little insane to live here, and maybe that is true, we are definenlty a lot weirder than Austin thinks they are, but the pros so greatly outweigh the cons that sometimes you don't even notice them until there is a shooting a block away.