BlogFerret » Louisiana

Holiday Traditions, New and Old

midnightferret — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:02:35 +0000

It’s that time of year again!

Time for delicious holiday foodstuffs? Nope. Time for incessantly repeating carols on retail PA systems? Nope. Time to panic? Maybe.

My friend Lori Luza just posted her Annual Holiday Pre-Rant. This is not the kind of thing people look forward to, is it? I mean, there’s probably something wrong with me. However, I have to say that I’m relieved that I’m not alone. I used to think very few people “got it” around the holidays. Lori not only re-emphasizes that we really don’t need to hear “Little Drummer Boy” 187 times in the grocery store before Christmas, but that maybe a few of us have different priorities this year.

Picture this: New Orleans, 2004. My husband and I had saved up enough to move to what’s called a “mixed income” neighborhood. To us, this meant “longer walk to the bus stop, but fewer drug dealers.” It was great, but we had pretty much used up all our resources doing it. It was the end of the semester, so the student loan money was running out, and James didn’t really have a high paying job back then. I remember being sad because my grandmother had passed away a couple of months prior. A lot of stuff around late 2004 – 2005 is hazy for me, actually, but I’m going to tell this story anyway.

One night, I saw on the TV page in the newspaper that A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie was coming on. We decided to splurge on two pizza slices and some tallboys and watch the movie. (Yeah, I know, a beer snob with a tallboy: we ate on $20/week back then. What do you want from me?) The message of the Christmas special, of course, is that as long as you have your family and friends, you have everything that really matters. The problem, I thought, was that throughout the whole movie, a Lexus commercial kept coming on. You know the one where the wife goes outside and there’s a big Lexus outside with a bow on it? (Not the pony one. The other one.) I can’t remember what the narration was: something about “What they really want for Christmas.” It was really depressing. No, not because I couldn’t have a Lexus, but because we were watching this cute holiday movie, and every ten minutes it was being interrupted by a message that said, “Fuck togetherness! What you really need is a Lexus.” Seriously? This is legal? What are we doing to our children? Not only could I not relate to the Lexus commercial, but that year, I could hardly relate to the other gift-giving and traveling commercials, either. The one where the nuclear family shows up to the huge well-lit house and is greeted at the door by three generations of other family members – and a dog – seemed like it came from another planet. And let’s not get started on the jewelry commercials. If “every kiss begins with Kay,” then my husband and I have broken laws in at least six states.

As my friend references in her blog post, even articles aimed at reducing holiday stress can seem like they are aimed at people completely unlike ourselves: What do you get the uncle who has everything? How do you deal with airport delays and visits to two sets of grandparents? I have a reality check for that sort of advice: your average person isn’t worried about that stuff. The average person is worried about whether or not he can even get his kid a present this year. She’s not worried if the pumpkin souffle will collapse; she’s worried that she can’t afford everything on the Christmas dinner shopping list. Another couple could both be laid off; they’d love to be delayed at the airport, because it would mean that they had somehow been able to buy airline tickets to see their families. Your average person may not even have anyone to go visit, and wishes she had to worry about stocking stuffers.

There are many people who face the holiday season with a sense of dread. The airwaves and environment start pummeling us with holiday messages before we even realize what’s going on. Maybe you’re not part of a culture that celebrates any holidays. Stop and think for a minute how it might feel if everyone was shoving Christmas down your throat if you don’t celebrate it. I’ve seen people handle these sorts of issues with a variety of strategies, from weeks of planning to “if it gets done, it gets done, otherwise, who cares?” I have friends who celebrate “Season of Giving” to “Season of Bitching” and everything in between. I hope you celebrate (or don’t celebrate) this season without stress. I hope you find time for personal reflection or at least a little quiet. Most of all, I hope you can keep your priorities at the forefront, and not let the small stuff get in the way.

I Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans

midnightferret — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:10:03 +0000

A well-known residence in the Garden District.

Let me begin by stating that I currently reside in Austin, Texas, which is a pretty cool place. I have nothing against it. I’m not “doing it wrong.” I’m just not as in love with Austin as I am with New Orleans.

I was born in new Orleans, and I spent some of my early childhood and later, early adulthood there until Hurricane Katrina happened. We intended to go back, but circumstances (mostly financial) prevented us from doing so. Still, not one day goes by that I don’t think about New Orleans. Carnival Season began January fifth, and from then until around June, I’ll be pining for that city extra hard, and not just because of Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. I’ve got a couple of theories and a few legitimate reasons why I can’t stop missing New Orleans:

Theory:

New Orleans was “taken away” from me. Because I didn’t leave New Orleans voluntarily, part of me must feel that somehow it was “stolen.” If we could have found a way to return without having to live under a bridge or something, it might have been different. As it stands, in my emotional life, I kind of feel robbed.
I spent some of my early childhood there. We all have hazy, sun-dappled childhood memories. Mine smell like live oak trees in humid weather and are filled with various NOLA accents. My grandparents and relatives have NOLA accents. I think I imprinted on the place like a baby duck!
Before I left, I was finally easing into adult life. I had a part-time job and was finishing my B.A. degree. My husband and I were thinking of buying property at which to reside for at least the next ten years. I had several very close friends whom I saw every day, and legions of casual acquaintances whom I ran into regularly. Three days before I turned 27, it all suddenly dissolved. It was as if the previous years I had spent building my life had never happened. Keep in mind, I was lucky. I didn’t own a family home that was destroyed, or lose a loved one to the flood. It was still difficult to cope.

Legit:

Don’t care what you say, there is no other city like NOLA. I have traveled many places in the U.S. and all over the world. New Orleans is truly unique. It’s not just the food (we’ll get there, I promise!). The combination of cultures and attitudes, having simmered slowly for 300 years, has created an environment that is impossible to duplicate.
The food. The city has some of the best eats I’ve ever had, and trust me, I like to eat! In NOLA, you can get an excellent Bloody Mary not from a mix, a high quality po boy on fresh bread for the price of a fast food meal, French pastry made by a 6th generation French pastry chef, in-house ground lean beef and house made Italian sausage at the corner store, tamales made by a real Mexican grandmother for $.50 apiece, and a 5 course meal at a world-famous restaurant, all in the same day and in the same 8 mile radius. I know because I’ve done it.
The history. 300 year old architecture. The oldest continuously operating open air market in the United States. The birthplace of Jazz. Oldest continuously operating street railway system in the world. (The world!) There’s more, so much more that it could (and does) fill numerous books. The history of the city is one of the most fascinating and diverse of any city in the United States.
Something for everyone. It’s not just the French Quarter and Bourbon Street, y’all. There are museums and historic sites so you can better yourself culturally. The Audubon Zoo is absolutely amazing, as are the Aquarium and the Insect Museum. There is usually some kind of festival happening on any given weekend. Did I mention the food yet? You can go to school if you want. You can go sailing or fishing on Lake Ponchartrain, and while you’re near the lake, you can drive across one of the longest bridges in the world. And of course, no one says you can’t just go rat around the French Quarter, or go ahead and spend an afternoon at the casino, if you want!

After Katrina, when we would go back, it would make me so sad to see neighborhoods still in ruins. I went back last year to visit, and when my friend and I drove on I-10 over parts of the city at night, we could see large dark neighborhoods which still hadn’t recovered and may never recover. These are the neighborhoods where people were too poor to fight the insurance company lawyers who said they didn’t have a claim. They are the neighborhoods that were so-called “mixed-income,” where regular Joes like you and me made their homes, but couldn’t afford to come back.

Louis Armstrong sang it, and I feel it. I do know what it means to miss New Orleans.

The Killing Floor

midnightferret — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:37:26 +0000

Naw, I’m not gonna talk about this PC game, even though I heard it was good for some Co-Op Zombie killing fun of an evening. I just liked the title.

When I lived in New Orleans in 1996, I worked at a place in the 200 block of Baronne Street downtown. It was in a bank building. We worked on the ground floor, but we supported some clients on the upper floors of the building. For some reason, when you called the elevator to go down, it would stop even if it was on its way up. If you got in one that had the “up” light on, you would first have to go up, then down to your destination floor. This was true even if someone below you had used the elevator to ascend, and then left it. So the elevator doors would open into an empty elevator, and you’d get in, and although you pressed a button for the lobby, the elevator would still go to the top floor, open, and then close and take you back down. Even if no one on the top floor had called it, which was usually the case. I don’t know why the elevator behaved this way and didn’t know why then.

The true mystery probably had something to do with the everyday machinations of elevators, about which I know nothing. However, I maintain to this day that that elevator was haunted. The top floor of the building was not in use. It was a dark, grimy, disused office space with low ceilings and a definitely creepy cross-elevator door panorama. I only saw what the wall across from the elevator looked like, because absolutely nothing could induce me to leave the elevator on that floor. When I was alone in the elevator, and the doors opened on that floor, with its silence and general aura of a “prime zombie spawning point,” I would actually squeeze my eyes shut and plug my ears against the silence until I heard the elevator doors close again.

See, there was never anyone on the top floor to call the elevator. Therefore, why would it continue to ascend after someone had used it to get to one of the lower floors? Why not stop there and wait for someone else to press the call button? I was irrationally afraid of those few moments in the elevator on that top floor, so much that I took pains to avoid them. If alone, I would not get into the elevator unless I was certain it would descend. Still, sometimes the elevator would trick me, and I would end up on that top floor, frantically pressing the “close doors” button. The worst was when someone else was in the elevator with me and it took us up there. I had to act like I wasn’t terrified that the abandoned office floor was going to eat us both. Sometimes I wondered if they were just as afraid of that floor as I was, but I never had the courage to ask. I mean, after all, it was just an empty floor. Silly to think something was lurking in the unknown darkness to devour anything stupid enough to pass beyond that rectangle of light shed by the open elevator doors.

Even sillier to think that maybe that elevator took everyone in the building up there, one by one, alone. And the abandoned floor replaced them. Silly to think that all those replacements are now living their lives, having children, going about their business. Waiting. Utterly ridiculous. Right? . . . Right?

The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook

midnightferret — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:31:11 +0000

Today we did some errands and, as usual, couldn’t stop ourselves from visiting Half Price Books. I was so pleased to pick up an actual treasure: The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book – Sesquicentennial Edition! It contains 150 years worth of recipes compiles from The Times Picayune, the New Orleans daily newspaper. The Picayune itself is somewhat sentimental for me, in part because my grandfather always said it phonetically to make us giggle when we went to visit. Also, a lot of my mom’s own recipe clippings come from the Picayune, and, miraculously, the paper has two pages of comics on weekdays! Weekdays! Can you believe it?

This isn’t the newer version, printed in 2002, with the pretty cover. The hardback of that edition seems not to be available now for less than a C-note, but I’ll settle for the more “homey” version from 1987. It is a reprint of the second edition of the Picayune Cookbook from 1901, which is considered the definitive collection. This edition was edited by Marcelle Bienvenu, of St. Martinville, LA. She worked for the Brennan’s family of restaurants, as well as opening her own restaurant, Chez Marcelle.

I love, love, love this cookbook. After Hurricane Katrina, everyone was not only traumatized, but most of us were (and still are) scattered to the four winds. Entire neighborhoods that have stood for three hundred years disappeared, and some of those neighborhoods are still toxic piles of sticks today. I am especially distressed about it because in New Orleans going to a different neighborhood can be like visiting a different country. The entire city evolved like an ecosystem with the different cultures blending and overlapping in unique ways. It’s depressing to think that some of those ways of life could be gone forever.

New books and cookbooks have been published since Katrina in an attempt to preserve New Orleans culture and also to help the rest of the US understand why it matters so much that New Orleans is in such dire straights. It’s comforting for me, personally, to have such a tangible collection of Creole culture in my hands. It’s a substantial book, containing recipes I would never eat paired with recipes I grew up eating or remember from special occasions.

The Picayune Cookbook began in 1901, carrying on the tradition of New Orleans Creole cooking and household management. It actually began as the old Creole cooks began to die off after the Civil War (or as my old New Orleans History professor called it, “The WAW-uh”), leaving the ladies of the house (who could no longer afford cooks) to carry on. Can you imagine living without the family cook? The humanity! The horror! Actually, I have some older friends who had personal acquaintances who thought the kitchen was the place where the cook went in and the food came out, and that was rather much later than 1901.

Especially entertaining is the section with various menus: Under the heading of “Economical Menus,” The Picayune insists that a family of six can live “comfortably and with variety” on $1.00 to $1.50 per day, and proceeds to list menus with so much food on them that if I had to cook it, much less eat it, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else all day! Incidentally, the money with inflation would be around $25 or so. I don’t know if that’s what it costs to feed a family of six today.

I am especially looking forward to a brunch of grits and grillades (round steak) with red gravy. I ate this dish when I was a kid and gave my mom grief about it, but strangely my grown-up palate craves those flavors! My friend Eric asked me to explain how red gravy and tomato sauce are two different things. This one’s for you, Eric: red gravy is made when you make a brown roux over some onion and garlic, and throw in two chopped tomatoes in their juice. As it browns, put your meat on top, and cover it, turning after one side is browned. Then add a little vinegar and and simmer on low for around half an hour, still covered. Then you have meat and red gravy. The cookbook will give you exact proportions for doing so, and page 139 asserts that “[t]he great truth is that the Creoles knew how to fry meat.”

The are very few illustrations in the book, and what pictures there are have to do with Creole history. Just about every category of food item is covered, including syrups and cordials, as well as pickling and preserving, and even condiments! Caveat: Although I have always thought I would be an excellent book reviewer, I haven’t come up with any sort of rubric or rating system for books, much less for cookbooks. There goes that dream. I can say, however, that I haven’t been as excited by a secondhand cookbook find in some time, and anyone who wants to come over in the near future for a complete “Picayune Creole” meal is going to be pretty lucky!

King Cake Bonanza is ON!

midnightferret — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:04:10 +0000

UPDATE: If it isn’t obvious, Carnival Season is over. It’s now Lent, so you should be depriving yourself. Try again next year!

Okay, I am now able to offer Homemade Authentic King Cakes to those of you living out of the Austin Area! If you are in Austin, of course, I can deliver one to your door! If you are living outside of Austin and still crave a cinnamon and sugary, butter-briochety, Mardi Gras fabulous King Cake lovingly fashioned by the two hands of YOURS TRULY, then listen up!

I can ship them priority mail for $10.00! Each one gets its own cute USPS box and everything! If you live out of town, and want to pay by PayPal, hit the buttons underneath what size you would like:

Small King Cake $25

Large King Cake $40

Sookie Stackhouse novels: Has anyone read these?

midnightferret — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:02:07 +0000

I don’t really expect anyone of my acquaintance to have read these things.

That being said, the author seems hugely successful. I was just curious because her vampires, fairies, and other creatures seem to inhabit a section of the country I’ve tried all my life to escape. If someone has read these, can you please tell me how accurate the depiction of North Lousiana is? If it’s accurate, why the hell, if you’re a powerful vampire or whatever, don’t you go to California or New York or at least New Orleans, like in the Concrete Blonde song?

Ok, so I realize that after Katrina (that bitch) that a lot of people fled North. But if you’re a vampire, who has powers and stuff, wouldn’t you go somewhere, oh, I dunno, cool? Interesting? With better food? Oh wait, you’re a vampire, and they don’t eat. Okay, forget about the food part. But maybe better tailors and shopping? Vampires always seem to have the best tailors.

Someone solve the mystery for me!

“Cajun” vs. Louisiana (vs. New Orleans)

midnightferret — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:02:43 +0000

Wow – two posts in one day! I feel so opinionated. Yesterday I spoke in class for two minutes flat on what I thought was wrong with the novel Wide Sargasso Sea and also why I thought it was such a great success anyway. I think I’m turning into someone else…

Okay, so tonight is “junk food” night at the Newkirk household. I am making Natchitoches meat pies and french fries. Ah… Lasyone’s… Although mostly when I was at LSMSA we got our meat pies from a place called “Leon’s,” which started out as a sort of lunch shack across the street from the LSMSA high school building. At any rate, I usually just did meat pies “my way,” but just for kicks I thought that I would look up meat pies on the internets and see how other people made them. What I found compelled me to make this post.

The reason they are called “Natchitoches” meat pies and not “Cajun” meat pies is because they are not, in fact Cajun. I swear. Natchitoches, being the oldest settlement in the Louisiana Purchase (or so my LA history professor told me), was settled before the Acadians came and settled Acadiana (a portion of the state of Louisiana whose parishes, by the way, do not include Natchitoches Parish.) As many people should know by now, just because one is from Louisiana, or even has French heritage and is from Louisiana, does not mean that one is Cajun!

Similarly, just because one is from New Orleans and may happen to have French heritage does not mean one is Cajun. My friend Eric (who is most certainly Cajun) frequently professes to like me anyway, even if my family hails from “too far east”. My snooty New Orleans grandmother frequently asserted that our family was most certainly not Cajun. At our house we frequently had Creole dishes such as gumbo and Creole “barbeque” shrimp, but we hardly ever had etoufee or jambalaya. If you want to make a Cajun angry, imply that New Orleans is Cajun or that Creole is also Cajun. Also, let me know before you do this so I can be safely out of earshot so I don’t have to listen to the lectures and/or beatings.

So just remember: crawfish pies = Cajun, Natchitoches meat pies = not. Thank you.

Oh, and a personal note to all four of you who read this blog: I know that you already knew this. I just have to rant.