Cooking Up A Storm

We are planning a trip down to New Orleans in June (a sort of late anniversary trip, while The Peanut gets to stay a week with grandma after school finishes for the summer).

I love it there.  It's like visiting Europe, but in our own backyard, and the food is divine.

Recently, I discovered a cookbook that makes for fascinating reading on the culture of cuisine in NOLA and the surrounding areas.  If you haven't seen Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, think about picking up a copy.

If for no other reason than the red beans and rice recipe on page 205 -- it is fabulous, especially with just a tad more hot sauce to finish it at the table.  I made ours with brown rice, and could have eaten it for a week, if it had lasted that long.

The recipes in the cookbook were gleaned from the pages of the local newspaper -- the Times-Picayune -- and from regular readers and local restaurants.


After Katrina, the local newspaper was flooded (no pun intended) with requests for recipes that folks had lost in cookbooks and recipe boxes that had been drowned in the flood waters.  They took the most often requested recipes and compiled them into a fascinating book that is part cooking and part local nostalgia, history and hilarious stories rolled into one.

My copy is sitting by my bed, alongside Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen, which is the original bible of more modern riffs on Cajun cooking in my opinion.  His chicken and seafood jambalaya on page 218 rocks my world.

I've been trying to play around with some of the recipes for more healthy versions (sacrilege in the Big Easy, I'm sure, but my thighs don't need any more assistance with the bacon grease, thanks).  If I come up with something I like, I'll post it here.

If you want more background on New Orleans cuisine and local flavor, I'm currently reading Sara Roahen's Gumbo Tales, which is laugh out loud funny in parts, and mouthwateringly good in others where she talks restaurants, po'boys and more.

Can't wait for our trip.  But in the meantime, I'm already traveling to New Orleans on the pages of my nightly reading. 

(Photo of a courtyard garden in the French Quarter taken by me on my first trip to NOLA.)