Southern Cuisine

A few comments about the food down in Mississippi and Louisian: The ever-present "Waffle House" was a mainstay for breakfast, where I had my fill of waffles and grits. The waitresses all yell out "good mornin'" and "hey, Baby" when you come in and they advertize as "the World's Leaning Server of Real Hashbrowns." This helped explain the shouts for orders of "hasbrowns scattered, smothered and covered" that I kept hearing (extra brown, with onions, covered with American cheese).

That's me confronting my first serving of boiled crawfish, done in a firey red pepper and salt mixture not unlike Chesapeake blue crabs that I know well. Not much meat in those things, but tasty! Crawfish also appeared at "Dot's Diner" where we had breakfast on the west side of New Orleans and Chris devoured "Creole Julie" which was a hot bisquit smoothered with crawfish in a cream sauce gravey.

The small brown balls are fried okra with hot sauce, again ordered by Chris; interesting but not great. (Yikes, ALOT of fried and salty food down here.) Next you see bright red Louisianna strawberries, first of the season and quite sweet already.

Moving on to my "good news, bad news" tale about SHRIMP. You see Chris holding some huge shrimp we boiled in our camper one night while down on the tip of Grand Isle, Louisiana. And there is Pastor Don Morgan, after cooking boiled shrimp for some 30 volunteers at Back Bay Mission and the rest of us chowing-down. For years, Back Bay has sent their shrimp boilers out all over the country to bring boiled shrimp to churches and tell the story of the Mission's empowerment projects among the poor people of Gulf Coast. First Congregational UCC in Grand Marais has had "shrimp boils" during Fishermen's Picnic in August to raise money for Back Bay for years. Unfortunately, since Katrina destroyed most of the Biloxi fishing boats, Back Bay has had to discontinue this practice.

Just before we left Louisianna, I discovered an itchy rash on my wrists and ankles. At first we thought it was bug bites from Grand Isle, but as it got worse I realized it just might be too much shellfish! As I counted the number of days I had eaten shrimp, I realized I had gone 5 days straight consuming the little critters in one form or another (fried, boiled, with garlic over pasta, in gumbo). Whoops! Good thing we moved up into Arkansas and Missouri where we could start eating BARBEQUE!
-Anne