It’s crawfish season in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Recently, Canseco’s Market on Esplanade had a sale on locally grown as well as Vietnamese crawfish. The price difference was remarkable. Crawfish from fisheries within 20 minutes of my 9th Ward home cost nearly five times as much as the Vietnamese fishes.
Maylie’s on Poydras where Albert Booth Campbell cooked the best red beans and rice in New Orleans
Albert Booth Campbell is one of the mythical old-school Black cooks of New Orleans.
When I was in culinary school in Alabama back in the 90s, I read the Birmingham News and the Birmingham Post-Herald every single day. On Wednesdays I kept a pair of scissors handy so I could cut recipes out of the food section.
Just like my mom and grandma did in the 70s.
Texas chili man John Billy Murray, 1988.
Back in 1984, Murray traveled ten hours from his home in Humble to the Original Terlingua International Frank X. Tolbert-Wick Fowler Memorial Championship chili shootout deep in the heart of Big Bend country.
Last week we were up in Kentucky hanging out in a slaughter house when we noticed a big hog’s head sitting on the meat-cutter’s work bench. He offered it up to us and we immediately began plotting what we would do with this animal’s lovely noggin.
Four hours over a Hickory fire found the head to be sufficiently cooked but we needed stock so we wedged the head down into our big Kuhn Rikon pressure cooker and put it on low bars for three hours til the meat was like butter and the jaw had completely separated from the head.
Pableaux Johnson hard at work shooting a second line in Central City, New Orleans.
It’s ungodly how much bacon we eat at the Scrumptious house. We’ve been on a pork belly-curing tear for the last few months, and not coincidentally have been cooking and eating rashers of bacon on a daily basis.
We’re all going to die soon.
rl reeves jr’s frito pie recipe
It seems so simple. Crack a couple eggs, throw them in a pan, scramble them around for a few minutes and a meal is at the ready.
But like most things in life, attention to the small details often gains one big rewards.
Scrambled eggs are a prime example. They can be transcendent when treated properly by a skilled cook. In my life as a chef, I’ve cooked thousands of eggs. I’ve worked for two very busy breakfast houses where it was not uncommon to go through several hundred per shift. Yet I still love cooking eggs.
Here’s my recipe for the best scrambled eggs you will ever put in your mouth.
Growing up in the Cumberland Highlands of Eastern Kentucky, the Atlantic ocean seems a million miles away.
So it’s with a certain fever that I make my way to Litchfield Beach, South Carolina (immediately procuring a mauve Panama Jack shirt and custom made French Foreign Legion hat emblazoned: “Bod Squad” ) as a 16 year old lad eager to see the world.
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