Snacking State-by-State: Maine I - Oh, there's more in the sea than the lobster! (Hey, ya!)

The next few posts take us back to New England, as far as you can go up the Eastern seaboard. We're gettin' down with the Down East (oh Jesus, I cannot believe I actually typed that).

Official Name: State of Maine
State Nicknames: The Pine Tree State
Admission to the US: March 15, 1820 (#23)
Capital: Augusta (9th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Portland (largest); Lewiston (2nd largest); Bangor (3rd largest)
Region: Northeast, New England; New England (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Maple Syrup; Clambake
Bordered by: New Hampshire (west); Québec (Canada) (northwest); New Brunswick (Canada) (north, northeast), Bay of Fundy (due east), Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine (southeast)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: wild blueberry (fruit); Maine wild blueberry pie (dessert); whoopie pie (treat); Moxie (soft drink); landlocked salmon (fish); moose (animal)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: New England foods; seafood, especially lobster, haddock, swordfish, salmon, clams; blueberries and apples; fiddle head ferns; whoopie pies; foods in common with southeastern Canada, including poutine

What can one specifically say about the cuisine of the Pine Tree State? Brooke Dojny, author of The New England Clam Shack Cookbook, discovered this after moving to Maine from her native Connecticut. She compiled a cookbook that "captures authentic Down East flavors" in her Dishing Up Maine. Therein she lists many reasons why she has fallen in love with the foods of Maine. There are too many to list, though she definitely notes that it isn't all about the lobster. Mainers still eat by the seasons, and did so before it became fashionable everywhere else:

In winter, it's likely to be thick pea soup with smoky ham, vegetable-rich pot roast, rich and reamy seafood casserole, or cranberry-glazed meat loaf; in summer, thoughts turn to the likes of crab cakes, lobster rolls, barbecued chicken, and farmers' market pasta with Maine chèvre. [Dojny 2006: 11]

She also notes that the "artisan movement thrives in Maine" (Dojny 2006: 11) - everything from maple syrup to pickles to freshly picked blueberries and locally made sausages and cheeses are readily found in this Northeastern-most portion of the country.

A few months ago, I consulted this same cookbook when I got inspired to make myself a lobster roll for the first time ever (due in part to an exceptionally good sale on Maine lobster at the local Graul's). Why Dishing Up Maine for the lobster roll? Because lobster is one of the most iconic foods of Maine, and I figured a Mainer, even a new one like Dojny, would know what she was doing when describing this dish to a poor little ol' cook from below the Mason-Dixon Line like myself.

I am surprised in retrospect that I never wrote about this venture, but am happy to finally post some photos of the project here:

This little fella is probably not expecting what is about to hit him. At least I threw him in the freezer for a bit.

Nope, the little guy didn't see it comin'. Unlike in Cajun Country, where you never steam a crustacean, or the Chesapeake, where you almost never boil one, in New England - apparently - you can boil or steam your crustaceans. I went all Chesapeake and steamed mine.

The recipe is very simple: lobster, lemon juice and mayonnaise. That's it, plus optional salt and pepper to taste. And then you need something to put it in: a hot dog roll for each person, toasted and brushed with melted butter (the hot dog roll, not the person), and maybe chopped chives or parsley to sprinkle on top.

And the final lobster roll, on a buttered toasted hot dog roll, accompanied by my own wasabi mayo-dill potato salad with sliced chili peppers.

I liked Dojny's "classic Maine lobster roll" (found on page 49 of her Dishing Up Maine cookbook), but I knew there were other ways to prepare lobster, and other edible sea life around Maine. I found a whole new (albeit overlapping) world of lobster and seafood recipes in the book Recipes From a Very Small Island by Linda Greenlaw and her mother Martha. The "very small island" in question where the Mss. Greenlaw reside is Isle au Haut, floating smack dab off the middle of the Maine coastline. The elder Greenlaw (Martha) points out that "[w]e New Englanders are a sturdy breed and tend to stay pretty much where we're born. Nowhere is this more true than in Maine" (Greenlaw and Greenlaw 2005: 9). Martha's daughter is a cook, fisherwoman and lobsterwoman, and so neither has very difficult access to fresh New England seafood (the younger Greenlaw also has acclaim as an author, and as the only female swordfishing boat captain on the East Coast).

It comes as no surprise, then, that the Greenlaws' cookbook has an embarrassment of riches from the sea - a partial list includes not just lobster but also scallop, crab, haddock, halibut, clam, mussel, and (duh) swordfish. But to narrow down my choices a wee bit, I wanted a lobster dish that wasn't in "roll" format. I eventually went with a creamy casserole, the kind that Dojny says is more suited for winter. This one features not only lobster but also the humble and widely available haddock. The recipe, I think, is Martha's, and is named for Head Harbor, much closer to the easternmost point of the state (and of the United States).

Recipe: Head Harbor Lobster & Haddock Casserole

The authors note that "any mild, flaky white fish" can be used in place of the haddock, which I found during my shopping is not the most readily available fish down here. For the complete recipe, including exact amounts, check out page 55 of their Recipes from a Very Small Island.

For their lobster and haddock casserole you will need:


* lobster (As we all know, this is not cheap, so you have to find it as cheap as possible when you can. Ever the opportunist, I profited off the misfortune of Super Fresh, which shut down in Baltimore recently, by picking up two frozen lobster tails for half the price at $10! That said, it only afforded me half the lobster I needed for this casserole, which in retrospect would have worked as well had I halved it. To make up for it, I did buy a small pre-steamed lobster for $12 at Wegman's)

Hey, do you know a crawfish I boiled recently?

* haddock (I almost got some on sale at Harris Teeter for $8 a pound, only to find that it was sold out. Eventually I picked up a 2 lb bag of frozen haddock for $12. I later kicked myself in the rear when I went back to Harris Teeter only to find haddock at the ridiculously good price of $6 per pound. Sigh.)
* Dijon mustard, ketchup, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce (These I already had)
* horseradish (I actually did not have this on hand, but I picked up a bottle of Inglehoffer's cream-style horseradish for about $5. I know I will get plenty of use out of this eventually)
* medium-dry sherry (If you don't have sherry on hand, no problem: a passable substitute is red wine, which I do have)
* salt (have it)
* all-purpose flour (have it, too)
* whole milk (picked up a quart for $1.30 - I don't drink a lot of milk. I later found that I left half and half off my shopping list, which I needed instead, but here's a trick I read about online: if all you have no half and half, an acceptable substitute is an equal amount of whole milk with one exception: replace one tablespoon of milk per cup with a tablespoon of butter. That is, if you need two cups of half and half, you can substitute two cups of whole milk, but replacing two tablespoons of the milk with two tablespoons of butter. This only works in cooking and baking)
* butter (have it)
* fresh parsley (got it from the garden)
* bread crumbs (it plays to freeze extra bread after you bake it - I had a lot of this on hand)

There are a lot of ingredients, but the procedure is relatively simple once you have the ingredients in place.


First, simmer the haddock until it is opaque (a little longer if yours is frozen). Once this is done, you will cut it into chunks and set it aside.


While you poach the haddock, tear into the lobster and remove the meat. Don't just use the tail meat, of course - you need the claw and leg meat, too, and if you can get to the tomalley (the green stuff that is analogous to crab mustard and crawfish fat) add some of that, as I did. This is not in the Greenlaws' recipe, but I don't think they would object.


Just to gauge your meat level: a small lobster, weighing a little over a pound, yields a little over a cup of lobster meat.


Take all your lobster meat - for me, that included the tails I bought separately and at a discount - and cut that up as well, and set it aside.


Next you make a roux. That next part seems almost Cajun in practice, but it should come as no surprise, given how close Maine is to Québec and to French Canada, where you often start with a roux. The roux comes from the butter and flour, which you will whisk together over medium high heat.


When you have the roux, add the rest of the ingredients except for the haddock, lobster and bread crumbs, and constantly whisk together until thick.


It will end up being very thick.


Add the seafood and pour into a 3 quart casserole dish.


Top with bread crumbs (note: if you are dealing with frozen bread, toast it first in order to dessicate it, and then throw it in the food processor for much easier crumbs).


Bake the casserole at 400°F for about 35 minutes.


If Maine is a hearty state, then this dish most certainly exemplifies that fact. This casserole is very filling, and you won't need a lot in any one sitting. This casserole, as a friend pointed out, combines a high falutin (to me at least, though maybe not to Mainers) seafood - lobster - and a very plebeian seafood - haddock. The two blend together nicely. It also gives a nice blend of textures - the hearty seafood, the creamy sauce, the crunchy bread crumbs, all making up a fascinating and lovely casserole. But next time, I will cut this in half. it's just too much food!

Sources:

Dojny, Brooke. Dishing Up Maine: 165 Recipes That Capture Authentic Down East Flavors. Storey Publishing: North Adams, MA, 2008.

Dojny, Brooke. The New England Clam Shack Cookbook. 2nd edition. Storey Publishing: North Adams, MA, 2008. Portions also available on Google Books.

El-Begearmi, Mahmoud. Facts on Fiddleheads (Bulletin #4198, Facts on Fiddleheads). Updated by Alfred Bushway, Beth Calder and David Fuller. Cooperative Extension Publications (University of Maine): Orona, ME, 1995 & 2010.

Greenlaw, Linda, and Martha Greenlaw. Recipes From a Very Small Island. Hyperion: New York, NY, 2005.

Yankee Magazine. "Dijon Fiddleheads". From "Weekly Wisdom", May 2002. Copyright 2011 Yankee Magazine.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Maine" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Maine".

Julia Child and the Perfect Omelette

Julia Child passed seven years ago today.  In memoriam, her classic omelette.  I learned how to make it from her.

Snacking State-by-State: Louisiana IV - Bourbon? Vanilla? Butter? Yes, please!

As I mentioned earlier, the four recipes I interpreted for my Louisiana posts were the same four dishes I ate at the Gumbo Shop in New Orleans on a recent trip there. There were the chicken and andouille sausage gumbo, the jambalaya, the étouffée and (for dessert) bread pudding with a rich and silky hard sauce.

Official Name: State of Louisiana (French: État de Louisiane; French Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn - though Louisiana has no official language, French is important to the state's identity, and in 1812 Louisiana was the first state to join the Union whose majority did not speak English. For more on the linguistic history of Louisiana, see here)
State Nicknames: The Bayou State; The Pelican State; The Sugar State
Admission to the US: April 30, 1812 (#18)
Capital: Baton Rouge (2nd largest city)
Other Important Cities: New Orleans (largest); Shreveport (3rd largest): Metairie (4th largest)
Region: South; Deep South; Gulf Coast; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Gumbo; Cornbread & BBQ
Bordered by: Arkansas (north); Mississippi & the Mississippi River (east); the Gulf of Mexico (southeast and south); Texas (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: crawfish (crustacean); milk (drink); alligator (reptile)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: Cajun cuisine and dishes, especially gumbo, jambalaya, courtboullion (COO-bee-yon) and étouffée; pralines; crawfish, shrimp, crab, alligator, catfish; typical Southern foods in the northernmost part of the state.

As Terri Pischoff Wuerthner mentions in the preface to her Great-Aunt Irma's version of this classic dish, bread pudding grew out of practicality.

Bread pudding was originally developed to make use of stale bread, but evolved into something so creamy, crunchy, and decadent that it is now a much loved dessert. As kids, we turned up our noses at the thought of pudding made from old bread, until we tasted Great-Aunt Irma's version. The cardamom, vanilla, pecans, and Bourbon Vanilla Sauce make this a step or two above other bread puddings we have tasted. [Pischoff Wuerthner 2006: 248]

It is fattening and filling and sweet and tangy all at once, and I couldn't help but make the whole recipe.

Recipe: Bread Pudding with Bourbon Vanilla Sauce

For this bread pudding, you need a lot of ingredients, but the author suggests that it is relatively simple to make.


For the pudding half of the recipe, you need:

* unsalted butter, both for greasing the pan and for adding to the pudding itself
* pecan halves (pecan pieces were cheaper for me to find)
* eggs (had them)
* sugar (same)
* vanilla extract (just enough for this recipe)
* ground cinnamon and cardamom (had them too)
* whole milk
* one 8 ounce baguette, cut into cubes of about 3/4 inch (one French baguette will run about $2.50 these days; some recipes call for brioche instead)

For the sauce half of the recipe, you need:

* sugar
* cream (have about a pint on hand)
* ground cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg
* butter
* bourbon (this was an excellent opportunity to use some more of that Maker's Mark that I bought for the mint julep I made for Kentucky)
* cornstarch
* vanilla extract

The procedure is relatively simple, but has a lot of small steps:

First, grease a 9 x 13 inch pan.


Cube the bread, and spread half of them over the bottom of the pan.


Toast the pecans...


...and add them.


Next, whisk the liquid ingredients (including melted butter), sugar and spices.


Pour half of this mixture into the pan.


Add the rest of the bread, and top off with the rest of the liquid.


Cover with plastic wrap, lightly push on the plastic to soak all the bread cubes, and let it all sit for half an hour. Around this time, preheat your oven to 350°F. When ready, replace the plastic wrap with aluminum foil, and slip into the oven.


Now it's time to make the sauce. Gently boil together the ingredients for the sauce, except for the bourbon, cornstarch and vanilla.


These last three ingredients you will mix together in a separate bowl.


Once the butter melts, add the bourbon, cornstarch and vanilla mixture, and constantly stir while gently boiling for five minutes.


Back to the pudding: take it out of the oven, remove the aluminum foil, press the cubes down a little with a metal spatula (again to soak them some more), recover and bake for 15 more minutes.


Take it out and pour about 1/2 cup of the sauce over the pudding, and return to the oven one last time, uncovered, for 5 minutes. Let it cool a bit, and serve with some of the warm sauce. It all tastes best warm.


What to say about this amazing bread pudding? This version was, unarguably, much better than the one I got at the restaurant in New Orleans, which ended up being quite soggy in comparison. This bread pudding was firm, toothsome, sweet and tangy all at once. As Pischoff Wuerthner notes, the cardamom, vanilla, pecans and bourbon sauce make it better than so many others, and it shows. Needless to say, I am slowly working through it, both to keep from snarfing it all down at once and because it is so rich that I just cannot eat so much of it so fast. It is a delicious recipe.

We are done with Cajun country. Next we head back in the direction of the Acadian homeland, left so long ago, stopping just short of Nova Scotia and the Canadian border. I'm trading the Deep South for the Down East. It's time to remember the Maine! Er, the state of Maine.

Sources:

BoilCrawfish.com. "How to boil crawfish". Copyright 2005 BoilCrawfish.com.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Fitzsimmons, Tom. "What's the difference between Cajun and Creole Cooking?" Published 2003 on the "Taste Tent" section of the Tabasco Sauce website. Copyright 2011 McIlhenny Company, all rights reserved.

Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc. River Road Recipes: The Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine [Volume I]. The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc: Baton Rouge, 1959. 72nd printing, April 2000.

Pischoff Wuerthner, Terri. In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou. St. Martin's Press: New York, 2006.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Louisiana" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Louisiana".

Snacking State-by-State: Louisiana III - What you say? Étouffée!

One of the most iconic ingredients in Cajun cuisine is the crawfish. Call it what you want: crayfish, crawdad, mud bug, little lobster-looking thing. But whatever you call it, don't forget that there's more to them than just the tails.

Official Name: State of Louisiana (French: État de Louisiane; French Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn - though Louisiana has no official language, French is important to the state's identity, and in 1812 Louisiana was the first state to join the Union whose majority did not speak English. For more on the linguistic history of Louisiana, see here)
State Nicknames: The Bayou State; The Pelican State; The Sugar State
Admission to the US: April 30, 1812 (#18)
Capital: Baton Rouge (2nd largest city)
Other Important Cities: New Orleans (largest); Shreveport (3rd largest): Metairie (4th largest)
Region: South; Deep South; Gulf Coast; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Gumbo; Cornbread & BBQ
Bordered by: Arkansas (north); Mississippi & the Mississippi River (east); the Gulf of Mexico (southeast and south); Texas (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: crawfish (crustacean); milk (drink); alligator (reptile)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: Cajun cuisine and dishes, especially gumbo, jambalaya, courtboullion (COO-bee-yon) and étouffée; pralines; crawfish, shrimp, crab, alligator, catfish; typical Southern foods in the northernmost part of the state.

Outside of Louisiana, it's not terribly easy to find Louisiana crawfish. The best most of us in the US (including much of the South) can do is the variety shipped in from China. Beyond that, there are a few ways to find them:

* pre-cooked and frozen (you can find a pound of them boiled, "Cajun-seasoned" and bagged in the freezer section at Giant for $9 a pound. This would have been my last choice)
* just the tails, frozen (I have seen them this way at the Columbia Harris Teeter, though I cannot remember how much they cost)
* live at your local fishmonger (not too difficult to find in Baltimore or Washington - I got mine at the Maine Avenue Fish Market a few weeks ago, live, for $7 per pound).

Once you get them, what do you do? You can fry them and put 'em in a po'boy, or you can make a gumbo or a jambalaya, perhaps even serve them barbecue style. But regardless, most Louisianans would look on in horror and contempt if you steamed them, much in the same way that most Marylanders would look on in equal horror and contempt if you boiled a crab (we just do not do that in the Chesapeake, but I digress).

But to stay true to how they do things in Louisiana, I bucked up and set to fixin' a crawfish boil, in order to make the following recipe: not a crawfish boil, but a crawfish étouffée. The term "étouffée" means "smothered" in French, and it is one of the more decadent things you will eat from Cajun country. It was one of the deliciously evil things I ate at the Gumbo Shop last November when I visited New Orleans during an academic conference (yes, I've been to the Crescent City twice, and both times it was for academic reasons). It dawned on me during the prep for the Louisiana recipes that I did eat, more or less, most of the things that I ate at the Gumbo Shop, and their $24 Creole dinner: chicken and andouille sausage gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée, and a classic bread pudding that is coming up in a few days. Their étouffée was made with shrimp, but I had crawfish on my mind. I just had to get at the meat and fat first.

Recipe: Crawfish and Shrimp Étouffée

While Terri Pischoff Wuerthner's In a Cajun Kitchen has been my go-to Bible on Cajun cuisine, this time I looked to John T. Edge and his compendium of recipes from throughout the American South, done for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. The recipe he prints on page 217 of his book A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South originally comes from the book Louisiana Legacy, printed by the Thibodaux Service League in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

For this crawfish and shrimp étouffée, I had to cut down Edge's recipe by half. And since I hardly had the amount of crawfish meat or fat that I needed (I don't have a whole lot of money to play with here), I added a good amount of shrimp to bulk up my étouffée.


You do not need a lot of ingredients for your crawfish étouffée. What I ended up with was:

* a pound of crawfish (how much meat will a pound of live crawfish yield? See below. I needed to make up the difference in shrimp, so I still ended up using a pound of crustacean meat. You will be using not just the tails but as much of the meat as possible, as well as the fat in the head portion)

Revenge from beyond the crawfish boil grave

* green onions (sliced)
* parsley (fresh and chopped, from my garden)
* butter (if you don't have enough crawfish to use just the fat)
* salt and pepper (to taste) and cornstarch (in case you want a thicker sauce, as I did)
* rice (usually plain white rice, though you could also use a jambalaya)

Recipe Part 1: Crawfish Boil

The very first step is to boil your crawfish. There is no recipe for boiling just one pound of crawfish - tantamount to steaming three or four blue crabs. The recipes that are out there call for massive amounts of the little critters. The guidelines I used came from the conveniently labeled BoilCrawfish.com, with amounts easily adjusted:


Wash off your crawfish, being careful not to let the cute little critters attack you.

I will cut you with my 'ittle claws!!! I wiiiiiiill!!!

While you do this, boil enough water to cover the crawfish - measure this out by putting the crawfish bucket, or in my case the colander in which the crawfish will finish out their little lives, in the crab pot and filling it enough to cover the crawfish. You will need a lot of water, even for an amount as small as mine.


Into the pot, dump the crab boil. I used Chesapeake crab boil (yes, I know, it's strange but it exists; it comes from as far south in the Chesapeake Bay as you can go). You will also add a bit of salt and some cayenne pepper. I also added a few shakes of Old Bay, quite popular throughout the South so it's not exactly strange to see it here.


As you boil the crawfish water, set the crawfish in enough cold water to cover them and add a good amount of salt. This will force them to purge. You can figure out what that means for yourself.

When the water in the crab pot is finally boiling, set the crawfish in the basket and lower it into the water (or in my case, make sure the colander is already in the pot, and then dump the crawfish into the colander). They will die a quick death.

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!

BoilCrawfish.com also suggests you add sausage and/or various other vegetables. This would make sense for a large scale crawfish boil, but for one pound of crawfish, you will not need this.


Let the crawfish come back to a rolling boil, and then turn off the heat, cover, and let the crawfish absorb everything for 15 minutes.


Let them cool, and prepare to extract all that stuff for your étouffée.

Recipe Part 2: Crawfish and Shrimp Étouffée


If you are dealing with whole crawfish, the next step is to extract two things: the meat - primarily the tails but also whatever claw and leg meat you can get - and the fat. If you pick crabs at all, you know how to get as much meat out of these little legs as possible. Also, if you pick crabs at all, you will probably be able to figure out what crawfish "fat" is - it's analogous to the crab "mustard" that so many of us love. The place to find it in the crawfish is in the head, and so you will need to reach right in there to get it.


How much will you get from a pound of crawfish, allowing for attrition of, say, one or two that died on the way home?


A pound of crawfish, boiled, will yield approximately 1/4 pound - that is, 3 ounces - of meat, if you extract as much meat as possible from the tail, the back and the claws and legs.


A pound of crawfish, boiled, will yield a little under 1/8 cup of crawfish fat. Edge's recipe calls for a whole cup of crawfish fat. Since I didn't even have a quarter cup, I had to add enough unsalted butter to make 1/2 cup of "crawfish and other fat"just to get the halved amount for his half-recipe.


The rest is easy from here. Melt some butter - not the butter you're using to even out the crawfish fat - in a heavy skillet or Dutch oven, and add the green onions. Sauté them for about 15 minutes, and add everything else:


The crawfish, shrimp, crawfish fat and butter...


And the parsley, salt and pepper.

Cover and cook over medium heat for 15 to 20 minutes. Serve over steamed rice, with lemon wedges if you like.

Your étouffée goes well with a nice Abita.

This dish was as decadent and rich in its taste as those crawfish were tedious in their preparation. It is probably not recommended that you do heavy exercise afterwards (running around kicking a soccer ball for an hour in 90 degree heat, for example, is not a good idea after eating this, as I found out the hard way). You will want to savor this over plain rice, even though you could eat it over flavored rice - again, the jambalaya from the last Louisiana post - because you will want the full flavor and texture of the silky, buttery étouffée to hit you. It was a beautiful thing.

Sources:

BoilCrawfish.com. "How to boil crawfish". Copyright 2005 BoilCrawfish.com.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Fitzsimmons, Tom. "What's the difference between Cajun and Creole Cooking?" Published 2003 on the "Taste Tent" section of the Tabasco Sauce website. Copyright 2011 McIlhenny Company, all rights reserved.

Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc. River Road Recipes: The Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine [Volume I]. The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc: Baton Rouge, 1959. 72nd printing, April 2000.

Pischoff Wuerthner, Terri. In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou. St. Martin's Press: New York, 2006.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Louisiana" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Louisiana".

Tidbits: Rehoboth in August Edition

I headed to Rehoboth Beach last week for a few days of rest and sun (and, er, clouds). I usually try to hit up places I have not visited while I'm there, though a visit to one famous brewpub is always on the agenda.

* The Pig & Fish is a puzzling name until you realize it means "Eat Like a Pig, Drink Like A Fish". And I certainly did during happy hour (4 to 6 pm), where various appetizers, beers and such are half priced. I got two Dogfish head 90 Minute Pale Ales and a Hennepin for half off, and enough appetizers to force me to have to return at some point. Their crab dip ($6) comes with lots of sliced bread for dipping. It wasn't a chunky dip at all, but more of a smooth and silky crab-flavored fondue. What was particularly fascinating was their "hog wings" ($5.50) - pork shanks cooked in either BBQ sauce or Italian herb butter. Quite a good bit of food and drink for happy hour.

* I made a tough decision on lunch thanks to the Urbanspoon app I downloaded onto my phone (damn this thing is useful, especially since the Wifi in the guest house was not working). I finally settled on Lily Thai on 1st Street. It has some pricey entrées - and a bowl of soup for dinner can run you $7. This is why eating out for lunch is such a good idea. For $8 I got a lunch special: salad (better than most side salads I usually get), a fried spring roll and, for my main course, fried catfish - Southern style (still not quite sure if they meant "Southern Thailand" or "Southern USA"), with potatoes and onions in a yellow curry sauce. Though the crispiness of the catfish didn't really hold up after a few minutes, the fried catfish still went nicely with the curry sauce. A Thai iced tea costs about $4 for lunch, a nice addition to your meal.

* I always stop by Dogfish Brew Pub while in Rehoboth, though it was so crowded when I got there that i figured i would just have a beer or two and then go somewhere else for dinner. It pays to hang out at the bar because I was able to snag a seat that one diner had just vacated (and it only took 15 minutes). I got there, it so happens, on International IPA Day, a day to celebrate craft beers. Dogfish had its special 75 Minute IPA available, a beautiful looking and tasting IPA for $5. I got to sample more with my dinner, a regular burger with my choice of toppings ($8 plus $1 for each topping) - avocado and goat cheese spread. It amazes me how they fit a burger like this - an average width burger, mind you - on such a tiny bun. It was almost like a burger that Wimpy would have eaten. Back to the sampler: I got to try several in 4 oz glasses. My favorite of the five? Chateau Jiahu, based on a 9,000 year old Chinese recipe and featuring honey and rice in the mix. The ultra fruity Black & Red stout was also a winner, though not one I could finish a whole glass of. Also of note: the Palo Santo Marrón and the Chicory Stout (I love the dark beers, what can I say?) My least favorite was the Shelter Pale Ale, the Dogfish original and a good beer but it really kind of pales in comparison to the others I sampled. I guess it would pale, since it's a pale ale (har har har).

* One friend of mine suggested a Nic-O-Boli from Nicola Pizza, and so I made it my last meal in town. Nicola is a friendly establishment with pizza and other Italian-American standards. Their Nic-O-Boli ($7 to $10 depending on the fillings) is a standard stromboli filled with their tomato and ground beef sauce, a local favorite. I got mine with everything, including anchovies, which I never get enough of a chance to eat.

Snacking State-by-State: Louisiana II - Jambalaya by-a any other name

For the next dish in our tour of Cajun country, we examine that famous catch-all rice dish, jambalaya - more than just the bagged mix you buy at the supermarket for "instant jambalaya", here's an actual recipe to make it from scratch.

Official Name: State of Louisiana (French: État de Louisiane; French Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn - though Louisiana has no official language, French is important to the state's identity, and in 1812 Louisiana was the first state to join the Union whose majority did not speak English. For more on the linguistic history of Louisiana, see here)
State Nicknames: The Bayou State; The Pelican State; The Sugar State
Admission to the US: April 30, 1812 (#18)
Capital: Baton Rouge (2nd largest city)
Other Important Cities: New Orleans (largest); Shreveport (3rd largest): Metairie (4th largest)
Region: South; Deep South; Gulf Coast; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Gumbo; Cornbread & BBQ
Bordered by: Arkansas (north); Mississippi & the Mississippi River (east); the Gulf of Mexico (southeast and south); Texas (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: crawfish (crustacean); milk (drink); alligator (reptile)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: Cajun cuisine and dishes, especially gumbo, jambalaya, courtboullion (COO-bee-yon) and étouffée; pralines; crawfish, shrimp, crab, alligator, catfish; typical Southern foods in the northernmost part of the state.

What exactly is a jambalaya? Terri Pischoff Wuerthner, in her In a Cajun Kitchen, defines it as

...a rice-based dish with one or several main ingredients. Vegetables are browned, a seasoning meat is added...along with the main ingredient(s), and then rice, parsley, stock and spices are put in and cooked together until the rice is done... [With cooked rice, it is] an ideal way to use up leftovers by adding a bit of extra chicken or seafood, plus cooked seasoning vegetables, spices, and some stock to the rice. [Pischoff Wuerthner 2006: xxii]

Since I didn't have any leftover rice to use at the time, I had to make my jambalaya from scratch. True to the versatility of jambalaya recipes, there are many of them - chicken, shrimp, crawfish, andouille sausage, turkey, catfish, vegetarian, and so on and so forth. I ended up using a basic recipe from one of the best-selling Junior League cookbooks, River Road Recipes: The Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine, published by the Junior League of Baton Rouge. This RRR, which I bought on a trip to New Orleans several years ago for a conference, is merely the first of several volumes that the JLBR published.

Recipe: Jambalaya

The Junior Leaguers recipe, first published in 1959 (on page 76 of their River Road Recipes), calls for the following ingredients (I made the whole recipe, not cutting it by half or a third or anything else):


* andouille sausage and beef chunks - in order to get the amount of meat I wanted, I also added some shrimp to the recipe, bought head-on but eventually cleaned before I added them. You can find head-on shrimp very easily in Baltimore (duh) or Washington, where I bought a half pound at $6 per pound)
* bacon grease and flour (for your roux - because I didn't have enough bacon grease, I made up the difference with unsalted butter)
* cayenne, salt and pepper (had them)
* fresh parsley (right from my garden)
* green onion, onion and garlic (the recipe doesn't call for red onion - and for leftovers, they aren't as attractive - but I had some in the garden and I wanted to use them up. The rest I had on hand)
* rice (plain white rice, in this case, raw)


The recipe is pretty simple: first you brown your meat in the bacon grease and butter (I held off on the shrimp for now), then remove the meat and make the roux with flour and whatever is left over in the pot.


Make a dark roux.

Yes, mine should have been darker. I was being impatient.

Add your vegetables and parsley and soften.


Next add your rice.


Then and then add everything else. Boil, then reduce to the lowest setting you can, cover tightly and cook for an hour.


Uncover for a few minutes at the end to let the rice dry out a little bit.


I loved how the andouille sausage and the cayenne pepper flavor this jambalaya. It's funny, but I gave some to my mother, who like most of my family does not eat a lot of spicy food. Even though it wasn't terribly spicy to me, she said it was quite spicy for her! Overall, it's not a terribly spicy dish, but I could have made it so if I wanted! I think I should have cooked the jambalaya a little longer, as I would have liked the rice to be a wee bit moister. However, the flavor was quite exciting and I will make this again, next time throwing in whatever I can find.

Sources:

BoilCrawfish.com. "How to boil crawfish". Copyright 2005 BoilCrawfish.com.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Fitzsimmons, Tom. "What's the difference between Cajun and Creole Cooking?" Published 2003 on the "Taste Tent" section of the Tabasco Sauce website. Copyright 2011 McIlhenny Company, all rights reserved.

Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc. River Road Recipes: The Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine [Volume I]. The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc: Baton Rouge, 1959. 72nd printing, April 2000.

Pischoff Wuerthner, Terri. In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou. St. Martin's Press: New York, 2006.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Louisiana" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Louisiana".