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Red beans and Rice Monday - Boiled Crawfish!

Berled crawfish from Dennis' Seafood in Metairie

Recipe from Chuck Taggart's most excellent GumboPages.com:

New Orleans BOILED CRAWFISH
The boiled crawfish recipe was adapted from the old Jazz and Heritage Festival Cookbook, now sadly out of print. This is the way boiled crawfish were prepared by Jazzfest food vendors The Fontana Family, of New Orleans, Louisiana. Comments and instructions from the original recipe are in quotes; all other comments are mine.

"The Fontanas are one of the largest, oldest, and best known Italian families to settle in New Orleans, originally coming from various parts of Italy and settling in Louisiana in the early 1850's. This recipe is the one served at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival boiled crawfish booth. The secret is to serve hot."

* 30 pounds live crawfish
* 15 ounces cayenne pepper, plus 5 ounces additional Lagniappe
* 2 ounces Tabasco sauce
* 20 cloves garlic, cut cloves in half, do not peel or crush ng
* 3 dozen lemons, sliced in half
* 1 cup olive oil
* 20 bay leaves
* 4 ounces Louisiana hot sauce
* 2 pounds salt
* 10 bags of Zatarain's crab boil, or 10 recipes seafood boil seasoning

"Place all ingredients but the crawfish in the biggest pot that you can get your hands on and bring to a good boil for about 15 minutes. As all comes to a boil, put you face over the steam and take 10 deep breaths, as the boiling cayenne, garlic and lemon mist is good for your soul - being careful to breathe only throughyou nose.

"In the meantime, the crawfish should have been soaking in cold fresh water, with a couple of boxes of salt emptied into it as to allow "mud bugs" to be spitting out the mud.

"Put crawfish in boiling water. After water comes to boil again, add 10 ears freshly peeled corn of the cob and 20 small potatoes. Allow 8-10 minutes cooking time. Remove and add a bag or two of ice to cool the crawfish water, and allow the crawfish to soak in the pot for another 10 minutes after turning off the boiling water. Strain and serve the crawfish hot with the garlic cloves, potatoes and corn." (Alternate method: Remove the hot crawfish from the boiling pot and layer in ice chests with sprinkled Tony Chachere's seasoning.)

Some people also like throwing anything from andouille sausages to whole heads of garlic to hot dogs into the boil ... be creative, but not foolish!

For a great seafood dipping sauce, take some ketchup, add horseradish and Tabasco to taste, and finish with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice (never use that swill out of the bottle). Mix and dip. That's how we do it in Louisiana.

Eating instructions: Find the biggest crawfish in the pile. Break the tail off of the crawfish, and slurp all the good juice and fat out of the head (optional). Peel off the first section of the crawfish tail shell, pinch the bottom of the tail, and the meat pops right out. Eat. Drink. Repeat. (Some people save time by pinching the tail and removing the tail meat with their teeth and eating it immediately, rather than wasting a few precious seconds getting the meat out with their hands. As one hardcore native crawfish eater once put it, "That way I could eat four crawfish to maybe y'all's one."

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While there's part of me that finds it amusing that a 20-year old Gregriana Kennedy of New Orleans talks trash on Facebook, goes to her adversary's house to continue the "discussion" face-to-face, and ends up getting her ass whooped, the part where the 20yo brings a gun to the fight takes this from merely a silly social media story to something much more serious:

About 6 p.m., Kennedy, abandoned her computer and arrived at the teenager's residence, according to a statement the teenager and a friend provided police.

The teenager told investigators she was standing outside her residence near a carport when Kennedy arrived in a green car, got out of the car with a gun in her right hand and began waving it around, according to the police report.

The teenager said Kennedy then announced, "If anyone jumps in this fight, I'm going to shoot them." Kennedy then threw the gun in the grass and ran toward her, the teenager told police.

Well, that's a start, at least, that it appears she didn't intend to shoot anyone. Still, a twenty year old psycho woman is no person to have a handgun.

Now for the incredibly disturbing part, how Kennedy came about having the gun in the first place:

The handgun, according to police, was reported stolen in 1992 during an attempted murder. The victim in that incident was a woman who lives on Curran Boulevard and "that address is that same one given by the arrested subject, Kennedy," according to the police report.

Now, if Ms. Kennedy is twenty, that means she was two years old in 1992. Did this handgun pass from one generation to another in that family? Even serious gun registration laws would find that difficult to address.

So, someone in the house where this Kennedy girl lives picked up a gun when she was an infant, and now she'll be off to St. Gabriel for a few years' hard time as a result. There's no reason this gun should have been accessible to a hotheaded young woman.

(h/t to @humidcity for tweeting the @nolanews article)

I think of Michael J. Fox and Charlie Sheen when I hear the term "Deputy Mayor," but methinks Mayor-Elect Mitch is onto something here:

As Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu counts down the days to his May 3 inauguration, he is giving serious consideration to reshaping the traditional division of duty at City Hall by creating deputy mayor positions.

Though the management approach has never been used in New Orleans, the practice is old hat in many cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Newark, N.J.

Sounds like a great way to accomplish a number of tasks. You get people into city government at a high and visible level. That attracts the best-and-brightest sort. It also means a Deputy Mayor position would be a great platform from which someone could launch their own campaign for mayor or council. That's necessary here in New Orleans, where we've been lacking platforms that expose those interested in serving in city government to the city as a whole. Aside from the mayor, you've got two at-large council seats, and after that, the only real city-wide position with any visibility is NOPD Superintendent.

As attractive as this concept is, it's not going to be cheap. Consider Landrieu's model:

Under Bloomberg's set-up, a chief deputy mayor in charge of administration and policy oversees six others whose primary areas of concern are economic development; health and human services; legal affairs; intergovernmental relations; police, fire, emergency medical services and budget; and education.

Of course, NYC is a city literally twenty times the size of New Orleans, so seven deputies might be a bit much. I would propose one for economic development and education. Those two go hand-in-hand. Possibly another for police/fire/EMS, but, as I mentioned on the podcast two weeks ago, fixing NOPD is the single most important thing Landrieu must do. Perhaps that should stay in his portfolio.

No podcast yesterday, because of my return flights from Copenhagen, but back today with Sacred Heart Sunday. Today we talk about the three locations of St. Aloysius College, first at Barracks and Chartres, then the second, the "original" building at Esplanade and N. Rampart, and the "final" building at that corner.

Here's a postcard image of the 1925 building at Esplanade & N. Rampart, from the late 1920s:

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Congratulations to Mayor-elect Mike Yenni and voters of the City of Kenner for making the right choice in yesterday's mayoral election. Yenni defeated former mayor (and still sleazeball) Phil Capitano:

Yenni announced his win early, taking a 57 to 43 percent lead over Capitano. The unofficial results show Yenni with 6,745 votes to Capitano's 5,181.

To me, this was a no-brainer, but I didn't expect Capitano to win even once, so it's good that Yenni took him seriously. Elsewhere, Mandeville has put Eddie Price behind them, and Slidell has once again promoted a police chief to mayor.

Even though I respect a principled stance on pro-life issues, I must respectfully disagree with Archbishop Greg Aymond of New Orleans, In this week's Clarion Herald (NOLA's Catholic weekly), Abp. Aymond says (pdf):

It is disappointing that the Catholic Health Association supported the bill. The end – providing access to health care for more people – does not justify using our tax dollars to fund abortion.

This is where the principled stance of the Catholic Church runs into a head-on collision with the reality of 40+ million uninsured people. Again, while I respect the belief he is expressing, Fr. Greg is still playing a trade-off game by taking this position. Consider for a moment the outcome of Aymond getting what he wants, namely sinking the reform bill because of it's less-than-unequivocal language regarding abortion. How many abortions does that really stop that aren't happening now? Then consider how many uninsured pregnant women will now have the opportunity to get proper pre-natal care because they will now have access to health insurance. Further consider how many women will be able to continue to provide proper healthcare for their children because the child will not be considered a "pre-existing condition" if the mother changes jobs or comes off unemployment.

While the NCCB's hard-line stance against abortion appears at first glance to be a principled pro-life stance, that stance must be measured in the all-too-nuanced real world. Would sinking health insurance reform over abortion actually kill more babies?

TGIF from Denmark! Talking about a childhood experience reading about this region, Hornblower novels, and libraries/librarians.

Some stuff to put the Hornblower talk into perspective:

The pinpoint is the location of my hotel. This is the narrow passage Hornblower's fictional squadron made in 1810, in Forester's novel, Commodore Hornblower.

Zoom-in on the passage. Hornblower's strategy was to keep close to the Danish side of the strait, trying to avoid the Swedish guns at Malmo.

Gregory Peck as Horatio Hornblower in the 1951 film, Captain Hornblower.  Peck's Hornblower is closer in age than the A&E mini-series, where he's just a Midshipman and Lieutenant.

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Just a reminder to everyone that YatBazaar is set up as a community site. If you'd like to write here, or cross-post stuff from your own blog, you're more than welcome to. Here's the process:

1. Sign up here as a user.
2. Email me at edward at ebranley dot com to let me know you're here.
3. I'll approve your access.
4. Blog! Each user has their own personal blog. I'll see when you add a post and will promote it to the front page. If we get to the point where I get a few regulars, I'll give them access so they can promote themselves to the front page.

Questions? ask away.

I'm not sure exactly what I think about the notion that Mardi Gras Indians are upset with people who take photos of their costumes. Karen Beninato at NewOrleans.com and even the New York Times are talking about the Indians today. My first reaction was that, if you're going to parade in public and actually stop to pose for photographs on the street, you don't have much of a claim here. But then there's this thought from Big Chief Howard Miller (in the NYT article):

“Indian culture was never, ever meant to make any money,” said Howard Miller, Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, the city’s oldest tribe, and president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council. But neither should the culture be exploited by others.

“We have a beef,” he said, “with anybody who takes us for granted.”

As Jeffrey pointed out in a conversation we had on Da Twittah, there are many aspects of New Orleans culture that are being Disney-fied. Super Sunday is one of those. Time was, if you wanted to see Mardi Gras Indians, you had to go into the projects and look for the tribes. Now that the tribes are more open, more out in the public eye, they're also more vulnerable to that Disney treatment. We have to guard our culture lest it become less a reality and more a section of EPCOT.

That's easier said than done, however, in a city where tourism has long been the number-one industry. The film industry is expanding, returning to it's huge pre-storm growth curve. Those "Hollywood liberals," as Vitty-cent likes to call them, bring with them a LOT of decent-paying jobs for electricians, carpenters, other skilled trades, as well as contracts for caterers and other services. We will have a serious struggle to maintain a balance between preserving the "real" New Orleans and using that "real" culture as a movie set.

Politics Wednesday! Putting the Healthcare Reform legislation passed in DC into a local context:

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