Cajun and Creole

It is interesting that the Saints won the Superbowl one weekend, the following weekend is Mardi Gras, and the week in between we are covering Louisiana style food in American Regional. Coincidence... I don't think so. BTW... WHO DAT! I loved this week because we could finally make food really spicy, since before last week we were in the boring northeast.

Anyway... on to the food. We made Chicken and Andouille sausage gumbo. This was actually quite good. But it seems that the recipes we get from our book are always inaccurate, we needed almost twice the amount of stock the recipe called for to ensure the flour was cooked out.

Crawfish etouffe is a soup similar to the gumbo, but it more liquid. Very tasty, and spicy (gotta love the spicy).

Tomato and hericot salad was ok, I'm definitely not a big fan of mayo so I didn't really like it.

Our bread pudding was amazing! Chef Pam said it had too much cinnamon, excuse me, is that possible. I think not. I had never eaten bread pudding before and after reading the recipe I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy it. Bread pudding is essentially soggy, milk soaked, day old bread. Yeah, I know, sounds appetizing right. But it was actually awesome, I loved it, it was like warm, gooey french toast. It was topped with a whisky sauce that another girl in my group made. Apparently she was trying to get us drunk, I had to cook it down for about fifteen minutes to try to cook out the liquor, but the whisky taste was still really strong. Nice addition to the cinnamon though.

On the second day of Cajun and Creole we made yummy fried oyster Po'Boys. An interesting fact about Po'Boys is that they are sandwiches made from cheap ingredients for "poor boys". These Po'Boys have a spicy Aolle sauce. It was amazing.

For the second time in my life I attempted to work with sugar. Thank goodness this time it worked the first time. When working with sugar it is important to get it to the proper stages before adding any acidity to it, and also to remember it is EXTREMELY hot. So this time I made parlines, very similar to peanut brittle in that they are both sugar morsels made with nuts, but these are softer and closer resemble turtles. Our group was a little ahead of time this day so I went and bought some dark chocolate to melt down and drizzle on top. They were so good, and the dark chocolate was the perfect offset to the sweetness of the cookies.