Everyone here at FastServers.Net knows that I have an affinity of New Orleans…the music, the food, the atmosphere, and of course, the Abita beer. So it’s pretty obvious that I’d do a little somethin’ somethin’ (or should I say lagniappe) for Fat Tuesday here at the office.
Last year I surprised everyone with a big pot of home-made Jambalaya, a fistful of beads, and a King Cake delivered from Gambino’s bakery. It was our little Mardi Gras celebration here at FastServers.Net (but I think Travis got a bit tired of me screaming, “THROW ME SOMETHING, MISTER!!!” every time he paraded past my office).
I decided to cook up some chicken and andouille sausage gumbo and vegetarian red beans & rice for this year’s Fat Tuesday festivities. On the Saturday before Mardi Gras, I headed over to my favorite place to get Tasso and Andouille, Paulina Meat Market and then picked up the “holy trinity” at the produce market. Earlier in the week, I’d also blown in a quick order to FastServers.Net customer Cajun Supermarket for some Gumbo File and spices so I had them at the ready. I was all set to do some Cajun cooking during the Super Bowl.
My love of New Orleans started back in ’88 when I was invited to fly down to the Crescent City for Mardi Gras. My best friend, Tim W. Brown, called me one blustery January day and told me that in a few weeks, he was driving down to New Orleans during Carnival to visit Kim, a good friend from grad school who was down there teaching at UNO. Kim had embraced the whole “Southern Hospitality” thing and her place had become known as the “Kim-on-Inn” due to her exceptional generosity and willingness to put people up at her apartment for Jazz Fest, Mardi Gras or whenever someone wanted to visit. So of course, she was fine with Tim inviting me down as well. Tim suggested I fly down the Sunday before Fat Tuesday and ride back with him to Chicago during the first days of Lent, tired, reticent and thoroughly debauched.
Now mind you, this was my first “real” vacation. I had never been on a plane before and had never been farther than the states bordering Illinois since I was two years old. Lately, I had been working two jobs for a while, one job or the other (or often both) every single day. I was really ready for a vacation. New Orleans fit the bill and it sure delivered. Within hours of arriving, I was hooked on the whole scene, especially since Kim was such a terrific host. She got us to great spots to watch the best parades (having friends that live along the parade route is key), great places to hang out, and great, not-to-miss places like Jean Lafitte’s, Pat O’Brien’s, and the Voodoo Museum. She also made sure we had the gumbo at Coop’s, a muffuletta sandwich from Central Grocery and in honor of A Confederacy of Dunces, the occasional Lucky Dog to keep us going.
A while after I got back from New Orleans, I discovered a Red Beans recipe in one of my cookbooks and started perfecting my Cajun cooking.
STATE'S EXHIBIT "A" (( HAWT ))
On a subsequent trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras in ‘95, Tim and I packed the trunk with crawfish, boudin, and oysters to take back North. I wanted to share our New Orleans culinary haul with friends, so even though it was the Sunday following Fat Tuesday…the Inaugural Mardi Gras Brunch was born. The annual event soon grew to include around 70 of my closest friends stopping by on a Sunday afternoon to have Hurricanes, Abita, Blackened Voodoo Lager and my spread of Jambalaya, Red Beans and Rice, Crawfish Pie, Shrimp Creole, and of course, King Cake. Even with the help of my girlfriend Michele and our cat Nefertiti (acting as executive chef and watching the proceedings from her bar stool) it still took about three days to prepare the spread for the brunch. With that much food, I didn’t have enough room to store it all in the refrigerator. But thanks to the wonderful Chicago winters, I had a deep freeze/cooler as big as my whole back yard. I would just pop everything in a cooler on the back porch.
So you can see I had gotten experienced at putting together some New Orleans fare for a large number of people. The gumbo and red beans would be a piece of (king) cake. I had time because the Mardi Gras brunch wasn’t happening this year since Easter (and thus Fat Tuesday) is as early as it could possibly be and the normal date was in conflict with some type of football game. Besides, I felt that I had just barely survived the holidays with my mind and liver intact. I just couldn’t pull it together this early. Cooking a Fat Tuesday Lunch for the great FastServers.Net crew would help keep my Cajun cooking chops sharp.
Sunday was spent cooking up a storm with big pots of gumbo and beans on the stove. Once they cooled, I did my usual back porch fridge thing, setting the pots in the snow. I get a call from home while at work on Monday:
Michele: “What did you do with the gumbo?”
Me: “It’s out on the back porch in the pots.”
Michele: “Did you tape the lids shut?”
Me: “No, I didn’t think it was necessary.”
Michele: “What about the opossums.”
Me: “Opossums don’t like gumbo.”
Michele: “I’m going to tape down the lids anyway.”
Me: “Knock yourself out.”
Monday night I got everything together to take down to the office the next morning. I assembled the utensils, the chafing dishes, the burners, and the King Cake together and ready to go. I then transferred the gumbo and red beans to aluminum pans that will fit into the steam table, sealed them up with the aluminum lids and returned them to my outdoor refrigeration unit.
Timeline of the horrendous crime:
24:00, Monday – I retire for what I hope to be a great night’s sleep
04:00, Tuesday – The cat is spazzing out, running up and down the stairs…usually a sign that she’s got an empty food bowl and wants to make us pay by waking us up. I check and see that she’s got provisions. Maybe it's a full moon.
05:00, Tuesday – More cat shenanigans. This is getting old. She finally calms down.
07:30, Tuesday – I get up and discover…we’ve been robbed and vandalized.
You guessed it...opossums do like gumbo. The little robbers ripped back the lid and stuck their little marsupial faces in it. There were a bunch of tracks leading from the back of the yard up the steps and right to the ripped up and poked lid. I like how they used my hard work in shoveling out a path as their little gumbo freeway.
STATE'S EXHIBIT "B" (( PWN3D ))
I picked up the pan and walked back into the kitchen. I stood, watery-eyed and sniffing a bit, and then dumped all that hard work and great gumbo down the sink under the “I told you so” gaze of Michele and the “I heard 'em snackin' last night. I tried to alert you, you idiot” look from the cat. Luckily, our little bandits didn’t seem to care for the red beans, so at least half of the Mardi Gras lunch was safe and without desecration; all was not lost. It turned out to be another good Fat Tuesday celebration at FastServers.Net (and a healthy one as well). So after all, we could say, “Laissez les bon temps roulez!”
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