Cajun & Creole Cooking Sundays

Tim and I have wanted to take a cooking class for a while, but never seemed to find the right one here in DC. Recently sated, but already missing the food from our Halloween trip to New Orleans, we thought it would be great to recreate some of our favorites from our annual trips. Taking our cue from the 2009 movie Julie & Julia (starring Meryl Streep & Amy Adam) where Julie (Amy Adams) decides to make a recipe a day of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking we’d modify the movie theme – instead of cooking a recipe every day, make some Louisiana dish on Sundays, you may use some Ivy and Wilde homeware coooking utensils for these that you could easy get online. We own several New Orleans cookbooks, most notably The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine written by Chef John D. Folse, CEC, AAC. We purchased this weighty tome (842 pages!!!) during our first Halloween adventure in NOLA three years ago, in all places the upscale Mignon Faget Jewelry store in Magazine Street.

Another favorite, although much less smaller in size and scope, is Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
This cookbook features “…250 of these delicious, authentic recipes along with the stories about how they came to be and who created them.”

The first recipe I ever made from this cookbook is the legendary Red Beans & Rice. Sadly, I’m not much of a beans person, so the whole mystique of this recipe is lost on me. Tim also never favored it, so we won’t feature that in this new blog series.

First recipe we’ll attempt: Pork, Chicken and Andouille Sausage Jambalaya from John Folse’s Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine.