At Lola’s New Orleans restaurant where we raised a couple of Abita beers to our pals Adrienne and Bill in NOLA!

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Dr. Paul arrived in town this afternoon and we headed straight for an Irish pub, where he started drinking Newcastle Brown Ale as though it were water.

He’s here for the Dylan concert on Saturday and said, as soon as he got off the plane, “For the next four days I’m going to try and forget that I’m a Protestant.”

So far so good!

Cooking in the Crock-Pot is very easy but sometimes I want it shamefully easy. Recently I decided to make a pot roast as simply as humanly possible, modifying a disreputably convenient rule I found online.

I got a three-pound hunk of chuck roast, salted and peppered it and braised it in butter in a large pan. (This was the only remotely difficult part of the procedure.) When the meat was browned on all sides I put it in the slow-cooker, deglazed the pan with red wine and poured the resulting liquor into the pot.  This all took about ten minutes.

I added to the pot a 12-ounce carton of organic condensed cream of mushroom soup and then poured in about 16 ounces of store-bought organic French onion soup, enough to barely cover the meat.

Do you see the beauty of this now?  No chopping!  The only time I even touched a knife was to cut off two ounces of butter for the braising.

I set the Crock-Pot on low, let it do its thing for about 12 hours and then served myself up some delicious pot roast, cackling fiendishly at my slothful but wholly successful enterprise.

Ha ha ha!

UPDATE — this rule works just as well for beef stew, simply substituting two or three pounds of beef chunks for the post roast.

Searching around online has led me to conclude that there are as many recipes for red beans and rice as there have been people who ever lived in or visited New Orleans in the entire course of its history. It’s a very simple dish, theoretically, but the variations are endless.

I collected three or four recipes that looked promising and picked the elements of each that seemed most appealing in order to create this rule, which can now be added to the myriad recipes for the dish already recorded. This one uses a slow cooker.

I started with a cup of dried red kidney beans, soaking them overnight in water. When you measure out a cup it won’t seem like enough beans, but the next day when they’ve absorbed a lot of water, it may well seem like too much.

Drain them and put them in the slow cooker.  Fry up four pieces of bacon, remove and drain them when done then pour three tablespoons of the bacon grease over the beans.  Crumble the dried bacon into the pot.  In the remaining bacon grease sauté two cups of coarsely chopped onions.  When they’re lightly browned add them to the pot.

Slice up 12-16 ounces of pre-cooked spicy Louisiana sausages and brown them in the same skillet.  Add them to the pot.  In the same skillet lightly roast a coarsely chopped and de-seeded green bell pepper.  Add it to the pot.

Now cut up and sauté a slice of country ham and add it to the pot.  You probably won’t be able to find country ham unless you live in the South or unless you have, as I do, a kindly mother who lives in the South and sends it to you from time to time.  If you can’t find it, any sort of ham will do, or you can just fry up some more bacon as a substitute.  (Emiril Lagasse uses 1/4 cup chopped tasso ham in his red beans and rice recipe.)

Pour in enough chicken broth to barely cover the contents of the pot, set it to high and wait four and a half to five hours, or until the beans are cooked through.  Stir the mixture every hour or so and add more liquid, broth or water, if it dries out.

Some recipes say you should remove a quarter or so of the beans halfway through cooking, mash them up in a skillet and sauté them a bit, then stir them back into the pot.  To me this seemed like more trouble than it was worth.  (Update — it’s not more trouble than it’s worth.  See the comments below.)  Some recipes call for adding hot sauce to the pot before cooking, but I see no reason not to add the sauce to taste when the dish is served.

Serve it over rice of course, drink beer with it, while listening to some Louis Armstrong.  When Louis asked his last wife Lucille to marry him, he did so on the condition that she would learn to make red beans and rice, without which he felt he could not lead a full and happy life.  (He often signed his letters “Red beans and ricely yours”.)  She learned to make it, he approved of the results, and they stayed married for the next 29 years, until Louis’s death.

Try the recipe above and you’ll see why red beans and rice was so important to Armstrong.

It’s so easy to forget when you started the post roast in the Crock-Pot. A simple reminder next to the computer is essential — and so cheering.

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From time to time I treat myself to a lovely, disgusting banana cream pie, but this creates a problem — as long as it’s in the house I don’t really want to eat anything else.

Looked at in a certain way, though, that’s not really a problem at all.

Houston, Texas.  They say it’s a right friendly place to hang out.

Click on the image to enlarge the crawfish.

Photo by J. Ewing Walker, Jr.

Still com’era, dov’era.

From the Cushman Archive.

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I got a hankering for some chili recently and poked around on the Internet for a new recipe, never yet having found one that suited me just right.

I stumbled on a recipe that intrigued me because of its complexity — it called for onions, garlic, green bell peppers, cayenne pepper, paprika, dried basil, dried parsley, Louisina hot sauce, red wine, beef bouillon cubes, oregano, salt and pepper . . . in addition to the usual whole peeled tomatoes, tomato paste and ground hamburger.  (I never put beans in my chili.)

I decided to try it, adding one more twist of my own — two chipotle peppers with two teaspoons of the adobo sauce they came in.  (These peppers and this sauce are, as you probably know, extremely hot, but have a delightful smoky flavor which enhances all sorts of dishes.)

I chopped up one large yellow onion and one large green bell pepper, started them cooking over medium heat in some olive oil and added two pounds of hamburger meat, not too lean. When the meat was brown I added 2/3 of a cup of red wine, crumbling the two bouillon cubes over the mix and adding six large cloves of peeled garlic, crushed.  I added two 12-ounce cans of peeled tomatoes, chopped up, reserving the juice, and one 6-ounce can of tomato paste.  I added two teaspoons each of the dried parsley, dried basil, cayenne pepper, paprika, Mexican oregano, salt and pepper.  (Mexican oregano tastes slightly different from regular oregano and I think works better with chili.)

I actually didn’t have a (clean) saucepan big enough to cook all this much at once so I made two equal batches.  I put the first batch in my Crock-Pot, then put the chipotle peppers and the adobo sauce in a blender with a few more peeled cloves of garlic, covered them with some of the juice from the canned tomatoes and mixed it up thoroughly.  I poured this onto the first batch of chili in the Crock-Pot, stirred it up, then added the second batch of chili to the pot and stirred it up again. Finally I shook in twelve drops of Crystal hot sauce and gave it all one last stir.

I set my Crock-Pot on high and let the chili stew for a couple of hours, to get all the flavors well blended, then tried a bowl of it.

Damn good chili.  The four different hot seasonings made for a complex blast of heat.  Next time I’m going to double the dose of each, for an even fierier dish.

Click on the images to enlarge.

UPDATE — the second time I made this I added an extra chipotle pepper and an extra teaspoon of the adobo sauce it came in, and I doubled the doses off all the seasonings but the salt.  This resulted in an all-around improvement in the dish.   It was pretty hot, though.  If you don’t like your chili super-hot, use the same amount of seasonings but add more tomatoes and tomato paste — or a 12-ounce can of diced fire-roasted tomatoes.  This will temper the heat but keep the complexity of the flavor — and you really can’t make too much of this stuff.  It gets better the longer it sits, and can be frozen for delightful meals at a later time.

Use small radishes or cut larger ones into bite-sized pieces. Place them in a bowl, drizzle them with melted butter and salt to taste. Eat with a strong red wine. This is the way the French do it, though sometimes they eat the radishes on pieces of buttered baguette.

Delicious, refreshing — almost a meal in itself.

Dinner on the porch tonight, homemade beef stew, cheap red wine . . . twilight in Sin City, more accurately described as Silly Town.

I never look out my windows, even after seven years here, without thinking, “Where the hell am I?” I guess that’s sort of the point.