Back in the Day

Recently the Rural Life Museum held its Harvest Days weekend. The Rural Life Museum is a museum of rural buildings and artifacts from the local area, dating from the early 1800’s to early 1900’s. Several times a year they have special events in which volunteers in period costume demonstrate skills such as weaving, blacksmithing, making cane syrup, cooking over an open fire, and woodworking with 19th century tools. Children demonstrate how to roll hoops. There are wagon rides and occasionally a reenactment of the Battle of Baton Rouge by local Civil War buffs. At Christmas there are choirs.

Musicians at Christmas time

Gospel quartet from Southern University, December 2008

Reenacting the Battle of Baton Rouge

For years when we went to the Rural Life Christmas event I wanted to take a wagon ride but the lines were always too long. Three years ago I finally decided I was going to take the wagon ride first no matter how long I had to wait on line. It was the most uncomfortable ride I have ever been on. I couldn’t wait for it to end. As my late mother-in-law used to say, “The good old days - you can keep them.”

Wagon of the type used for wagon rides

There are a number of old buildings to see, including an old church from St. James Parish and several buildings from Welborn Plantation. There’s an overseer’s cottage, which was actually lived in until 1960, a general store, a small post office, a dogtrot cottage, two barns, some slave cabins, some Acadian cabins, a blacksmith’s shop, and a kitchen with a large hearth for cooking. New acquisitions are made from time to time. Now that the museum has a new display and office building, it seems to have acquired a dozen or so quilts to hang from the high ceiling and a display of funerary items to keep the old hearse company. The gift shop has expanded, too.

Cottage with bousillage walls

Old barn, before Hurricane Gustav

As much as I enjoy the Rural Life Museum, Magnolia Mound Plantation, and other attractions devoted to teaching about local life back in the old days, good or otherwise, I never feel like I they give a realistic picture of life back then. The problem is, all these buildings and artifacts are old, and consequently dilapidated. The people who lived and worked with them 100 or more years ago saw them brand  new. The barn was not about to fall down, it was a snug home for the family’s livestock. The treadle sewing machine and steam powered saw blade weren’t old and quaint, they were new and high tech. The floors the overseer’s cottage weren’t worn and sagging, they were glossy and as clean as slave labor could make them. The old hearse was shiny black with plush green velvet fittings, not worn and faded. I don’t have the imagination to picture these items new, so I am always left with a picture of the original owners, rich, poor or middle class, living surrounded by rust, dust, and squalor.

Steam powered saw, still runs

I suspect even if I could see the dwellings brand new and furnished straight from the general store, I wouldn’t choose to live back then. I like my home comforts. Hundreds of years from now, though, archeologists will pick over the remains of our homes and technology and put them on display in museums. People will come see, and then say, “The good old days - you can keep them.” 

Food cooked in the old kitchen. I made a pumpkin stuffed with apples
like the one in the picture in my oven at home. It was good.

Pineapple growing in the kitchen garden

(S)hell of a Good Time

On our way back from the zoo Saturday we stopped at Tony’s Seafood Market. There are seafood markets closer to home, but none like Tony’s. Tony’s is where we take guests when we are running out of things to do. We even let them pick out their own dinner.

You can buy fish so fresh it’s still swimming at Tony’s. When you walk in the front door, on your right, running the depth of the store from front to back is a large tank with catfish swimming in it. You can pick the one you want and have it dressed on the spot. The day we were there, I think some of the customers watching the fish swim around were placing bets on which one would get to the end of the tank first.

Across the back of the store is the counter where you can buy shrimp, fish (the already dressed kind), oysters, picked crabmeat, turtle meat, whole crabs and crawfish in season, hogshead cheese, and the day we were there, octopus and seaweed salads.

Down on the left end of the store is where they sell cooked seafood and sides. You can get a lunch there or buy in bulk for party trays. You can also buy sides like boiled corn and potatoes, French bread, and desserts. Tony’s even sells its own seasoning mixes under the name of Louisiana Fish Fry Products.

The day we were there, we were picking up catfish for catfish etouffee and shrimp for barbecued shrimp. Despite the name, “barbecued shrimp” are not really barbecued. They’re broiled (unpeeled and the heads still on) in a lot of melted butter and seasonings, then served with a loaf of French bread to soak up the sauce while you wait for the shrimp to cool enough to peel. 

Looking around Tony’s reminds me of how we entertain here in Louisiana. You round up several dozen of your best friends, buy a sack of crawfish to boil along with potatoes and corn, cover the folding tables with plastic and newspaper, and put out lots of rolls of paper towels. That’s it. Everybody serves themselves and peels their own. It’s customary to have jambalaya on hand for those who don’t eat crawfish, and maybe some boudin balls and other nibbles. If crawfish is not in season, you can have a crab boil or a shrimp boil, or use those big pots to fry up big batches of catfish and fries.

If you are really ambitious and have friends who will shuck for beer, you can buy a sack of oysters, and serve them several ways. Raw on the half shell of course, fried served along with French bread, mayonnaise, sliced lettuce and tomatoes to make your own po’boys, and as Oysters Rockefeller and Oysters Bienville. You need more people pitching in to help than you do with crawfish, but that’s what beer is for.

If you have sufficient property to dig a big pit in the ground, or build a cooking shed, you can have a cochon de’lait. If you have friends who play Cajun fiddle and room for dancing, even better. I haven’t been to a cochon de’lait in a long time. I need to make more friends.

We don’t have a large enough yard to dig a pit, but we do have large pots for crawfish, and we are long overdue for holding a party. Next spring, when the crawfish are running good, our house. I’ll even teach you how to peel.

Zuri Turns Two

Two years ago our local zoo made the national news with the birth of a baby black rhino. Eventually named Zuri, Swahili for "beautiful", the female rhino weighed in at 75 pounds and was one of three baby rhinos born that year. 

The black rhinoceros, also known as the hook-lipped rhinoceros, is endangered in the wild. The Baton Rouge Zoo bred Zuri as part of its participation in the Species Survival Plan (SSP). Organized by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), the SSP began in 1981 as a cooperative population management and conservation program for selected species in zoos and aquariums in North America. 

Zuri became an instant hit at the zoo. She made her public debut around the time of Boo at the Zoo in 2009 and was not shy about posing for the adoring public.

Zuri at one month

Baby Zuri profile

Following Mama

This year the zoo celebrated Zuri’s second birthday. Since John has a zoo membership and I get in for free as his guest, we decided to go see what the fuss was about. Zuri was not posing for pictures, at least not while we were there. I tried to grab a shot of her sleeping in the distance with her mother, Gemstone, but it was too blurry to see anything. We did sign a happy birthday banner for her. The docent also told us Zuri now weighs 1000 pounds, more than half as much as her mother, who weighs 1800. I wonder if they are having mother-daughter squabbles now that Zuri is older. “Why can’t I pierce my horns, mom? All the other rhinos are doing it. You are so old fashioned!” Probably not.

We missed them serving her special birthday cake, with the carrots for candles.

While I didn’t get any shots of Zuri, I did get a few of the tigers in the zoo’s Realm of the Tiger exhibit. It opened last year.

Sumatran Tigers

Malaysian Tiger

Next on the list for upgrading is a new elephant pavillion, with shaded resting spots for both the elephants and the humans. Back in the 1960’s, a local children’s television personality known as Buckskin Bill urged the community to build a zoo. When Baton Rouge voted in the funding for the zoo, he led a penny drive to raise money to buy the first two elephants for the zoo. The elephants, one of whom was named Penny, were there when the zoo opened in 1970. The new zoo had what were spacious animal habitats for its day, but it is continuously being updated to provide more naturalistic homes for its residents. The elephants are long overdue for nicer digs.

I know a lot of people don’t like zoos. When we were on our Antarctic cruise, John and I were eating dinner with two of the naturalists one night when one of them asked us about Baton Rouge. Since we had been looking at a lot of wildlife, I unthinkingly said, “It has a nice zoo.” I got a strained smile in response, along with the comment that, “You really shouldn’t mention zoos to a naturalist.”

I can understand that, but at the same time, if you had never seen a lion or a tiger or a hook-lipped rhinoceros, would you care if they went extinct? Zuri puts a face on a sad problem. She also serves as a shot at a solution.

Birds of a Feather

I didn't used to pay much attention to birds.  I could identify the obvious ones, like robins, cardinals, and blue jays, and the exotic ones, like flamingos. I wouldn't know a purple martin from Purple Rain, or an indigo bunting from the Indigo Girls.

When I became a home owner, I began to be a little more familiar with the birds in our neighborhood. There was a woodpecker who used to peck on the attic of my first house. Cardinals eat the seeds off our magnolia tree. Then of course there are the mockingbirds, who dive bomb our cats. Mockingbirds are little terrorists. I've seen crows that are more than twice their size winging away from mockingbirds for dear life. 

Since Hurricane Gustav came to town three years ago, there are birds living in our neighborhood that I did not used to see. I'm not sure whether the storm caused birds to seek out new habitats or whether I'm just paying more attention to the skies around me, but I'm fairly certain we did not have egrets living at the lake down past the school when I moved into the neighborhood. I never noticed the mourning doves prior to the storm, either, and they are almost as numerous as the mocking birds now. Red-winged blackbirds are scarcer, but I've only seen them in the last three years, too.

Rufous sided towhee at the Bluebonnet Swamp. The only reason I know what it's called is because the nice gentleman who called it to my attention told me.

Two years ago, I came home to find a sharp-shinned hawk sitting on my back fence. I had my camera with me and got a blurry shot through the windshield. As soon as I got out of the car it flew away.

Juvenile sharp-shinned hawk on my back fence

In the past few days, I've been seeing a pair of red-tail hawks around the neighborhood. For years, I have seen hawks high up in the air overhead all around the city, but these two were flying low over the road to the lake.  The next day, I saw one circling the highway next to the Target parking lot, and when I got to the lake, the other one was sunning itself on the fence. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera, because I was perfectly positioned to roll down the window and get a clear shot.

I wonder if these birds are the beneficiaries of the recent recession. Back in the 1970's and 80's, several subdivisions around town were built around country clubs with golf courses. Ownership of the golf courses, however, did not rest with the homeowners/club members, and when interest rates dropped, several of the golf courses were sold off for further housing development, or in the case of two that backed up to main roads, business development. One of those is opposite Target. It was scheduled to become an upscale shopping center with boutiques, a Whole Foods, a bookstore and other small shops, but that was pre-2009. Now it sits abandoned, returning to the swamp it used to be back when the brothers Iberville and Bienville first set foot in the Delta mud. 

I'm pretty sure that egrets are living there. I see the egrets flying over the interstate almost every day. I have brief, humorous imaginings of some local TV station strapping video cameras on them. "Let's go to our live egret cam for a look at your 5 PM traffic. You can see that traffic is already slow on I-12 at Millerville due to construction on the Amite Bridge."  I wouldn't be surprised if alligators were living there, too. 

Heron at the lake near the drugstore

I think we need a word for that subset of animal life that is not domesticated, but does live in suburban backyards. It's hard for me to think of the raccoons and mockingbirds that eat our cat's food or the cardinals that nest in our magnolia tree as "wildlife", but they aren't tame, either. It's easier for me to think of the hawks and egrets as truly wild, but if they are going to set up shop in my backyard, I may have to rethink that as well.

Blame

There are different degrees of misplaced blame. There's the kind where an accident gets misattributed as an avoidable action. Say, for instance, the cat runs in front of you as you are heading to the door, and you step on the cat's foot. Or some part of the cat, it's hard to be sure, since it all happened so fast. It's also hard to be sure that blame is in this case misattributed.  That cat has been under your feet all day long. Shouldn't you have been watching out for him?

Then there's the kind where you get blamed for something someone else did. There was the time several years ago when my husband blamed me for paying some personal bills online out of the joint checking account, causing checks for household bills to bounce. Actually, they didn't bounce. The reason we knew about the whole snafu was that we got a letter from the bank telling us they had paid the bills anyway, and charged the amount to his Visa. Reason enough for him to be irate, but I was puzzled, since I remembered setting up my bills to be paid out of my account, not the household account.

When I looked online at the transaction history, I discovered that it showed I had set up the payments to come out of my account, and that the error was the bank's. As I found out when I called them, their computers had been down in the wake of Hurricane Gustav, so they keyed in the upcoming bill pay transactions themselves, using the default account that they had on file. They assured me they would transfer the money appropriately and cancel all fees. I informed my husband of this conversation calmly and politely, for those definitions of "calmly and politely" meaning that no actual weapons were used.

The worst kind of misattributed blame, however, is the kind in which you get blamed  for doing something that never actually happened. The day that I stepped on D'Artagnan, I let my husband know what had happened so that we could keep an eye on the cat to see if it started limping. The cat meanwhile was climbing the six foot tall bookcase, but Truffle hadn't shown any signs of his broken bone until it got infected, so I didn't want to take chances. Hubby looked D'Artagnan over and noticed a claw that was poking up perpendicular to his paw, and promptly concluded that the bone was broken and the digit would have to be removed and it was All My Fault, even if the cat did run under my feet. 

When the vet saw the cat the next day, she told me the broken claw would grow back and added, "Sometimes they develop a husk that sheds." She assured me that there were no broken bones and that D'Artagnan was in great health otherwise.

Keep in mind, this was two days after I had been accused of letting the cat out of the house when the cat was actually in the house all along. So you can imagine how cheery I felt about being blamed for the broken bone that wasn't broken. Fortunately for hubby, he was at a workshop on professional ethics and did not return until I had had some time to calm down. I even was calm and polite (see above) when I pointed out to him that he tends to make decisions without having all the facts, or even recognizing that he doesn't have all the facts.

I realize that my husband isn't the only person who thinks all the facts he has are all the facts there are. That's pretty standard human behavior, including my pretty standard human behavior. Something of the sort has been displayed on the local sports message board, Tiger Droppings, now that the two football players accused of battery in a local bar fight are being brought before the grand jury.

A few days ago, it was announced that no traces of the victim's DNA were found on any of 49 pairs of shoes belonging to the accused that had been seized on a warrant last month. The DA described the DNA results as "inconclusive", but they were actually conclusive: there was no match, not even a partial one, to the victim's DNA on any of the shoes. What the DA meant by "inconclusive" was that the lack of DNA does not clear the suspect, because they don't know if the shoes he was wearing were among the ones confiscated. Apparently there are witnesses who say the accused is the one who kicked the victim while he was down on the ground and others who say they saw the accused at the time of the fight and he was not involved. So now the DA is bringing all the witnesses before the grand jury, where they will be under oath and facing perjury charges for lying.

Reading the messages on TD reminds me that there is yet another, more pernicious form of blame: blaming the victim. Much is being made of the victim's behavior prior to his being kicked while on the ground: he allegedly stalked his ex-girlfriend, who ultimately got a restraining order on him, he is shown on videotape arguing with one of her friends at the bar and eventually pushing her, he is alleged to have thrown the first punch in another altercation, causing him to be thrown out of the bar before the fight in the parking lot. He's not much of a role model for today's youth, but once he was on the ground, helpless, he did not deserve to be kicked in the head.

At least the criticism directed at the victim, however, is directed at his pugnacious behavior, known and alleged.  It is not of the "this would never have happened if he hadn't been in a bar at that hour of the night to begin with" variety. The criticism directed at the accused, however, is. When asked to reflect on the possibility that he may be innocent, being blamed for a crime that someone else committed, many posters are responding with variations of, "If he hadn't broken curfew and been in a bar at that hour of the night, this would never have happened to him." That's an argument that sounds eerily familiar. If you're charged with a crime you didn't commit, it's not because eye witness testimony is faulty; it's not because you were the most recognizable face in the crowd; it's not because of racial prejudice (that never happens here in the South); no, it's because bad things never happen to people who weren't asking for it by being where they shouldn't be and when. Never mind that you have no way of knowing "where you shouldn't be and when" until the bad things happen.  Never mind that bad things happen to people at two in the afternoon.

I understand the desire to learn from other people's mistakes. No one wants to be the victim of a crime. No one wants to be falsely accused of a crime. If you can trace the sequence of events that led to another person's predicament, you can figure out where to break the chain before it leads to your being in the same predicament. It's a short step from there to "He shouldn't have been so pugnacious". "He shouldn't have been out late drinking." 

We never know the entire sequence of events. The facts we have aren't all the facts there are. Given that we are human and limited, the facts we have are never going to be all the facts there are.  That's something to think about before placing blame.

I Couldn't Resist

When I saw this sign at the public library, I couldn't resist getting a picture of it. Why can't they just say, "By entering these premises you agree to be searched for weapons" like everybody else?

Things to Do with Leftovers that Create More Leftovers

As I have written before, I hate to serve leftovers by just heating them up and putting them on a plate. I know, that's the time saving way to do it, but I figure, they were left over because no one was too crazy about them in their original state. Of course, the fact that my husband cooks as if he were cooking for six people instead of two is a factor also, but one I prefer to ignore in the quest to make life harder for myself.

The problem is, re-imagining leftovers always seems to involve  a few fresh ingredients, thereby increasing the volume of the original leftovers, and creating - more leftovers.

Take hash, for instance. The basic ingredients, meat and potatoes, are usually already cooked because whenever hubby makes a steak or a roast, he bakes potatoes. He doesn't just bake two potatoes, he bakes four or five. So I have meat and potatoes on hand for the basics, but I have to add chopped, sauteed onions, celery, and bell peppers and then mushrooms if we have some that are looking peaked. Finally, I add Hungarian paprika cream for some color and flavor, and just before the final browning, a little sour cream. By this time, I have enough hash to feed four to six people easily.

Then there's my faux risotto. I make real risotto on occasion, but when we have leftover rice, I make my faux version. That involves dicing up onion and browning it, chopping and adding whatever leftover vegetables we have on hand, adding the cooked rice and enough chicken stock to cover the ingredients by half an inch or so. If I have white wine I use it for some of the liquid. Then I cook it down until it's still a little soupy and stir in Parmesan cheese to thicken it all up. By then, I've at least doubled the volume of the rice, but it tastes better than plain rice that's been drying out in the refrigerator for a week. Besides, this is the only way hubby will eat brown rice.

Of course, making soup is a wonderful way to make sure leftovers for two turn into leftovers for half a dozen. Whenever we have a chicken carcass, I try to get to it before hubby does, because I prefer my soup making methods to his. Hubby throws the carcass, skin and all in with onions, celery, carrots and bouillon, and when it's done, he removes the skin and bones and serves the rest, mushy celery and onions, chicken fat, and all. 

I remove as much of the skin as possible to keep the fat content down, and cook the chicken in canned broth with onions, celery, and whatever fresh herbs are around (and salt and pepper to taste). The last twenty minutes or so I squeeze in two small lemons ( a trick I learned from Anne Burrell's cooking show) and throw in the rinds. Twenty minutes later I strain the broth into a bowl, and pick the meat off the bones. I keep the chicken meat and broth, but everything else, celery, onion, herbs, bones etc, gets tossed out. I allow the broth to stand in the refrigerator until the fat rises and solidifies enough to be skimmed off. Then I cook some carrots in the broth, and add any leftover cooked vegetables that are appropriate when I add the chicken. If we have frozen peas I put them in, but if not I add canned garbanzo beans. I cook noodles or pasta separately to add to the individual soup bowls, so the broth doesn't get all starchy and the pasta doesn't get soggy and slimy.

My final recipe for wasting your time with leftovers is Sloppy Joes. Usually I make Sloppy Joes by taking my leftover homemade pasta sauce (which contains ground beef and bulk sausage), adding a little brown sugar and cider vinegar and cooking the sauce (which is already very meaty) down to Sloppy Joe consistency. Today, however, I used leftover meat loaf, which had become very crumbly, plus  the chopped up remains of a hamburger John brought back from a restaurant. To the sauteed onion and garlic, I added the last quarter cup of  Italian dressing John had made with tomato soup (great recipe), a small can of tomato sauce and the sauce can full of water, then let it cook down slowly while I dealt with the soup. The bread crumbs in the meat loaf thickened the sauce as the water evaporated, and the salad dressing gave it the appropriate tang. I froze the inevitable leftovers.

So there you have it. Why save yourself time with leftovers, a plate, and a microwave when with a little time and effort (okay, a lot of time and effort), you can make yourself even more leftovers?