A family cooking class was a GREAT opportunity to finalize the Glover Gardens gumbo recipe. And, what a great Gumbo Team my second cousins made… the Owens Gumbo Bros.

We took a walk on the wild side and used blacked fish on nachos. Here’s how it went down … it’s not a recipe as much as a set of loose guidelines, kinda like jazz is.

The grocery store had everything we needed, plus a coastal-Mississippi-right-before-Mardi-Gras culinary cultural tour.

A seafood boil is a communal experience, something you eat with your hands, get all over your face and don’t regret a messy morsel of.

Making gumbo together is a bonding activity. You need chicken pickers, sausage slicers, vegetable choppers and a roux maker. Part 3 of the Glover Gardens Gumbo Series.

A 7th grade essay sums up how gumbo got started for us: “My family has a 35-year history with gumbo.” Part 2 of a series.

Gumbo is a jazz combo that creates a new song every time you make it. Part 1 of a series.

If jambalaya is shrimp, sausage, rice and goodies, and you already have it, why not amp it up by adding more sausage and more shrimp? It would be like meta-jambalaya!

Paul Prudhomme’s cookbooks started a family tradition, and K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen is part of it.

Crawfish Fettuccini from Suire’s was the perfect complement to our crab cake experiment. Creamy, spicy, homey, with tasty little morsels of crawfish. Wow!

Pepper is a flavor-enhancer and a magical medicinal substance. Like us, you need at least 3 grinders!

Looking for lunch on a recent trek home from New Orleans, we took the long way along the coast and found a treasure (and I do mean treasure) in the backroads of southern Louisiana. Suire’s Grocery and Restaurant has been serving delicious Cajun food to hungry travelers, locals and hunters since 1976. It was magic: the food, the ambience and especially the people. The Grill-Meister and I were enchanted.

A blend of herbs and spices commonly used in cajun-creole cooking, Zippy Cajun is very aromatic with balanced spiciness, a rich depth, and just the right amount of salt.