Happy Mardi Gras, Y’all!!!

And how do we celebrate Mardi Gras in the blogosphere?

Well, first, I hand you a virtual drive-thru daiquiri (because yes, they’re open this early):

 

…because you’re going to need to take it with you to the parade!

(Clicky-clicky below for LIVE FEED of the parades!)

http://www.experiencemardigras.com/ 

http://livewire.wdsu.com/Event/Live_Wire_Mardi_Gras_On_WDSU

 

After that, you’ll want some king cake, right?  Where do your loyalties lie?  With Haydel’s?

Or Gambino’s?

Or maybe Meche’s, if you’re near Lafayette?

Me, I’m partial to Southside Bakery in Lafayette:

 

What’s your favorite type of king cake?  So many of them are just jammed full of cream cheese…and while I like a LEETLE cream cheese, I prefer the fruit fillings—cherry being my fave.  However, I’m also a sucker for a good slice of traditional cinnamon & pecan.

 

Alas, I have never been brave enough to attempt my own king cake, but someday…someday.  (I’d say, “later this week”, but it’s a crazy week around the FeauxCajun household.  I’ve got a two day out-of-town work conference, and a pirate-themed murder mystery party later this week, for which my husband & I still need to make our costumes. SO EXCITED!)

However, if you’re looking for a fun recipe, I recently came across this recipe for a King Cake Bread Pudding with Whisky Sauce on the Raised On A Roux blog, and I am ITCHING to try it.  Because it combines two of my favorite things—king cake, and bread pudding!  So if you’ve got a random king cake on hand & want to try something new & fun with it, give that recipe a whirl & let me know how it comes out!

(I’d try it myself, but I found it after I’d already made my New Year’s Resolution of “no new recipes”.  Sad face.)

“Cook Some Rice.”

A quick confession.  I’ve noticed that the vast majority of my Cajun recipe posts involve me giving the direction “cook some rice”.  Because, yes, there’s a lot of rice in Cajun dishes.  But in all honesty, it’s a teensy bit of an inside joke, and I write it that way because it makes me giggle to myself.

But if you’re not from Louisiana and haven’t scoured the outer rims of YouTube, then you probably haven’t heard of PooPoo Broussard, Louisiana’s own version of…say…Justin Bieber, as viral YouTube sensations go.

Okay, so maybe not that extreme.  But he is pretty well known locally down there.

So, here you go.  Readers, meet PooPoo & his buddies, & their rendition of the Spielberg classic, “E.T.”

 

I’ll let you peruse the rest of PooPoo’s YouTube channel on your own time. :D

 

Oh, and…go cook some rice.

Wednesday’s Word of the Day

 

I took French in high school.  Two years of it.  I went to a small school, so our options were French, Spanish, or German.  German would have made sense, since much of our area of Missouri was settled by German families.  Spanish would have made sense because it’s really practical—I mean, if the U.S. of A. were to have any sort of official secondary language, it would be Spanish.

But no, I took French, because it seemed more exotic, and because I wanted to visit Paris some day, and I justified it by saying (in my infinite 14-year-old wisdom), “someday I can live in Louisiana or Canada, where it will be useful.”

(Even K-5th graders in Louisiana speak French, why shouldn’t I?)

In college, I continued this delusion with two semesters of French.  I threw one semester of Spanish in there, but discovered that I can’t roll my R’s (true story—it’s an actual physical defect), so that was the end of that.  And to be fair, while on our honeymoon in Europe, having one Romance language under my belt made it fairly easy in both France & Italian, since there were enough similarities to limp by. (Though, on our two days in Germany, I was REALLY wishing I’d taken German instead, and was so happy that our next stop was London.)

However, I’m here to say—whatever French I learned in those 4 years was somewhere next to useless when I DID in fact move to Louisiana.  Aside from knowing that the “Vieux” in Vieux Carre (aka the French Quarter) meant “old”, a beignet was a donut, and “cafe au lait” was coffee with milk…yeah.  Not so useful.

Because a) contrary to what i believed as a 14 year old, everyone in Louisiana does not speak French…and b) the French they DO speak is not the formal French I learned.  It’s a bit of an amalgamation of English, Creole French, Acadian (Nova Scotia area) French, and Houma Indian. And you wrap that up in a Cajun accent and…yeah… We’re so far out of “Je m’appelle Bobbi” that it hurts.

Thankfully, it didn’t matter much, because as a “Yankee” (come from anywhere north of I-10, and you’ll be branded as such) they didn’t expect me to speak it anyway. And the ones who do speak it tend to just throw it in now & then, like the seasoning on a bowl of gumbo.  And I got a good bit of satisfaction on those occasions that I DID understand bits of it, like while doing field work, one of my coworkers was measuring something, and finished off by saying “C’est bon" (“It’s good”).

I digress.  Today’s word! (Which I did NOT learn in French class, but rather from one of my favorite former coworkers, Jude.)

Frissons: (Free-SOHNS) essentially, goosebumps.  Other online dictionaries define it as “an intense moment of excitement, or a shudder”.  Use it as you will.

And, as a bonus, the video for Flight of the Conchords’ “Foux de Fafa”, which always reminds of the feeling I had when I moved to Louisiana & realized just how much “french” I DIDN’T know.