The month started out with a flat of Louisiana Strawberries from Pontchatoula. These are always the reddest and sweetest strawberries of the year. Being grown so near to us, they always last the longest. I threw away two strawberries a week and a half later when I pureed the last three pints for smoothies. We also passed a milestone at Timberlane when the avocado tree I planted from a seed about 12 years ago began to bloom for the first time. The pollinator of choice seems to be ladybugs and I have a photo below of them doing their work.
Gretna is a town in Scotland famous for Gretna Green — a place couples could go to get married after England enacted laws in 1734 that parental consent was necessary for a couple to be married. Scotland lacked such a law and the first coach stop over the border into Scotland was a blacksmith shop at Gretna Green. It became a custom for couples to stop by the Ole Blacksmith Shop there to have the blacksmith perform the services for them, so they could quickly return to England married. 
Our home town of Gretna has such an Ole Blacksmith Shop, and in the tradition of Gretna Green, many marriages are performed there, often several on a single day. On a recent Valentine’s Day over 14 weddings were performed at the Blacksmith Shop. Each wedding comes with a guarantee, by the way, which you can read in the sign above being held by one of the blacksmiths, J. B. Borel. JB is also president of the local chapter of the Council for the Defense of French-speaking in Louisiana, Les Amis du CODOFIL Westbank. Elsewhere in this Digest, you’ll find photos of a familiar-looking new blacksmith-in-training and the S-hooks he hammered and forged from rod stock. Here's some of what I learned from Blacksmithing 101: "Strike while the iron is hot" means you're wasting your energy hammering if the iron has cooled off a little. "Too many irons in the fire" means you can't get anything accomplished because the excess amount iron has cooled down your fire.
We went to our first CODOFIL breakfast. It takes place first Saturday of the month at LeBlanc's Restaurant. CODOFIL is the Council of Development of French-speaking in Louisiana and it was great to be sharing food with French-speaking Cajuns again. We pledged allegiance to the American flag in French, something my grandparents did in their time, but I had never gotten a chance to do before.
After the breakfast we invited Paul, Joyce, Buster and Emily over to Timberlane for cards. This time when we played Pay Me! I actually got to say those words a few times and came out winning for the day. Our son John brought his two sons, Kyle and Collin over, and Paul played the violin for them. For lunch we dined on take-out — Di Martino’s Po Boy sandwiches and its wonderful shrimp potato salad. Talk about good!
Grandson Collin spent the night with us and came to High Mass at St. Joseph's the next morning. I explained to him how we expected him to behave during church and he did admirably for a four-year-old boy. Afterward we went out into the Memorial Garden and in the little chapel, we lit a candle for his great-grandfather Gene Grazer who was on his deathbed. I explained to him that Gene would be able to see this candle while he was in the spiritual world and would feel loved by Collin when he saw it. Fire provides a linkage between the physical world and the spiritual world. A few days later his mom called Del to ask what Collin was talking about this candle he lit for Gene. Del explained to her what we told Collin. Later we found out that Gene had passed completely into the spiritual world during the time of that phone call. Gene was a real gentleman and he will be missed by all who knew him. Our long-time friend, Father John Finn formerly of Holy Family Church, our church in Mimosa Park, came to do the funeral mass for Gene, so we know Gene got a fine send off.
We celebrated the tax return ceremony this year with our friend and CPA Tom Trumble who did another excellent job of satisfying all our coerced tax payments to the Federal bureaucracy. When taxes are voluntary, we'll know that real freedom has come to our land. Till then, may I wish everyone a Happy-As-Possible April 15th? After our tax meeting, Del and I drove to Metairie for our weekly joint massage (check the ambiguity, folks) and stopped at Bennigan's for French Onion soup and Caeasar's Salad. At a nearby table was Sandy from Del's former employer TBS and Del had a chance to catch up on the scuttlebutt she's missed by being gone for several months. Talking about 'being gone' — she has finished liquidating AHP and received the final papers from the Secretary of State attesting to that fact. One more first of the month report for April and AHP is finally history. She helped Jane Hodel Cooper give birth to AHP and she has now single-handedly given it an honorable burial. All claims were paid, all lawsuits settled, and creditors satisfied. Atta Girl, Del ! ! ! This is one of the good news stories which will never appear in the Times-Picayune news paper, don’t you know?
Had to get a hot water heater replaced for our apartments this month, always a challenge in a 100-yr-old house. Got to watch LSU's basketball team nearly beat Kentucky in the SEC Conference Championship, then go down ignominiously to UAB in the first round of the NCAA playoffs. Oh, well, next year. Back to baseball and LSU's run for another National Championship there.
Two crawfish boils this month. For those who don't know what that is — we catch these tiny lobsters in the ditches, swamps, and rice fields and throw them live into a boiling pot of water filled with delicious seasonings and then we dump them on a table covered with newspaper and peel and eat four to ten pounds of them. Non-natives usually turn their noses away from them — which is great — more for us. First boil was given by our daughter Maureen in Metairie and she asked if I'd bring my tools for opening oysters. I also brought the fixings for my special sauce to dip the oysters on the half-shell into: ketchup, horseradish, lemon, Worcestershire Sauce, Louisiana Hot Sauce, salt and pepper. I had been spoiled all these years by having Buster and Henry opening oysters for me, so I figured it was time for me to be the opener. Jean Paul and Katie Wood loved the oysters and it's always more fun doing that wet, dirty work of opening oysters on the halfshell if there’s someone to appreciate it. The second crawfish boil was in Baton Rouge at our son John's. It was a more genteel boil with trays instead of newspaper and no oysters. 
Had lunch with Anna Keller at the Red Maple where she gave me an autographed copy of her new book (See phot below with my review of her book.)
Belle Terre Acadie. I read it in the next few days — it is a wonderful story about the D'hué family over the generations beginning with their expulsion from Acadia (Nova Scotia). Brought tears to my eyes as I read the horrendous deprivations my own ancestors suffered overcame during their uprooting from Acadia and subsequent transplantation into South Louisiana where we all live and thrive today. This was a month of being immersed in my Cajun heritage in many ways.
During the CODOFIL breakfast JB had mentioned there would an Acadian Memorial Festival in St. Martinville on March 19. We decided to go and made immediate reservation at the Old Castillo B&B situated along Bayou Teche adjacent to the grounds for the festival. We ate at Café Des Amis in Breaux Bridge our first night, and asked our waitress, a young perky gal, who to find the famous dance Mulate’s. She didn’t know, explaining she was an UL student from Houston, but she found out for us. She said, “Last night a table asked me where was a good place to go dancing and I didn’t know what to tell them.” We drove out and scouted Mulate’s — saw a lot of cars so we decided to come back the next night.
The next day we spent at the festival. Cajun bateaus on the bayou, Cajuns in period dress of the eighteenth century dancing and singing songs in Cajun. We visited the Cajun Museum on the festival site which contains plaques with names of the Cajuns exported to Louisiana which included my Babin ancestors. (See Plaque of Babins exported to Louisiana below.) In the afternoon I went to the WWII Veterans lecture at DuChamps Opera House. Talked about the Cajun Macqui who assisted US forces in taking France during WWII — around D-Day. Had great bread pudding there after the talk.
After a long day we drove to Mulate’s at 6 for dinner. By 7 we were eating our hot bread pudding when the Cajun band started playing. Del said, “There’s couple on the dance floor that looks like your brother Paul and his wife Joyce. It is Paul and Joyce.” 
We were surprised, so I said, “Let’s surprise them.” They were on the opposite side of the dance floor which was already crowded for the first dance and we began dancing closer and closer without looking at them until they saw us. They were surprised. They had spontaneously decided to stop for a bite to eat at Mulate’s to break up the long trip home from a Spring Break trip with their son, Greg, Heidi, and the three girls to Big Bend National Park. The wait for a table was an hour, so they thought they’d dance a few dances and then eat down the road. We invited them over to our table and they ate while we visited and danced a few dances.
The next morning we celebrated Palm Sunday mass at St. Martin of Tours and drove home after church with a blessed palm for Timberlane. The church has a fine statue of Mi-cha-el the Archangel which I have a photo of in this Digest. The Atapakas Indians of the St. Martinville area were reputed to be cannibals and the Cajuns cooperated with the other Indians of the region to force the Atakapas to make their boudain from hogs instead.
Del came down with what her dad used to call affectionately "diphloucus of the plock” — which we would call a bad cold — and she had to rest in bed for a few days while I ran a few of her errands. Her mom is still day-to-day on how she's feeling. Had a setback this month which required day-time help for a few days, but the doctor has taken her off the cholestrol medicine — after all the side effects clearly state: can cause muscle & joint pain. As always we remain hopeful for a full recovery and ask for your prayers for Doris.
We were visited by Cedar Waxwings this month and I took some photos. If you aren't home every day you would miss them. They come in a large flock of several hundred birds, but most of the flock remain in nearby trees while some third of them are eating berries from one tree. It's a holly tree with red berries which borders the South Portico garden. They fly constantly in and out of the berry tree while the surrounding birds keep watch. Eventually all the birds get their fill and they fly off till next year. It's quite a treat to watch them take turns eating, so keep an eye out for these beautiful and interesting birds.
I went to see LSU whip SLU in baseball at Zephyr's Stadium in Metairie. One game a year at a stadium is more than enough for me, especially at that stadium, thank you very much. At home, I mute the loud, irritating commercials, but in a stadium, what can you do if they play excruciatingly loud and obnoxious music? To explain to Del how bad it was between innings when the Disc Jockey played horrible booming music from stadium-size boom boxes, I performed this little ditty I made up on the spot as a rap song. It's my rant about the Zephyr Stadium Cacaphonous Boom Boxes:
“Yo, Bro, watch the sho,
Watch the Tigers winning
ZAP the amps tween the innings
Plug the speakers with a slug
Pitch the DJ Bitch
Ovah the ditch
Yo, Bro, baseball’s where it’s at
Don’t need no friggin scat.”
For Maundy Thursday my friend Brian Kelley came over for lunch. For Good Friday we drove to John's crawfish boil. On Easter Sunday I took Del to Easter Brunch downtown at Le Pavilion Hotel. Sunday afternoon I cut the grass at Timberlane for the first time to celebrate the beginning of Spring officially.
After buying Del a silver moebius strip bracelet with the Lord's Prayer on it, she had wished for one in gold instead of silver. So for her big 6 0 birthday coming up April 12, I bought her the gold one. After she took it out of the box, I held it up and said, "Here's the 0 from the big 6 0!" She laughed. When I ordered the gold one, I thought long and hard on what we might wish to do with the silver one Del had been wearing, and finally I decided to buy a second silver. Our two oldest daughters, Kim and Maureen, had each lead a great event in the past 12 months and I suggested to Del we honor them with a silver Lord's Prayer bracelet. Kim had the idea to honor 1200 soldiers at Fort Polk heading off to secure the peace in Iraq with a special meal prepared and delivered by her daughter, Katie's 8th grade class and mothers. Maureen designed the 2005 Jefferson Parish's Superintendant's Conference for 130 JP Principals and Administrator. Simultaneously Del had lunch with Kim to present her bracelet in Baton Rouge while I had lunch with Maureen to present her bracelet. I have a photo of Maureen wearing her bracelet. Kim hasn't stayed in town long enough since she got hers for me to get a photo. She went to D. C. with Katie's class on a trip, then fly out West with the family for skiing vacation.
What's next? In New Orleans, there's the Spring Festival, the Jazz and Heritage Festival, blackberries to be picked, creole tomatoes, and the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer to look forward to.
Till next we meet in these pages, have a great April!
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Start with a package of fresh brussels sprouts — never use frozen. Boil the sprouts in water with a tsp of salt and a tbsp of olive oil for about ten minutes or till a sharp fork can easily penetrate a sprout.
Eat about half the brussels sprouts as a side dish, lightly buttered. They should taste sweet and delicious (or else throw them away — they won’t taste any better in the soup). Save the broth from the boiling for the soup.
Cooking Instructions for Dish Two: Brussels Sprouts Soup
Soup [Note: quantities are only guidelines. ]
Use the remaining buttered brussels sprouts (anywhere from six on up) and place into the broth saved from above. With a sharp pointed knife cut the sprouts into about quarters. This can be done easily in the pot. You won't lose any leaves from the sprouts and you’ll save yourself a mess on the counter top.
There hasn't been a pizza delivered to our house since the kids left for
college twenty years ago — they ordered it. And I don't ever not feel like cooking. But I took
a look at Jacques's site anyway. I went through the slide show where he shows how to remove salmon from the skin and take away the dark flesh. All stuff I figured out from actually tasting the food without having to be taught by somebody. Thanks, anyway, Jacques, I can take it from here.
I learn things about cooking in the cracks where most people don't bother looking. Cooking for me is like books, I don't read best-sellers as anyone who's familiar with my reviews can observe, since I review every book I read all the way through. With cooking I look
for techniques, for processes, when I catch a few minutes in the middle of a cooking show. How to prepare a sauce, for example, so I can design any kind of sauce I wish with what I have on hand.
Only cooking show I ever watched all the way through was the Justin Wilson Show.
Ever notice? He was the only chef who actually sat down and ate the food he cooked. And savored it. Oh, the Galloping Gourmet Graham Kerr occasionally knoshed a bit on his food after he cooked it, but he never stopped talking long enough to convince me he was enjoying the food he ate. Compare him to Justin and you'll see the difference.
(Justin wasn't a real Cajun and admitted it, but he loved Cajuns and had a unique style
which was lovable.)
What do most other Chefs do when they finish cooking a dish? Display it. Rave over it. Talk about how good it smells. Let others
to taste a bite. They rarely ever actually taste the food the food themselves during cooking or after. I wonder if Jacques tastes his own food on the show?
About the website. Very slick. Jacques is a nice looking guy. Talks better than Julia Child. Videos are professionally done. Will help a lot of people cook and give them ideas. Cuisinart is a prominent advertizer for the website/show.
I have no use for most of his recipes because I threw away my Cuisinart about 20 years ago after I spent 10 minutes cleaning all the parts after it saved me 5 minutes chopping by hand. Also it mutilated the food, and as a Cajun I cannot bear to waste food just to learn how to use some maudits machine. I chop everything by hand with a carbon steel chef's knife I paid $2.50 for about 20 years ago, and which I rinse and wipe clean in 5 seconds and put up in 2. That's fast cooking and clean up. Plus I get to think about who I'm preparing the food for with loving thoughts as I chop each bite. I've learned that what you think about while you prepare food goes into the food you're cooking. Try thinking loving thoughts when WHHIIRRRRRRR!! is going on in your kitchen. Can't see for the life of me why I would want the horrendous sound of a food chopper and the way it makes me feels me when it grinds away to go into every dish I prepare.
Ever eat in a restaurant where the food was prepared nice-looking with fresh
ingredients and seasoned properly but tasted completely unappetizing? It was
prepared by some 20-something who hated his job and was thinking of all the mess
he'd have to clean up before he left work that night WHILE he was preparing the
food! He followed all the instructions he was given and still the food was
insipid. You tasted it and now you know why. [See my poem The Thinking Cook.]
By the way I cook a lot with crawfish and I always buy the cheapest crawfish I can find. No real Cajuns would pay more money to buy crawfish just because some maudits agency is buying ads to say crawfish from one place tastes better than crawfish from some place else. We just taste the crawfish ourselves and buy the cheapest crawfish that tastes good. Excuse me, I have a couple of crawfish leeks tarts in the oven I have to remove.
It would seem that anyone who offered a chance to invest this money in bonds or stocks that earned money instead of losing money would be considered a savior for the working class. Yes, that would be so anywhere but in the USA where the Democrats would pillory and burn at the stake any Democrat who suggested it, and what they would do to the Republicans, you only have to turn on either C-SPAN to determine for yourself.
Are you familiar with the Rule of 72? If you divide an interest rate into 72, the quotient will tell you over how many years your money will double. If you get a 6% return on an investment, you'll double your money every 12 years. If you work for 36 years and average 6% that's three doublings or 8 (EIGHT) times the amount you invested. At 12% that's six doublings or 64 (SIXTY-FOUR) times the amount you invested. Now let's look at the current SS PONZI scheme which pays about -1.2%. Divide 1.2 into 72 and you get 60. At a positive interest rate of 1.2 your money would increase only by half in about 36 years. Thus, with a -1.2 % rate, it would be worth about a third less than you put into it, all things being equal — and any fool knows there is no such thing as all things being equal when it comes to the FEDS — they change things every year or so to keep things unequal and you confused.
When I read this quote below, it read as if it were something I had written, but it came in the FederalistPatriot.US 05-12 Brief — Bravo Michael ! ! !
The best source at the best price is to order your copies on-line is from the publisher Random House/Xlibris's website above.
1. 
“Augustus” (2003) — Peter O’Toole in the last years of his career gives an outstanding performance of Caesar Augustus in the last years of his career. When Augustus on his death bed talks about being a player and asks the camera, “How am I doing?” We can only answer Peter saying, “Tremendous!” See Marc Antony and Cleopatra through the eyes of Augustus for a change. The treatment of Livia as a loving wife more than a scheming one. Of the intimate bond between Augustus and his daughter. It’s all there and even more.
“Kiss the Bride” (2002) Goodbye! A DVD STOMPER
“What the BLEEP do We Know?” (2004) What the BLEEP do I care? This is a dreadful movie on all counts: the key actress can’t speak clearly and fusses at someone who signs to her, “I can’t lip-read, you twit!” or something like that. But the worst part is she has a perpetual headache which is shown in closeup over and over again. The whole movie is a headache machine. All the ideas talked about chattily I’ve read handled much better in books. Fred Alan Wolf was a treat to watch — the only oasis in a desert of scientific mumbo-jumbo that goes nowhere fast and stays there. A DVD STOMPER! Keep this one out of your friends’ hands or buy them some aspirin to take while watching it.
“Vanity Fair” (2004) A lavish production of Thackeray’s famous novel which asks the question whether a governess can ever be admitted into society in the early 1800s in England. After Reese Witherspoon’s best efforts at shocking the nobility, the answer comes out, “Well, she can always go to India where no one cares if she was once a governess.”
“Tumbleweeds” (1999) Delightful movie about “trailer trash” with a freshness and verve that tugs at the heart strings. How many times can you meet a guy, get married, get divorced, and move to Arizona with your pre-teen daughter? Some time you have to stop rolling along and set down roots. Even a tumbleweed does that at some point in its life or there would be no little tumbleweeds. Some day one Romeo is going to put her foot down. 
(Adapted by one told at a club breakfast.)
Brussels Sprouts Soup
A good friend wrote me via email the other day saying, "Ever have one of those nights that you just don't want to cook and a delivered pizza doesn't cut it?" and gave me a link to a cooking website. I expressed my thanks for the link and replied with my philosophy on cooking which I'd like to share with you.
What's the opposite of security? Insecurity! And that's the "gift" that the so-called government gives us when we retire. It is not based on investment, but in stealing money from one's paycheck and an equal amount from one's employer each month. This latter theft is invisible to any who read their check stub, but the amount missing is exactly equal to the FICA that is visible. It's as if the Feds think we're too dumb to realize the huge amounts they are taking from our paychecks to fund a pyramid (Ponzi) scheme which pays out a NEGATIVE 1.2% interest to those who are forced to invest in it. This Ponzi scheme uses current theft receipts to pay those who have already retired while holding current wage-earners' grandchildren-to-be hostage to pay for their retirement.
