Tag: New Orleans
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Jettison Me Back
What TV shows did you watch as a kid? Growing up in the 50s and 60s, we were a one-tv household, which was housed in a large piece of furniture. There was no remote and because we were 60 miles southeast of New Orleans, we only got three channels, the three main networks NBC, CBS,…
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Friends, Family, Food, But No Funeral!
My husband and I just recently returned home from a nine-day trip to our home state, Louisiana, where we had the time of our lives. This trip was planned around my nephew’s engagement party, bookended by family time and some really great food. When my husband and I married, we were both living in Maryland,…
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My Two Special Saints
On an unseasonably warm March day this year, I attended the 5:00 Vigil Mass at my parish, which was also Confirmation with Bishop Evelio Menjivar of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. The large church was packed, with folding chairs lining the entire interior perimeter of the church and chairs outside the doors of the…
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Book Review: Southern by Design by Grace Helena Walz
The title of this ARC, graciously provided to me by NetGalley and HarperCollins, called to me on many levels, and I immediately requested this debut novel by Grace Helena Walz. As a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying Southerner (born and raised in southeast Louisiana), I just knew instinctively that I would enjoy this book, and I did. I…
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You Say Tomato, I Say Creole
When my mother deemed me old enough to cross Highway 23 South alone, she would give me a $5 bill and tell me to walk to Mrs. Benandi’s house and buy a box of Creole tomatoes. I would walk there, buy the box of tomatoes, and start my walk back home. The tomatoes on the…
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Book Review: The Essential Instant Pot Cookbook by Coco Morante
At what point when reading a cookbook do you make the decision to just go ahead and purchase a copy for yourself? Wait, you don’t read cookbooks? I do. I check out bags of them from the library and read them cover to cover like my favorite mysteries or biographies. Sometimes I jot down a…
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Travel for Beginners
I know almost nothing about soy sauce. I know I like to dip my sushi rolls into it and I know that the colored tops of the soy sauce bottles on the tables in Asian restaurants denote whether the soy sauce is regular (red) or low sodium (green). I know it is one of the…
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One Chord
One chord. That’s all it takes. One chord and I instantly know this song and the artist. It’s the sound of that one chord that caused me to have a reoccurring nightmare for weeks on end in 1974 where I would hear that chord and then faint, waking up hours later after having missed an…
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A Narrow Sliver of Land
We all have our Proust moments: the singular bite of something that we loved and cherished in our childhood, re-tasted later as an adult, transporting us back in time to a particularly fond memory. Truman Capote, in his semi-autobiographical short story “A Christmas Memory”, describes in great detail the food of his childhood in the…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 