A Gift of Soup

Searching around the kitchen pantry, thinking about lunch and not finding much there, I check the refrigerator. Nothing down below, but in the freezer I find a large container of bean soup. Frozen solid but I have an appliance for that, and the big hunk of frozen bean soup looks like just the thing. It’s soup someone gave me a month or so ago that until now has been lost behind popsicles and pork chops.

Some time later, after turning the soup for a spell on its magic defrosting rack, the appliance signals that the beans are jumpin’. Soup’s on. The crunch of an onion roll is good complement, so I toast one up. I’ve eaten this same soup before and the surprising fragrance rising hot off it is familiar. By surprising I only mean that it is close to gamy, maybe something like pheasant or quail. On the other hand, I am fairly certain neither of these two birds found their way into B’s soup. Whatever it is, the fragrance stirs my appetite.

I have paper and pen at hand thinking I will jot some notes on the taste, but I am hard pushed to distinguish the flavors in this soup. In some dishes the names of ingredients come to mind, but this one defeats me. White beans, ham hocks, sausage… There my certainty ends. Whatever the remaining combination of ingredients might be is hard to say. The soup is rich and full of country flavors, very close to Louisiana cooking. The fact that B, who made this soup comes from Louisiana might have something to do with it. She cooks a lot, and it all started when she was a little girl in Baton Rouge, cooking beside her mama. But the bean soup, wherever she learned it, wherever the recipe traveled from, the bean soup is a fine gift from a good cook.

Without knowing specific ingredients my sense of description is confused. Bean soup with ham is probably a familiar taste to many, so think of B’s soup as starting from there and building to a rich stew-like thickness, chunky with ham and sausage, a hint of Louisiana air tying the flavors together. Not everyone will choose to, but I ladle the soup over a spoonful or two of steamed white rice. The onion roll too, is a tasty extra. I’m comfortable with a glass of iced coffee this time, but a glass of Wal-Mart’s Oak Leaf sauvignon blanc would be a good match with a hearty bean soup like this one.

Sorry B if I have confused your recipe through the failure of my dull tongue to interpret the seasonings. I’m usually better, but this one addled my taste buds. When you make the soup again, if there are leftovers… What do you think? Any chance you’ll be in the neighborhood?

Greatest thanks and love to the person who teaches me about food and cooking—Beverly.

Crayfish & Hush Puppies

It had been awhile since taking a day away from the beach and driving the one hour into Maitland town, and Friday was the day for that. Some bank business needed attention, but mainly I wanted to meet and have dinner with some friends and try out a new restaurant we had been talking about. All but one of us come from Louisiana, and since this new place features Cajun-Creole recipes, we looked forward to an evening of down home flavors. There was a few years back, a very good restaurant for Louisiana cooking in the area, but for one reason or another it didn’t last. And then a terrific Creole restaurant opened out at the beach, but then picked up and moved to Atlanta after about half a year.

The new place is called KING CAJUN CRAWFISH, and is what looks to be a Chinese restaurant revamped to serve the regional food of southern Louisiana. The employees all looked to be Chinese, but somewhere along the way the chef learned how to cook the specialty dishes we grew up eating—and learned it pretty well. It is a small restaurant of about twelve tables and during the time we were they were all full, with people waiting at the front for an open table.

First off, when you talk about Cajun cooking, crawfish, jambalaya, catfish, gumbo, blue crab, hush puppies and po boys are going to be right at the top. It’s also going to be a spicy sort of dinner, with Louisiana hot sauce and Cajun seasoning in almost everything.

The idea was to sample as many of the ‘classic’ dishes as we could, and the menu makes that easy to do in some cases by offering small and large sized portions. We started with a pound of boiled crawfish set down in the center of the table. I know that some are unfamiliar with this kind of shellfish, and others shy away from eating it altogether. The Japanese do not consider it an edible shellfish at all, and will often makes faces when hearing of it on the dinner table. I have one thing to say about that: They don’t know what they’re missing. The crawfish at King Cajun Crawfish are very good, and I’m sure are live shellfish not very long before reaching the table.

Next we tried a small portion of gumbo and another of jambalaya. The gumbo was fiery hot, maybe just a little too spicy, but we rated it good. I would have liked it with more okra and less sausage, but the chef made a good base with the rich flavor characteristic of this thick soup. The jambalaya was not at all bad, but the taste of celery salt was stronger than it should be. My sister makes an eye-opening jambalaya which I’ve eaten dozens of times and I don’t think she includes celery salt in her recipe. Along with the gumbo and jambalaya we got a basket of hush puppies, the little balls of deep fried cornbread which taste much better than they sound.

Next up were fried oyster and fried shrimp po boy sandwiches. A po boy is a sub or hero type of sandwich with either fried shrimp, oyster, catfish or crawfish, lettuce, tomato and tartar sauce. We ordered three of them and little remained on our plates at the end. Good soft bread and fresh fish is the key, and the po boys at this restaurant include both.

The downside of King Cajun Crawfish is the take-out paper plates, plastic forks and Styrofoam cups that everything is served in. If not that, then a plastic basket with a piece of aluminum foil as liner. In place of napkins there is a roll of paper towel on the table. The tartar sauce is served in foil packets. But then you understand it better when the check arrives looking like a math mistake in your favor. We ordered a lot of food, including beer, and the check was just under $60 for four people. Not bad in my book.

If you find yourself in the area give King Cajun Crawfish a try.

914 N Mills Avenue • Orlando, Florida • 407-704-8863 • Monday thru Saturday 11:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. Sundays from 12:30 p.m. until 9:30 p.m.