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MC Horoscope

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  1. MC Horoscope
    Not having your bullpen ready is equal to or substantially the same as throwing a game deliberately or betting on your team to lose? How so? Managers mess up their bullpen's readiness all the time, usually through unwise overuse or sometimes underutilization. It's not even close to throwing a game, imo. His team can still win by scoring the most runs the next day, with or without relievers. This is not at all like what the White Sox did when they deliberately lost the World Series by sabotage. They threw to the wrong base, made bone headed plays, etc. It was not even very subtle. On the other hand, I do not think people are going to say "This game has no integrity! The manager is setting up his team to lose tomorrow by trying hard to win today!" They try hard everyday! Anyway, feel free to delete my post, moderators, if you feel that the discussion is over.
  2. MC Horoscope
    That would certainly make me change my mind about HOF, if it turned out that Rose did throw games.
  3. MC Horoscope
    I like The Complete Commodore Recordings for small groups. The Complete Decca Recordings have lush string arrangements, if you prefer that. --- Love this video of Billie Holiday with a small group including Lester Young, from a TV show.
  4. MC Horoscope
    The first couple of weeks of the tournament are the most exciting for me! By the time it all finishes it's been dragging on too long, greedy for nighttime and weekend TV ratings, with only maybe four games in a week or less. IMO. But the beginning is so exciting!
  5. MC Horoscope
    No-hitters are fairly common, but Johnny Vander Meer pitched two in a row in 1938! I can see someone tying that record but not breaking it, given how starting pitchers rarely even complete games anymore. Also, the rules have changed for how many high school basketball games a team can have in a season, so the all-time career scorer will probably remain Greg Procell of Ebarb, Louisiana. "A Scorer's Mentality Lives On" by Jere Longman on nytimes.com (Basketball was King where I grew up! I can still hear coach with a Cajun accent yelling "Run and shoot! Run and shoot! Run and shoot! And when you shoot, shoot wit autority!")
  6. MC Horoscope
    Brian Regan's a stand-up comedian. Yeah, he's the one who was rating his "date" with Jerry while they're spying a seal in the surf! No TV shows or movies that I know of. Lots of YouTube clips of him. Clean comic. Just a big old goof! Fond of his emergency room routine and his trip to the eye doctor. Seinfeld seemed to have genuine affection for him. Letterman was generous with his stories about comic Lenny Schultz. Loved his story about the hopped up Volvo! Super Dave Osborn had some great moments on Johnny Carson. He'd always call Carson Jimmy, like he was too vain and self-absorbed to even know, and he'd try to bribe Carson with gifts. His Stump the Band routine (with a steel drum band playing Barry Manilow's Copacabana tune) was crazy good!
  7. MC Horoscope
    "Iron Eyes Cody" was actually a Sicilian-American raised by a Cajun family in Kaplan, LA! I can still remember some of those cigarette commercials and slogans. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch. Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.
  8. MC Horoscope
    My favorite episodes so far have been with Brian Regan, Bob Einstein, and David Letterman. I look forward to new ones and check for them often.
  9. MC Horoscope
    Can't understand why the rule change for home plate and second base collisions was not changed sooner. The famous Rose-Fosse wipeout is just one of several gruesome incidents. An irony is that Fosse and Rose were supposedly up all night before that All Star Game discussing baseball with each other, they were so hardcore into it and pretty good friends! You can see it in Rose's concern for his friend after the play, though the clip's editing just emphasizes Rose's competitiveness, so if you didn't know better it might look like Muhammad Ali gloating over a KO'd opponent. Might change the way you think of him. A shame it shortened Fosse's career; he was a good one! Carl Hubbel's 1934 strikeouts probably remain the greatest feat in All Star History, and I also remember Reggie Jackson's incredible home run in Detroit that looked like a scene in The Natural, and an All Star game at the Astrodome with Willie Mays pretty much inventing the winning run with his base running, a la Jackie Robinson.
  10. MC Horoscope
    What Rose did was imo very far from what the White Sox did in 1919. He's been punished long enough,and I agree that he should have been punished. He should not have lied about his gambling and connections to some shady characters and drugs. On the other hand, his records still stand in the Hall of Fame, and he's featured prominently on displays about the Big Red Machine. He just doesn't have a plaque on the wall of fame.
  11. MC Horoscope
    Maybe it wasn't a good year for heat in the peppers. I really can't remember. They can't have been very hot if I used that many. Some years that would have been too hot for me! Should peppers get a lot of water for potency or just a little? We have had a pretty wet winter! It rained a lot before we had snow and ice.
  12. MC Horoscope
    30 years in Louisiana, 29 in Maryland, which makes me (that's right!) 39.
  13. MC Horoscope
    My shrimp were probably 20-30 count and I cut them in 2 or 3 pieces each when I peeled them. I just want pieces that can fit on my spoon.
  14. MC Horoscope
    Sounds like a good time in NOLA! I am going to Brennan's in May and Pesce if I can. Pesce is another Donald Link restaurant. I got the recommendations here on the Don Rocks board under Intrepid Traveler.
  15. MC Horoscope
    Let me know how it turns out!
  16. MC Horoscope
    Hi darkstar I like the oyster poboy at Johnny's Half Shell. Lunch only, I believe. In fact I like their gumbo too, though I have to say it's on the thick side with filé which I am not used to. I haven't been to Bayou Bakery but I hear it's really good. If I left anybody out let me know. I might not have been there. I miss the old Louisiana Express on Bethesda Avenue! I even miss the Copeland's Restaurant that was on Rockville Pike. It's a Hooters now! As for peppers, I believe they all lose intensity with age in the freezer. My mother used to pickle peppers, which my father liked to put uncooked in his bowl of gumbo at the table. We called them cornichons, but I don't know if it's the same pepper by that name that you can get in the grocery stores today. Anyway he was the only one in the family who liked that. You're right, Avery Island is not far away from Vermilion parish, but no, I didn't know of anybody making their own hot sauces. Pickled peppers were common. I grew these tabasco peppers for my gumbo here in Maryland. I don't use hot sauce very much, to tell you the truth, so I can't answer question 3. I know I use a recipe for a Maryland crab dip that adds the hot sauce while cooking, so that bit about not using it while cooking sounds like a myth. I try to go for a hot sauce that's not too vinegary. Louisiana Gold is a brand like that.
  17. MC Horoscope
    (I saved and updated this pictorial I did for eGullet in 2005) No intention to brew controversy here. Not claiming this is the only authentic or good way to cook okra and shrimp gumbo. Just posting stuff from my experience. Your mileage may vary (and probably will!) Here's a shrimp and okra gumbo done the old-timey way in Vermilion parish, Louisiana. Key concept, "a." Not the only one. Call it Cajun, Creole, whatever you want. It's pretty common where I am from. It's basically a smothered okra dish converted to a gumbo, sort of the way a chicken fricasee is converted to a gumbo. We started with two pounds of okra, a large onion, and a large bell pepper. Two-thirds cup of vegetable oil. We also had two pounds of Gulf shrimp, which we peeled and seasoned in advance with salt, black pepper and red pepper and kept in the ice box. With the shells we added a large onion cut in two and several stalks of celery, water, and made a shrimp stock. The final product took 8 cups of shrimp stock. Here's how the okra and vegetable mixture looked at the beginning of the process: Put a lid on it and cook it over medium heat. Our electric stove has settings for Lo-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-HI and we put it on 6 but lowered it to 5 or 4 whenever it started scorching. We stirred fairly often, about every 10 or 15 minutes, and occasionally added a little water to help out. After a half hour it looked something like this: It's pretty slimy at this stage. The idea is to cook it down until that slime is gone and the okra has considerably disintegrated. Then we will add tomato sauce and shrimp stock, and shrimp. I wasn't able to capture the texture too well with my camera, but you will get the idea. After an hour the texture and the color are changing: This needs to go some more! The smell is terrific. This is going to be very concentrated okra, very thick! We won't be using any roux at all with this gumbo. It will be plenty thick because of the okra. It looks something like this after an hour and a half. The volume seems reduced about half. Even the color is changing to something like brown. When it doesn't stick anymore and you can scrape your spoon on the bottom of the pot and it's clear, that's when you know it's where you want it to be. Ready to add a cup of tomato sauce. You can add less if you like. Or none at all. But I like it with tomato. Why not? And it's pretty common, as I said, where I am from. You could stop right now and freeze this stuff! It can serve as the beginning of your next gumbo, or you could serve it as a smothered okra dish. But we added 8 cups of shrimp stock: You can cook it without the lid now. Season it as you like with salt and pepper. We also added about 5 Tabasco peppers from our garden. They weren't very hot. These were in our freezer from last year's garden, and they lose some of their potency. Let it go about 10 more minutes before adding your seasoned shrimp: We cooked this about 20 more minutes because we like the shrimp pretty tender. Done at last! The smell of a happy home and a good bowl of shrimp and okra gumbo country style as done in Vermilion parish, Louisiana! Lest you say that gumbo never has tomato in it, well, yes, it's pretty common in SW Louisiana but ONLY in this okra gumbo. They served us okra and shrimp (dried shrimp) gumbo in the school cafeteria in Abbeville, LA when I was growing up! Today you can get okra and shrimp gumbo pretty much like this at the following places I have had it: Soop's Restaurant, Maurice, LA Their store, Hebert's Specialty Meats also sells it Pat's Waterfront Restaurant, Henderson, LA Don's Seafood Hut, Lafayette, LA Riverside Inn, Lafayette, LA Edit to Add: There's a brand of frozen okra called Today's Harvest that works really well. It's tender and doesn't take as long as the brand I used in this pictorial.
  18. MC Horoscope
    You may recall Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations episode in which he went to New Orleans then to Cajun country. In one segment he went to a boucherie (a pig slaughtering) and the cooks made a roux in a big kettle over a fire. He remarked that he had never seen such a dark roux before. The use of a roux is very common in Cajun country. I can probably count on one hand the number of times in my life that I have ever had gumbo with filé as the thickener. And I believe it was when I was following a Paul Prudhomme recipe! The thickeners I know are either roux (dark for seafood, medium brown for darker meat) or okra cooked down almost to a paste. In that NR episode Tony also visited Glenda's Creole Kitchen in Breaux Bridge. I went there and found their food to be the same as Cajun. I couldn't see any difference between Glenda's and what you would get at many Cajun plate lunch places. I guess the word Creole in that instance was referring to "Creole of color".
  19. MC Horoscope
    Yes, I went to USL then LSU for grad school from 76-79. Moved to this area in 85. Love it here! I went to Mamou Mardi Gras a few times in the 70s too. We might have run into each other. Fred's Lounge was something else! Mamou in Evangeline Parish is one of those places where the French people were originally Napoleonic soldiers left behind, hence really Creole, though it's considered the epicenter of Cajun music and they call themselves Cajun! My area, Vermilion parish, was full of those families that came from Acadia. That's part of the story too. Better lands went to the Acadians with Spanish land grants in the south like Abbeville, Lafayette, New Iberia, St. Martinsville, and worse lands went to left behind Creoles in the more northern areas like Mamou and Ville Platte. Their cuisine featured more game like squirrel and smoked meats, while ours featured more seafood. It's pretty well described in Marcelle Bienvenu's book. She describes 8 different sub-regions, which would only make any sense to a native! It all blends together today, but back then we thought of people from 40 miles away as strangers who were not like us at all! Bienvenu distinguishes between Cajuns east of the Atchafalaya and those to the west. A wheat/corn line -- wheat to the east, hence French bread, and corn to the west, hence cornbread and cush cush! Macque choux, that's Cajun! I think she's on target about that.
  20. MC Horoscope
    Ok, this will ramble, but I decided just to copy and paste and expand a bit on some PMs with Don: Background/Disclaimer: I am not a scholar on these issues, and my perspective is influenced by my experience. I am originally from the country, Vermilion parish, LA, in the Southwest part of the state. I grew up understanding myself to be a Cajun, but apparently the actual history is a bit more complicated than that. The term Cajun used to be a pejorative, a shortening of the word Acadian, and Acadia was the original French name of Nova Scotia before it became part of British Canada. But Cajuns are by no means solely the descendants of people who moved from Canada to Louisiana. It's much broader than "descendants of Acadian settlers." It's a mix, and since it was the predominant ethnic group in the area it actually assimilated other cultures into the mix, including Spanish, German, Scotch-Irish, etc. The common denominator was its own dialect of French. The original French people who settled in present day Nova Scotia came mostly from the French regions of Poitou, but also Brittany and Normandy. Cajuns are the people from the intermarriage between Acadian exiles and Creoles who were French speaking people already living in Louisiana because they were born in the New World. One of the meanings of the word Creole in Louisiana was a French speaking colonist born in the New World. I have ancestors that came from Nova Scotia, (Acadia,) but also ancestors who were French colonists already in Louisiana, hence Creoles, near the "German Coast" south of New Orleans (near Des Allemands and further south to Lafourche parish.) This mix of French from Canada and French from France -- people already colonizing Louisiana, soldiers abandoned in Louisiana by Napoleon, etc.) is what is most typical, even in the Southwest part of the state. (Carl Brasseaux is one of the leading scholars researching this area, and this is his most definitive work: Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877 (1992). He argues that Cajun is a NEW ethnic group borne of this mix.) The word Creole has different meanings in Acadiana (a geographic region for where the Cajuns live) and New Orleans. In SW Louisiana the French speaking black people prefer to call themselves Creole instead of Cajun, and that goes for their food and musical style. Creole food, creole music. Etc. It'd be hard to find non-black French speaking people referring themselves as Creole in those SW parishes. It's different in New Orleans. Creole refers to the upper crust early French and Spanish families and their descendants, but also to black French speaking people, and today even people who lost the French language long ago. ____________ As far as cuisine goes, most people call New Orleans cuisine Creole, and rural SW Louisiana cuisine Cajun. This changed somewhat since the 70s-80s with Paul Prudhomme's infusion of Cajun cuisine into New Orleans Creole cuisine. Brennan's and Emeril Lagasse had a large role in this mix too. I think of more refined dishes from New Orleans being Creole, and more earthy rustic dishes being Cajun. But both Creoles and Cajuns claim gumbo, jambalaya, etouffee, sauce piquantes, and a lot of other dishes. So you can't even say New Orleans is strictly Creole anymore. Cajun moved to the city, and Creole moved to the country! Some western towns have every bit as good a French bread and poboy as the city. 22 parishes make up Acadiana, west of New Orleans to Texas, but the word itself was made up by a popular weatherman on local TV in Lafayette in the 60s! _____________ It's a complicated topic for sure. Social class plays into it, too. In New Orleans I guess there's your working class Creole with stuff like red beans and rice, the poboy, the muffaletta, Willie Mae's fried chicken, as opposed to more refined restaurant dishes like Oysters Rockefeller, Oysters Bienville, Trout Almandine, Bananas Foster, etc. As I said, some dishes like gumbo, jambalaya, etc. are so universal, they're claimed both in the city and the country! Wouldn't want to start a fight but I would say that boudin and crawfish are definitely from the country, therefore Cajun. I guess I get a lot of these ideas from a book by Marcelle Bienvenu called Stir the Pot: The HIstory of Cajun Cuisine. Bienvenu is from St. Martinsville in the Cajun region but she's been a writer in New Orleans for decades and she contributed a lot to Brennan's. About 11,000 Acadians were expelled in 1755. A generation lived in various colonies and France before many, maybe most, made it to Louisiana under the grace of Spain which owned Louisiana in 1785. Cajun is a shortening of the word Acadian. But the cuisine and music and lifestyle bears little resemblance to Nova Scotia or Quebec. (the languages in Louisiana and the Maritime provinces retain a lot of similarities, though!) The people who became the Cajuns really started something new. Probably drew on the Spanish for jambalaya because it's something like a paella, and probably drew on southern France for gumbo because it's something like a bouillabaise. Probably some African influence showing with the use of okra, and some Native American thrown in with the use of corn and tomatoes. I'll have to dust off my copy of Bienvenu! _____________ So how does all this answer the question, "Where do YOU go for Cajun food?" Chère, I go in my kitchen, me!
  21. MC Horoscope
    Had that tiramisu Friday night. It's still great!
  22. MC Horoscope
    Went on a Friday recently and didn't see anyone over 65! Really good boudin blanc. Cassoulet. They were specials.
  23. MC Horoscope
    Sorry we couldn't make it to the main room again, but we were very pleased with our experience at the bar this Saturday! We were in line at 5:30 and so were two other couples. It fills up quickly. By the time we left there were people waiting for any available seat at the bar. Don't know why we didn't take advantage of this deal before! Hits were the pumpkin soup with lobster and rolled oats; crispy pork belly; and braised shoat with potato and kale. Missed one of the appetizers: salmon sashimi. Root beer float and coconut mousse for dessert. Cheese for an extra $22. They don't wheel out the cart for you to choose from but you review with the waiter what kind of cheeses you like beforehand and then they choose for you. I am sure if you are more knowledgeable than us you can pick for yourselves. Wine pairings for $25 were a bargain. Going to miss this place!
  24. MC Horoscope
    Still open at the bar on Saturdays? I think we might pop in next Saturday. Sounds too good to pass up.
  25. MC Horoscope
    That's right. It's a sonic upgrade from the bootleg copies I have been hearing for years. So I know the content.
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