Tuesday, May 31, 2011.
Cajun Blast. Muriel's Team. He Is The Eggman.
The guests Mary Ann rounded up for today's Round Table radio show were unrelated to one another, but that's okay with me. Shows in which all the guests have something in common sound like a good idea, but I don't think they are. I believe in contrasts.
The first guest to arrive came all the way from Crowley, well within Cajun country. Brian Boulet was the inventor of a sprayable, well-seasoned basting oil called Cajun Blast. I was one of the first customers for the stuff when it came out in 2004. I was at Winn-Dixie buying supplies for the Sacred Heart Academy festival, when Mary Leigh was a student there. We ran a booth selling grilled chicken. (With four different sauces--people would be disappointed if I didn't put a spin on my food.) One of the stock clerks was setting up a big display of Cajun Blast, which had just entered the market. I looked at it and thought it would be a worthwhile experiment in seasoning chicken. We bought several more bottles before the weekend was over. We sold a hell of a lot of chicken.
"It's a by-product," Brian admitted. "We used to cook up a mix of onions, peppers, celery, tomatoes, and seasonings, and sell it to people who cooked big batches of all kinds of Cajun dishes. The clear oil would float to the top, and we'd ladle it out. We didn't know what to do with it, but it looked too good to just throw it away. We wound up with a lot of it, and we tried using it to marinate chicken and fish and stuff."
This was a successful accident. So was the idea of bottling it with a sprayer, which is what grabbed me back in 2004--even though it would up being too slow a way to season a lot of chicken. (We just dumped the bottle into a pan and dipped the chicken in it before grilling.)
The Cajun Blast guys created barbecue, lemon-herb, and garlic versions of Cajun Blast, and it's done well for them. Also in their line is barbecue sauce. More recently, they became the 5305th concern to roll out a Cajun-Creole dry seasoning mix, which they say is their best-selling product now. I still keep the whole line of Cajun Blast in my pantry and use it all the time, especially when grilling.
It's Creole tomato season, and the core personnel of Muriel's was here to talk about their annual Creole Tomato menu. Chef Gus Martin, managing partner Rick Gratia and his wife Denise stayed for the whole three hours. We talked about the special menu just a little. The ghost who lives at Muriel's wasn't mentioned. (Those who believe in such phenomena will find the evidence of his presence at the restaurant persuasive.)
The most interesting datum was that Muriel's does two or more wedding-related private parties per day every weekend, all year long. "St. Louis Cathedral added another wedding time to its schedule," he said. (The Cathedral is about sixty paces from Muriel's.) "It's very popular. To get married there, you have to make arrangements two years in advance." That wouldn't have worked for me and Mary Ann. We were married seven months after our first date.
Chef Gus's most intriguing point involved the entree in the Creole Tomato menu. It's a filet mignon with sauce chasseur--the French equivalent of Italian cacciatore. Both words mean "hunter," and both sauces include mushrooms and tomatoes. I've liked the idea of tomatoes and beef together since the days when the old Leona's in Gentilly served boiled beef brisket slathered over with spaghetti sauce, with the spaghetti on the side.
Also in the room was Fred Rittler, who owns Bassil's Ace Hardware. He's the guy to blame for the large presence of the Big Green Egg in conversations on the radio and in my life. In fact, tomorrow we're going to give away a Big Green Egg on the radio (but not one from Bassil's, for reasons only the advertising salespeople know). I got my Egg from Bassil's in 2004, and became a proselytizer on its behalf. What could we say about it that we haven't already said a thousand times? When somebody brings up the Big Green Egg on my show, that's the topic for the rest of the day.
The Muriel's team left at five. Replacing them was Jack Jelenko, a local wine distributor formerly known as Champagne Jack. He used to represent Duval-Leroy Champagne, but not now. "I'm Amador Jack now!" he said. He was here with Robert and Kim Morse, who make wine in Amador County in the Sierra foothills, under the names Morse Estate and Gioiello. Some Zinfandel, and a lot of Rhone varietals. I wish I had been there to taste them, but the other guests (including the Muriel's gang) did and seem to like them.
Mary Ann made a grilled chicken salad from the remains of Sunday's work on the Big Green Egg. I wasn't very hungry anyway, after that lunch yesterday at Fury's. Relative to the way I eat now, it was a binge.
