Living Our Dream

Shreveport, LA Part II: Mudbug Madness

Shreveport, LA

As we said in our last post, Mudbug Madness is an annual crawfish festival that runs from Thurday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend near the Shreveport riverfront. We were downtown too late on Thursday to catch the early afternoon entertainment and too early to catch the evening entertainment, so we headed back into Shreveport around noon on Friday. There are several free lots where you can park, and we didn't have any problem finding a spot.

This year marks the 28th Mudbug Madness, which features Cajun music, Cajun food, and crafts. The event is held in Festival Plaza near the riverfront. Admission is $5 per person, but it's free on Thursday and Friday before 5:00 PM - another good reason to go back on Friday rather than try to go Thursday evening.

Mudbug Madness was started in 1983 when several locals decided to do something about the criticism that Shreveport was located so close to the Texas border it was more like Texas than Louisiana. They started the festival to showcase Louisiana foods, Louisiana music, and Louisiana fun.

On our way into the festival, we stopped for a tourist photo.

There are several entrances to Mudbug Madness, but the one we used was close to where the craft booths are located. We saw leather belts, bird houses, Louisiana-themed paintings, photography, and even hand-rolled cigars.

There was also a fairly big children's area with games, a bounce house, face painting and a stage for children's entertainment.

We stopped briefly at the first of two musical stages that had a group playing rock music.

Then we walked on to where the food booths were. We had tried crawfish once before, and we weren't too sure about them; but we couldn't go to a festival called Mudbug Madness without at least trying them one more time. The only problem was there were so many food booths to choose from, it was hard to decide what to get.

In addition to other Louisiana favorites like boudin (a pork sausage), jambalya, and red beans and rice, there were boiled crawfish, crawfish pies, and crawfish étouffée (pronounced Ā-two-fay). Since boiled crawfish are a lot of work to get at the meat, we decided on crawfish étouffée, which is a crawfish stew served over rice.

The étouffée was good with a nice, rich flavor from the dark-brown roux that was used as a base. But we're still not too sure about crawfish. They're not bad, but we expected them to be sweeter like lobster or langostinos.

Another reason we wanted to go Mudbug Madness was to hear some traditional Louisiana Zydeco music. The name Zydeco comes from a French Creole phrase that means literally "the snap beans aren't salty." The figurative meaning is that times are hard.

Zydeco is a form of folk music that started in southwest Louisiana in the early 1800s. It had Creole, Cajun and African influences, and it usually has a fast beat. The primary instrument in Zydeco music is a button or piano accordion. Another traditional Zydeco instrument is the washboard, which is sometimes incorporated into a specially-made instrument called a vest frottoir that is worn over the shoulders like a bib. Zydeco music has matured over the years and now incorporates elements of R & B, soul, hip hop, jazz, reggae and rock.

The name of the band that was playing at the second musical stage was Cedryl Ballou and the Zydeco Trendsetters. They were very good, including their 12-year old drummer.

As Zydeco music moved from homes to church community centers and finally to rural dance halls and night clubs, the music attracted dancers who incorporated different styles including two-step, waltz, shuffle, and rock and roll. We enjoyed watching several couples who were dancing at the festival.

We had an excellent time at Mudbug Madness sampling Cajun cuisine and listening to Zydeco music. By going on Friday afternoon, not only did we beat the crowds, we also got in for free.

We're hoping for at least one more sightseeing outing before leaving the area, so stay tuned.

Shreveport, LA Part I: Shreveport Riverfront

Shreveport, LA

We started our sightseeing in Shreveport with a drive downtown to see the area around the Shreveport riverfront. Shreveport, LA, which was originally named Shreve Town, was established in 1836 on the banks of the Red River. It was named for Captain Henry Shreve who was a riverboat captain and inventor who designed a special boat to clear log jams (called snags) from rivers to make the rivers navigable.

The Red River had a series of log jams 150 miles long called the Great Raft. The section of the jam around the area that was to become Shreve Town extended from 17 miles upstream to 8 miles downstream. Captain Shreve was asked by the Secretary of War to clear the Great Raft from the Red River in 1832. The Work was completed in 1838. There is a statue of Henry Shreve gazing out over the Red River in front of the Riverview Theater in downtown Shreveport.

In spite of the fact it was a weekday, and in spite of the fact it was the opening day of Mudbug Madness (more about that later), we found a free parking spot in a little gravel lot right along the river. We began walking upstream.

There is a nice riverfront park where they apparently have concerts and special events. The park had some interesting stainless steel roses along the water. The roses have colored lights in them that light up at night.

The next photo is a closeup detail of one of the roses.

The glass-domed building near the center of the photo below is the Barnwell Conservatory, which is located adjacent to the riverfront park.

Although we usually like anything that has to do with plants and flowers, the Barnwell Conservatory is fairly small, and it was much too nice a day to go inside to see flowers. We were content to walk around the small outdoor garden and then continue strolling along the river.

Behind the conservatory was a purple martin house. Purple martins, which are members of the swallow family, are very fast and agile, so we couldn't get a good photo of an individual bird because they were too busy flitting back and forth trying to keep their newly-hatched offspring fed.

Purple martins are considered to be highly beneficial because they eat a lot of insects. Unfortunately, the purple martin population in the U. S. declined with the release and spread of European starlings in the 20th century.

In front of the conservatory, Paul stopped to admire a pelican sculpture.

Back along the river, we saw the boat for the one-hour "Spirit of the Red" sightseeing cruise pass by.

There are also lots of casinos along the river. In the photo above of the Barnwell Conservatory, the tall buildings behind the conservatory are the Eldorado Casino (left) and Sam's Town.

Shreveport has a sister city right across the river called Bossier (pronounced BO-zher) City where we could see more casinos. On the Bossier City side of the river, the casinos are on riverboats on the water and the hotel part of the casino is a tower on land. The next photo shows the Horseshoe Hotel and Casino.

A little way downstream, the riverboat of the Boomtown Casino almost looks like it is steaming around the bend in the river.

Also right across the river in Bossier City is the Louisiana Boardwalk. After we walked along the river on the Shreveport side, we hopped in the car and drove across the bridge to the Louisiana Boardwalk on the Bossier City side.

The Louisiana Boardwalk is a large, outdoor mall that reminded us a lot of Branson Landing in Branson, MO.

There is a trolley that visitors can ride to save steps.

We went on our little excursion to the Shreveport/Bossier City riverfront a little later in the day because there is a Texas Roadhouse in Bossier City very close to the Louisiana Boardwalk. Participating Texas Roadhouse restaurants have 8 or 10 different earlybird specials for $7.99 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM Mondays through Thursdays. Our favorite is the 6-ounce sirloin steak. Since we're on our 2011 Zeller Foodie Tour, we figured we might as well take advantage of the special since we were going to be so close.

One of the fun things about Texas Roadhouse is the fact they have barrels on salted peanuts to munch on while you're waiting for your table, and they don't care if you throw the shells on the floor. Since we were there early, we didn't have to wait. Fortunately, they put buckets of the peanuts on the tables, too.

Dinners include two sides, rolls and cinnamon butter (yum!). We always get a salad for one of our sides. Margery likes the Caesar salad, and Paul likes the house salad with bleu cheese dressing. For our other side, Margery got a baked potato, and Paul got mashed. Margery could hardly wait for the photo. Her fork is poised in the background with her first bite ready to go.

As usual, the dinner was excellent. The steaks were juicy and full of flavor. A 6-ounce steak isn't huge, but with a few peanuts beforehand, a nice salad, rolls and butter, and potatoes, we got plenty to eat.

We mentioned Mudbug Madness earlier, and we promised more information. Mudbug is another term for crawfish (south) or crayfish (north). Mudbug Madness is Shreveport's annual crawfish festival that is held Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. The entertainment at the festival on Thursday and Friday runs from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM, then there is a big gap in the schedule until evening. Because it was Thursday, and because we went to downtown Shreveport later in the day so we could go to dinner at Texas Roadhouse, we missed the late morning/early afternoon entertainment for the day. Therefore, we decided to go back a little earlier the next day so we could see what Mudbug Madness was all about. Our next post will tell you what we found at Mudbug Madness.

Morgan City, LA

Berwick, LA

Although we decided to relax the last couple of days before we left Berwick, we were curious about how high the water levels were along the Atchafalaya River in town, so we took a drive over the bridge that lies between Berwick and the larger, neighboring town of Morgan City. The photo below shows the flood wall in Berwick. The flood wall is gray with light blue flood gates and sits in front of the trees to the right of the photo. Water was only a little way up the wall, which was only a slight increase over what it was when we first arrived in the area 5 days prior.

As we approached the Morgan City side of the river, we could get a better view of their riverfront, and we could see the water was up over the wharf. The water was only a foot or so deep at the base of the flood wall, which is about the same as it was in Berwick. We could also see the Morgan City flood wall had a walkway on top, so we decided to drive into town to take a closer look.

We parked and took the steps to the top of the wall where we could see a depth gauge with the water at the 8.5-foot mark. The gauge is on the wharf where the water is only a few feet deep, and the 8.5-foot depth relates to whatever their reference point is rather than the actual water depth at that point on the wharf.

Flood level in Morgan City is 4 feet. At a level of about 7 feet, the water just starts to overtop the wharf. The level was 7.7 feet when we first arrived, and it was 8.5 feet when we took the above photo. The crest is predicted to be less than 11 feet. The flood walls are at least 18 to 20 feet high, so that means if the water goes up another 2 or 2.5 feet, it will be nowhere near overtopping the flood walls.

The next photo is a view downstream. The wharf, an old abandoned warehouse downstream, and an oil company dock upstream of where we were standing were on the river side of the wall and were flooded, but there was no flooding anywhere on the city side of the wall.

There was no chance of anybody violating this parking ordinance, unless someone tied up their boat.

From the the top of the flood wall we had a good view of the Berwick lighthouse over on the other side of the river. The lighthouse originally stood along the Atchafalaya Bay to the south of Berwick to mark a shoal at the mouth of the bay. Just before WWI, a new channel was cut through the shoal. When a new lighthouse was built to mark the new channel, the old lighthouse was abandoned. In 1987, the town of Berwick rescued the old lighthouse and moved it up the Atchafalaya River next to the town.

After we left the flood wall, we took a short drive through town. The next photo shows a grand old house that was near the river.

Some of the homes in town looked like they hadn't changed a bit over the years. Even though the car needs some work, Paul liked the old De Soto Custom parked in front of the house in the next photo. It is most likely a 1946 to 1948 model.

We had a great time in Cajun Country. We never did get to go on our Cajun swamp tour because every time they thought they were going to have enough people (they needed 8 to make the trip economically feasible), someone cancelled. Finally, on our last day in the area, it looked like we would finally go; but then the Corps of Engineers closed one of locks on the tour route to better control water flow during flooding, and the tour had to be cancelled again. Oh well, now we have an excuse to go back - like we need one.

Our next destination is Shreveport, so stay tuned.

Jeanerette Museum

Berwick, LA

Jeanerett is a small town along Bayou Teche about half way between New Iberia and Berwick where we were staying. Margery found the Jeanerette Museum when she was doing her research into things to do.

Jeanerette is called "Sugar City," and, in addition to local history, the Jeanerette Museum has a lot of information on growing sugarcane and processing it into sugar. We have been hearing so much about sugarcane at all the Louisiana plantations we have visited, we wanted to learn more.

Another reason we decided to go the Jeanerette Museum was so we would have a good excuse to drive along Bayou Teche. The drive is quite scenic with many old plantation homes that were built in the 1800s. The photo below shows just a few of the mansions we saw.

Since most of the homes are privately owned, it's hard to find out much information about them unless you talk to the locals. The house in the photo below, however, had a plaque on the pillar by the gate that said "Arlington 1861." When we later Googled the name, we found out the house was for sale for $995,000. 

Franklin is another town along Bayou Teche on the way to Jeanerette. Franklin, which was named for Benjamin Franklin, was founded in 1808. Franklin is very charming with its white lampposts running down the center of the main street. The lampposts, which date back to 1915, were restored in 2005.

The town of Jeanerette was named for John W. Jeanerette, who came to the area in the 1820s from South Carolina. He worked as a tutor for a planter's family, and he also opened a store and saloon. By the 1830s, he had saved enough money to buy a plantation. John Jeanerette also became the town's first postmaster.

When we got to Jeanerette, we had no problem finding the museum. The Jeanerette Museum is in a 100-year old cedar house on the banks of Bayou Teche in back of a small park right on the main road.

Inside the museum, we watched their excellent video on sugar. From the video, we learned more about how sugarcane is grown and processed. Although sugarcane does produce seeds, it is most commonly grown commercially using stem cuttings. Short sections of stalks containing at least one node are buried horizontally in a shallow trench. Sprouts appear from the nodes. The photo below shows a field of young sugarcane plants.

Although sugarcane is still harvested by hand in some locations, growers in the United States use mechanical harvesters that cut the stalks at the base, strip the leaves and chop the stalks into short lengths all in one operation.

After harvesting, the canes are taken to the sugar mill where they are washed, shredded into small pieces and crushed between rollers to extract the juice. Crushing machines used to be turned by hand or by animal power. Outside the museum, there is a mule-powered sugarcane crusher. The canes would have been fed into the slit in the side of the machine where rollers would have pressed out the juice into the iron kettle.

Bagasse is the byproduct left over after the sweet juice is extracted from the woody stalks. The bagasse is dried and used for fuel for the boilers that produce steam to power the sugar mill.

The juice is then mixed with lime and heated to drive off water. In the past, shallow, open kettles were used. We have seen those kettles everywhere we have gone in southern Louisiana. Modern methods use vacuum kettles to remove water more efficiently at lower temperatures to prevent scorching of the sugar.

After most of the water is driven off, the sugar begins to crystallize. Molasses, which is the thick syrup that is left, is removed from the sugar by centrifuges. The resulting raw sugar is then sent to a refinery for final purification and bleaching into white sugar. Incidentally, most of the brown sugar we buy in the grocery store is really white sugar that has had molasses added back.

On average, one ton of sugarcane yields 180 pounds of raw sugar, 7 gallons of molasses and 270 pounds of bagasse. The remainder of the weight is water, which is evaporated.

One room in the museum had a lot of wooden foundry patterns used to cast gears and other components for local sugar mills.

The foundry, which is located next door, donated the patterns that are no longer needed to the museum. The reason some of the patterns are no longer needed is because many of the local mills have closed due to hurricane damage and environmental pressures against the burning of bagasse for fuel. The foundry is shown in the next photo.

The room with the patterns also had a great piece of local folk art in the form of a alligator hand-carved from cypress.

In addition to sugar-related items, the museum also had lots of photos and items that speak to local history such as these Mardi Gras costumes...

...and these household and kitchen items.

There was also a whole room dedicated to local wildlife. We called it the "man cave." There were mounted specimens of fish on the walls, and there were examples of other wildlife like the armadillo, alligator, wood duck, bobcat and otter shown in the next photo. The canoe-like boat is a pirogue. The pirogue is a traditional Cajun fishing boat built from cypress. The flat bottom is suited to the shallow waters of the swamps and bayous.

One surprising thing we learned about at the museum was that there was a WW II prisoner-of-war camp just 2 miles west of Jeanerette. Most of the prisoners were captured in North Africa and were under the command of General Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox." The prisoners were employed on local farms and engaged in the cultivation of sugar cane.

While the museum isn't a major attraction, we did enjoy it, especially the video on sugar production. It is worth stopping if you are taking the scenic route along the bayou.

Another thing we found out about when we visited the museum was Le Jeune's Bakery, which is located a couple of blocks away. The museum had several photos and newspaper articles about the bakery, which has been owned and operated by 5 generations of the Le Jeune family dating back to 1884. All their products are made from scratch using recipes that have been handed down from generation to generation.

LeJeune's Bakery specializes in French bread that they bake three times a day. If you know when to go, you can get it hot out of the oven. But we were interested in their other specialty - ginger cakes. In addition to being able to buy at the bakery, several local grocery stores carry Le Jeune ginger cakes, and you can also order their products online.

Signs direct customers to the side door because they're too busy in the back baking to man the front counter. In the photo below, Paul is trying to decide how many ginger cakes to buy.

The ginger cakes are fairly large (probably 6 to 8 ounces each), and they're only $1.75. We bought two. We should have bought more because we started eating the first one right there in the parking lot. Yum! They were as good as the ones we remember getting at the King's Arms Tavern Bakery in Williamsburg - maybe better.

We again took the scenic route along the bayou back to the motor home as we munched on our ginger cake. We planned to relax for the last couple of days of our stay in Berwick before we headed out to our next destination.

Avery Island Part II: Tabasco Pepper Sauce

Berwick, LA

In our last post we told you a little about the history of Avery Island and about how Edmund McIlhenny married into the Avery family. After the Civil War, someone (possibly a Civil War veteran who was passing through the area) gave Edmund some chile pepper seeds he said were from Mexico. Edmund was an avid gardener, so he planted the seeds. It is uncertain how he ended up with his final pepper sauce concoction, but because it was such a hit with his friends, he began to sell it in 1868.

Tabasco is the name of a region in Mexico, and since the original pepper seeds were thought to have come from Mexico, Edmund used that name for his pepper sauce.

McIlhenny Company offers factory tours 7 days a week, except major holidays. Tours start outside the factory visitor entrance.

The tour begins with an excellent video detailing how Tabasco sauce is made starting with growing the peppers. In 1965, the McIlhenny Company ran out of room on Avery Island to grow all the peppers they needed for their production, so they began growing peppers in Central and South America. All the seed peppers are still grown on Avery Island, and a member of the McIlhenny family personally selects only the best plants from which to save seed. Most of the peppers for the sauce, however, are now grown in other locations. A big advantage to growing in more than one location is the supply is assured in the event of hurricane, insects or disease at any one place.

According to company tradition, all peppers are picked by hand at the peak of ripeness because that's the best way to assure they are at their best flavor and maximum juiciness. As the peppers ripen, they turn from green to yellow to orange and finally to red, and they don't all ripen at the same time. In case there is any question about which peppers to pick, employees are given "le petit baton rouge" - a little red stick, which is a dowel painted the preferred shade of red for picking.

The peppers are mashed and mixed with a small amount of salt mined right there on Avery Island. The mash is placed into barrels that have been used to age bourbon whiskey, after which a thick layer of Avery Island salt is placed on top of the lid. The layer of salt doesn't directly affect the flavor of the peppers, but it acts as a natural barrier to protect the barrel contents while allowing gasses to escape during the fermentation and aging process. The mash is aged for up to three years.

After aging, the mash is inspected by a member of the McIlhenny family then blended with white vinegar. After the mixture is stirred intermittently for up to 30 days, the seeds and skins are strained out, and the sauce is bottled.

The caked salt from the lids of the aging barrels is put out around the island as salt licks for the deer. That way, their venison is pre-seasoned. ;-)

Seeds strained out from the mash-vinegar mixture are sold to be used to extract capsaicin to make analgesic rubs like Bengay and to make pepper spray.

After we watched the video, we walked along a glass window where we could see various bottling and packaging operations. Mixing and aging take place in other areas of the plant that are not part of the tour.

McIlhenny bottles an average of 720,000 bottles of sauce a day. The photo below shows the mid-day count for the day we were there. They needed to step it up if they were going to get close to their average that day.

There was a stack of labels by the window marked with the names of various countries - Uruguay, Czechoslovakia, Ivory Coast, Greece, Saudi Arabia and more. Tabasco is labeled in 22 languages and dialects and sold in over 160 countries.

At the end of the tour, there was a small Tabasco museum that had examples of old bottles and equipment. There was also a scale model of Avery Island. You can see how high the island sits above the surrounding landscape. The salt mine is located on the other side of the island. The red and gray buildings toward the right are the McIlhenny factory. Rows of pepper plants stretch out to the left.

After the tour, we took time to check out the Tabasco products in the company store.

In case you're hungry, there is also a lunch stand outside where they sell local dishes such as jambalaya, crawfish etoufee, seafood gumbo, red beans and rice, and more.

In the store, you can sample all the Tabasco sauces. We like a little heat, but we're not real crazy about Tabasco because of the sour nature of the sauce that comes from the fact vinegar is such an important ingredient. However, they have a new Sweet & Spicy sauce that Paul loved.

In addition to being able to sample all the sauces, they also had Tabasco soda and Tabasco ice cream. In the photo below, Paul is sampling jalapeño ice cream. It was delish - sweet with a definite jalapeño flavor and with a little bit of a kick.

In the next photo, Margery is checking out Tabasco hot pepper jelly.

By the time we finished visiting Jungle Gardens, taking the Tabasco factory tour and visiting the company store, we were kind of hungry. Rather than try something from the lunch stand outside the company store, we decided to continue our 2011 Zeller Foodie Tour by going back to Duffy's for a late lunch/early supper (lupper). Margery also had her heart set on a chocolate soda ever since we were too full the last time we were at Duffy's.

Margery had a barbecued brisket po' boy (in the background), and Paul had roast beef. This time, we each ordered only a half plus an order of onion rings to share. In New Orleans and the surrounding areas, Po' boys (no matter what kind), are traditionally served "dressed," which means they have lettuce, tomatoes and mayonnaise on them. Like the shrimp po' boys we had the other day at Duffy's, the meat was overflowing the bread. Everything was great.

Even with only half a po' boy we still got plenty to eat, but not so much that Margery didn't have room for her chocolate soda. It was gooood.

After lupper, we made our way back to the motor home. We still have more planned for Cajun Country, so look for our next post.