A Friday Afternoon Treat

Most of the time, we like to eat homegrown food raised right here on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  It is good stuff and we enjoy growing it and cooking it and especially eating it.  On some Fridays, however, we bend the rules a little bit.  Our family jumps in the car and heads due west.  The paved road soon turns to a gravel road and the dust billows up in big clouds behind us, making me glad that the car hasn't been recently washed.  We slow down as a mama duck and her ducklings cross the road and enter a ditch and hide in the grass.

We drive over the small bridge that brings us over Bayou Chene.  A family is standing on the edge of the bridge peering into the water below.  Several young boys take aim with their BB guns at a turtle or a stump or perhaps a snake.  We wave and continue westward, coming to a stop sign where the washboard road makes us bounce a bit.   After a minute or two, we turn onto a paved road and drive due south for about 3 miles, reaching our destination.

We get out of the car and go inside.  Right behind the glass case under a heat lamp, we see our prize - Boudin Balls!  Boudin that has been battered and deep fried!  Sometimes we get the plain spicy boudin balls.  Other times we get the boudin balls stuffed with jalapenos and cheese!

We climb back inside the car with the box of boudin balls and dole out napkins for everyone.  We can never wait until we get home to eat them.  Boudin balls are quite tricky to eat in the car.  As you bite into them, the napkin doesn't quite catch the pieces of rice and meat that fall onto your shirt and into the cracks of the car seat. 

We drive back home full of boudin and turn back in our driveway.  The sun is now setting as we disembark.  It is a nice little treat that we enjoy.  Boudin balls are hard to beat!

Making Stuffed Bell Peppers with a Cajun Twist

We have a Purple Beauty Bell Pepper Plant in the garden that survived the winter and is loaded up with nice, big fat purple peppers.  We cook with them quite often.  Tricia makes ‘dirty rice’ and stuffs the peppers and bakes them.  It is a big favorite at our house.  I was talking to a buddy the other day who told me an idea on how to up our Stuffed Bell Pepper game.  Here’s how we did it:

                                                                                                                                

First, we picked a peck of purple (and red) peppers from the garden:  (We didn't really pick a peck.  A peck is 2 gallons.)

The strange thing about it is that if the purple peppers stay on the plant for too long, they turn red.  Oh well…

Then we cut the tops off of each pepper to make a receptacle in which to carry our stuffing.  We don’t waste the tops that we cut off, though.  That is cubed up and used to cook with later on.  You'll notice that only the outside of the pepper is purple; the inside is green.  I guess this definitively proves that beauty is only skin deep...

Then we dunk the peppers in some boiling water prior to stuffing them.  Here’s where things went a little haywire, but it won’t affect the taste.  If you notice below, all of our beautiful purple peppers turned green once put in boiling water.  The red ones retained their color, but sadly, the purple bell peppers were now green.

Now for the pièce de résistance.  Rather than stuffing with dirty rice, we are going to use some spicy boudin from Cormier’s Specialty Meats right here in town.  Cormier’s has good boudin, sausage, stuffed chickens, cracklins and any other type of Cajun specialty meat you want to buy.

I first began just squeezing the boudin stuffing out of the casing and into each pepper, but boy, was that ever a mess!

While it got the job done, there is a more efficient way, and that is to slice the casing off with a sharp knife and grab chunks of the boudin and stuff into the peppers that are all lined up in baking dishes.  In no time flat, all the peppers were stuffed and ready for the oven.

We placed these bad boys in the oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.  Soon they came out of the oven and were ready to be consumed.  They smelled great!

Here's the 'money' shot:

Boudin Stuffed Bell Peppers.  Not bad at all!  It certainly kicked them up a notch...