Camellia City Market

Earlier this year I posted about Slidell's first Farmers' Market opening
after years of the city's residents resorting to travelling elsewhere for fresh produce.



Since its birth in April of this year, the Camellia City Market has grown and is still branching out.

In July of this year the market hosted its first live cooking demonstration
with Slidell native John Besh.



Hubby and I visited the market yesterday in search for wonderful Mediterranean food
from Pinnur Foods.



And we found it!

Lucky for us there was another cooking demonstration starting just as we arrived. The chef this week was Chef Scott Esteve from Abita Springs' Camellia Cafe. He was preparing oyster dressing. It was delicious.

We spoke with the people who run the Farmer's Market and they mentioned that they will have a cooking demonstration by the Redfish Grill in New Orleans. They'll be doing jumbo lumb crab cakes. I'll definitely be there.

On December 13th the market will be offering cookbooks signed by one of my favorite Louisiana cooks Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker from the Times Picayune.



The cookbook being offered is "Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes for Recovery From The Times-Picayune of New Orleans" and has 250 favorite authentic recipes from home cooks, restaurants and chefs, and tells the stories of those who lost the recipes and those who shared them so generously.

So if you're in the Slidell area on a Saturday morning, make the effort to visit the Camellia City Market from 8 am to 1 pm. It's worth the trip.

Rebirth on the coast

The Gulf Coast of Mississippi to a brutal beating from Katrina.

I posted last year about a Mississippi artist who has created some heartwarming art using dead oak trees along Highway 90 in Gulfport/Biloxi as his canvas and a chainsaw as his brush.

We recently took a ride out to the coast to see how things are progressing and found some new works of the chainsaw artist Dayton Scoggin. Called Hurricane Katrina Beautifucation Project he has works placed in Biloxi, Gulfport, and Long Beach centered in the medians and in the Parks.

Here are pictures of what we found.
click on pictures for larger versions








We looked in the grass to find this owl's lost eye, but didn't find it.
:)








this picture warms my heart because you can see growth from what was thougth to be a dead tree at the base of the pelican.

West Bay Diversion

From a Gambit piece in the November 18th issue regarding the West Bay Diversion project


The Corps' attempt to dodge financial responsibility for dredging is another example of its egregious indifference toward Louisiana's — and the nation's — environmental plight. Moreover, the Breaux Act was passed to create, protect and restore Louisiana's coastal wetlands — not improve navigation.

Garret Graves, director of the Governor's Office on Coastal Activities and a nonvoting member of the task force, says the state will pay for the dredging in the short term to keep the West Bay project going. He adds that the Corps should revisit the idea of balancing navigation, flood control and coastal restoration. Like Nungesser, Graves is interested in solutions, and the West Bay diversion is part of the solution to coastal wetland loss. Graves reports that the project produces 3.7 million tons of sediment a year — sediment that builds protective wetlands rather than clogs shipping channels, which the Corps otherwise would have to dredge. According to Harrison of the Environmental Defense Fund, when the Corps dredges a navigational channel, 80 percent of the material is either pumped or dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

The diversion thus saves money, because it uses sediment productively rather than requiring expensive dredging to expel it from shipping channels and dump it into the Outer Continental Shelf. The Water Resources Development Act of 2007 directed the Corps to implement a program for the beneficial use of dredge material and authorized $100 million for the project. Is there anything more beneficial than using sediment to restore wetlands — while saving the federal treasury money on dredging? "If done properly, [diversion projects] benefit navigation and that is the whole point of an integrated coastal program," Graves says.

Amen


image from Environmental Health Perspectives website

2nd Annual PoBoy Festival

Sunday, November 23, 2008: 12 noon - 6:00pm
Oak Street at South Carrollton

The 2008 New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival will feature two stages with live music, arts and crafts, a silent auction, a children’s section with games and prizes, a "Corner Grocery Photo Experience" photo booth, panel discussions covering the history of the po-boy (starting at 11:00 a.m.) and, of course, the best tasting po-boys in New Orleans.


Food Vendors



Art Vendors



Music Schedule

Big Oil & Our Wetlands

In a video by WWL TV Dennis Woltering talks about the destruction of Louisiana wetlands in LaFouche, Terrebone and Plaquemine parishes by big oil and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Final Blow

Cliff writes about the loss of his Ninth Ward home and the history it had three years after Katrina.

Schroeder says it all

Schroeder says it one hundred times better than I could ever have regarding the recent flare up between New Orleans Councilperson Stacey Head and Veronica "Whitney Houston wannabe" White.



Here's the video of Nagin discussing how he and Council president Jackie "Brownnose" Clarkson made things better

Here's a niblet of Schroeder's reaction


Ray Nagin is a freaking idiot! The man is a pandering racist himself! Just pull out that race card anytime you’re being scrutinized for ripping off the taxpayers.

Oh, and thank you, Jackie. You have about as much spine as a steaming colostomy bag. This ain’t a social. It’s about the taxpayers of New Orleans getting ripped off and shit on by a feckless, incompetent, stubborn, worthless man who enjoys the privileges of the office of mayor, without any of the responsibility or accountability.



On the subject of Mz White, Big Red Cotton says it all

Eli links to a petition to dismiss Veronica White here

Scuzzbuckets of the Week

The teachers and administrators in St. Tammany Parish who either refused to let students discuss Obama's victory or gave kids some bogus information
From the link above:


Many students said teachers displayed a clear political bias, and praised McCain in class while making disparaging remarks about the president-elect. Brandy Welch, a black eighth-grader at Slidell Junior High, said one of her teachers said that "Obama's not even from this country and that McCain is a war hero."

In some cases, students said they were threatened with punishment if they talked about the election.

"She said that if we did talk about (the election) she'd write us up, " 14 year-old Briana Seals, who is black, said of a teacher at Slidell Junior High School

Rachel Weaver, a senior at Northshore High School in Slidell and a white Obama supporter, said teacher and peer bias made her reluctant to voice her opinions. Some students used racial slurs to refer to the president-elect and her American history teacher simply ignored the election, Weaver said.

Makes me ill and happy that my daughter is no longer a part of this school system.

New BBQ for Slidell

We discovered a fantastic BBQ place in Slidell. Called Taste E Bones, their pulled pork sandwich (served on ciabatta bread) is fantastic.

Click here for their menu

New Orleans East Wetlands

Recently we took a trip down to Highway 90 in New Orleans East.

click photo's for full size versions



I drive some of Highway 90 going to and from work at the spaceship factory. Every day I notice how much damage the wetlands have suffered since Katrina. And the trees. Katrina killed thousands and thousands of trees .

For miles going east, away from New Orleans, this is the sight







This part of the swamps faces Lake Borgne, a lagoon in eastern Louisiana of the Gulf of Mexico. Due to coastal erosion, it is no longer actually a lake but rather an arm of the Gulf of Mexico. Its name comes from the French word borgne, which means "one-eyed".



Before Katrina, the trees in the photos above hid all of the wetlands you see past the dead trees. A good number of these trees were killed by saltwater intrusion created by Katrina's huge storm surge.

While we were snapping photos along Highway 90 near Powers Junction, when we discovered that a leg of Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge was open once again to the public.



Different from the Refuge Boardwalk a mile or so up the road , the Madere has a boatlaunch and a short boardwalk that transports you from the traffic noise from Highway 90 into what seems like the heart of a bayou.





There are so many channels that you can canoe out to to do some serious wildlife watching.











For more info on Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge Click here

Ike and the wetlands

Hurricane Ike was over two months ago.

I'm finally finding the time to post some pictures hubby and I snapped during our trek around Slidell on the Friday morning Ike made landfall.

Although Ike came ashore in eastern Texas, everyone along the northern Gulf of Mexico felt his impact. The tidal surge created havoc days before, with road closures in New Orleans East and beyond.

Here's what we saw back in early September.
[click on pictures for full-size versions]


The Bayou Liberty bridge


The boat ramp at Bayou Liberty


Here's what it usually looks like.


A tree swing in a yard facing the bayou


Here's what it looks like when it's not flooding


Along Rats Nest Road in south Slidell there was an abundance of marsh grass that had been uprooted and washed ashore during Hurricane Gustav a week before.

Lake Pontchartrain was sporting whitecaps that day.(that's the twin spans in the background)



This structure is a victim of three hurricanes, but still standing.


This is what back-to-back hurricanes can do to your neighborhood when you live on the shores of the lake.


Along Hwy 11 in the community of Northshore, water was coursing across the road from the lake into the marsh.


This house was an island during that weekend.


Over in Lake Catherine about a month later we spotted this house. It looks as if maybe it was in the process of being built when Gustav/Ike came along.


All along Hwy. 90 in Lake Catherine were moutains of marsh grass that had washed ashore during Gustav and Ike.


A trailer that was tossed around in the floods of Gustav and Ike, laid to rest in this marsh grass.

The thing that stands out in my mind after seeing the storm surge from Hurricane Ike was how much more water came ashore compared to pre-Katrina storms. Katrina destroyed so much wetlands that there is now nothing to protect us against future storms...even those that don't hit us directly. We have to save our wetlands now.