Non-BBQ Southern Treats

I'm still catching up with the food pictures from our trip, even though we got home over a month ago. I've already posted a bit about the BBQ we experienced down south and my poor attempts to duplicate it.

This trip was not all about BBQ, however... Not by a long shot.

Favourite food surprise of the trip: Hot Boiled Peanuts just outside of Mobile, Alabama

I wouldn't have necessarily thought that hot peanuts would be tasty, but this bag of spicy goobers that we picked up at a gas station in Alabama were FANTASTIC. You still had to sort of crack the shell open, and the soggy, salty, spicy peanuts inside were really tasty. We devoured this bag by the side of the road at 10 in the morning.

Favourite greasy breakfast: Fried Country Ham in Hoxie, Arkansas

This definitely was not a slice from some plastic-wrapped Toupie ham product - this was the real deal. This ham reminded me of my Oma Froese's fried ham- it was swimming in its own grease and it seemed appropriate. Why shouldn't it be swimming in grease? It's HAM!

Favouite Cajun food: Chicken on the Bayou, Henderson, Louisiana

We ate a lot of great Cajun food on this trip, and most of it was fancier than this place, but nothing could match Chicken on the Bayou for freshness or local flavour. It was basically a convenience store with a fry kitchen on the side with about 5 tables where you grab your own beer from the fridge. We started off with these spicy boiled crawfish and some yummy boudin (the spicy pork liver and rice sausage in the foreground) and ended up also ordering a fried seafood plate that included oysters, alligator, catfish, crawfish, shrimp and frog legs.

(And before you get alarmed at our unending gluttony here, remember that you only eat the tail from crawfish! Most of them were smaller than the average size cocktail shrimp.)

Favourite Seafood of the trip: Oysters!

It's hard to decide how I liked them best...it's a toss-up between simple raw oysters on the half shell and the fried oyster po-boy we had in Larose, Louisiana. Those po-boys were absolutely delicious, though...

Most interesting edible seafood: Fried soft-shell crab

I don't know about you, but I found it interesting to eat a crab - shell and all. Yummy. And not too crunchy, either. Jeff also had a softshell crab po-boy in New Orleans. Imagine half of one of these guys in a baguette with lettuce, mayo and pickles. Super yummy!

Favourite 'It's Getting Late and We're Hungry and We Need To Find a Hotel' supper: Spring Hill Seafood, Mobile AL.
We saw this place as we were on our way through Mobile, looking for a cheap hotel on the edge of the city. After we finally found a Super-8, we backtracked into the city to check this place out. It was a run-down fish market that also boiled crawfish and shrimp to order. We got a couple pounds of crawfish and a pound of huge Gulf Coast shrimp boiled fresh for about $12. We then rounded out the meal with some fried dill pickles and some fried catfish from a fast-food fish place across the street. So good! Why don't people sell fried dill pickles in Manitoba? We love dill pickles!

I've left out a lot of great food from this trip. We fine-dined at NOLA and munched on beignets at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, listened to Cajun music at Prejean's in Lafayette, and ate crawfish pie in Breaux Bridge, not to mention the very fine tin-foil dinners we enjoyed while camping. There just simply isn't the space to list it all. This list was mostly about the delectable surprises that were unexpected high points of the trip.

For those of you who'd like to see the non-food highlights of the trip, check out our album:

http://www.froddard.photosite.com/