rOland
Active Member
So Saturday before the Saints&Eagles game my buddy and I are at work jacking up a house when our boss comes back from the hardware store.
"Hey check out this flyer," he invites us. We walk over and check out this white page with nothing on it but animal meat for sale and and a phone number. What kind of animals? Every kind... shrimps, rabbits, coons, deer, goat, frog legs, 9 kinds of boudin sausage, muskrats (translation: groundhogs), turtles and every kind of fish you can pull out of the water up and down the gulf coast.
Understand something about South Louisiana, if something was once alive, someone's found a way to cook it up real tasty... so the Cajun in me got real giddy. I was thinkin' along the lines of a rabbit and venision sausage gumbo, but no, my friend and his brother had grander ideas: "Let's bar-be-que an alligator!" they both shouted.
Now I ain't talkin' about gator fillets which you can't do nothing with except fry. This guy sells whole alligators which I is something I've never seen except outside the swamps that raised me. So we call the guy up and he's selling all of his game for reasonable prices. It's then we run into our first problem: we haven't got anything to bar-be-que on as our pit got lifted after the storm. So we start driving around figurin' our ingenuity will help us throw together a grill and we catch an early break: a 50 gallon oil drum sitting in the trash. I jump out and throw it in the truck.
Now all we need is a grill to our bar-be-que pit. Our lucky break with the drum now appears to be exactly that: lucky. We stop to poke through every pile of Katrina trash and comb every abandoned lot for something we can use... but nothing surfaces, even a bit of storm fence will do. But nothing. We come across an old bit of wrought-iron fence around an empty lot and consider taking it's gate, but the fence is too pretty and historic for us to loot with clear consciences. Our morale drops and drops as we check our last possible street along the train tracks.
Suddenly my buddy stops the truck. "Matt, what is that?" I step out the truck and meander over to the neutral ground & leaning up against a rail-road tie is a bicycle wheel. A steel bicycle tire perfectly sized to fit over our barrel. Huzzah!
We celebrate and buy our gator. Our makeshift coona$5/white-trash grill cooks our gator perfectly as we and all of our friends listen to the game on the radio, we celebrate. The saints win and we celebrate even more. We go out to and every bar downtown is celebrating. And entire city celebrates along with a beleaguered coast, and we celebrate.
A perfect evening, and as we discover the next morning, we've built a perfect grill. All the rocks and bricks we tossed into the barrel to raise the coals to a heigth to cook on are still giving off heat. So if we want to cook something big... like a say... a whole pig (cruchandele' as we call it down here) we can. We can throw that animal over some hot coals and let it roast for the 12 hours it needs.
"Hey check out this flyer," he invites us. We walk over and check out this white page with nothing on it but animal meat for sale and and a phone number. What kind of animals? Every kind... shrimps, rabbits, coons, deer, goat, frog legs, 9 kinds of boudin sausage, muskrats (translation: groundhogs), turtles and every kind of fish you can pull out of the water up and down the gulf coast.
Understand something about South Louisiana, if something was once alive, someone's found a way to cook it up real tasty... so the Cajun in me got real giddy. I was thinkin' along the lines of a rabbit and venision sausage gumbo, but no, my friend and his brother had grander ideas: "Let's bar-be-que an alligator!" they both shouted.
Now I ain't talkin' about gator fillets which you can't do nothing with except fry. This guy sells whole alligators which I is something I've never seen except outside the swamps that raised me. So we call the guy up and he's selling all of his game for reasonable prices. It's then we run into our first problem: we haven't got anything to bar-be-que on as our pit got lifted after the storm. So we start driving around figurin' our ingenuity will help us throw together a grill and we catch an early break: a 50 gallon oil drum sitting in the trash. I jump out and throw it in the truck.
Now all we need is a grill to our bar-be-que pit. Our lucky break with the drum now appears to be exactly that: lucky. We stop to poke through every pile of Katrina trash and comb every abandoned lot for something we can use... but nothing surfaces, even a bit of storm fence will do. But nothing. We come across an old bit of wrought-iron fence around an empty lot and consider taking it's gate, but the fence is too pretty and historic for us to loot with clear consciences. Our morale drops and drops as we check our last possible street along the train tracks.
Suddenly my buddy stops the truck. "Matt, what is that?" I step out the truck and meander over to the neutral ground & leaning up against a rail-road tie is a bicycle wheel. A steel bicycle tire perfectly sized to fit over our barrel. Huzzah!
We celebrate and buy our gator. Our makeshift coona$5/white-trash grill cooks our gator perfectly as we and all of our friends listen to the game on the radio, we celebrate. The saints win and we celebrate even more. We go out to and every bar downtown is celebrating. And entire city celebrates along with a beleaguered coast, and we celebrate.
A perfect evening, and as we discover the next morning, we've built a perfect grill. All the rocks and bricks we tossed into the barrel to raise the coals to a heigth to cook on are still giving off heat. So if we want to cook something big... like a say... a whole pig (cruchandele' as we call it down here) we can. We can throw that animal over some hot coals and let it roast for the 12 hours it needs.
