Manic Monday

All I wanted to do on Monday was cook. After a 10 hour work day, I bounced from one grocery store to another to find gruyere and halibut (more on the halibut later). I, of course, ended up at Whole Foods, where I descended into a buzzing hive of high strung, take-no-prisoner vegetarians and vegans that I had to fight off with stalks of organic corn and lemongrass to get into the right check-out line.

Anyhoo, I ended up getting home at around 9:30 PM, took a deep sigh, and hunkered down with a Creole cookbook I've been itching to use.

My friends Robin and Todd gave me the cookbook as a gift. Being from New Orleans, we always associated Creole food with our hometown, but the author of this cookbook, Babette de Rozieres, hails from Guadeloupe, a French island in the West Indies. The cookbook has more of a Caribbean vibe and uses more tropical ingredients than the Creole food I grew up with, and it's helped me better understand the foundation and essence of Creole cooking.