A Cajun Halloween Party -they did it for Harry Potter, They can do it for Pinch & Scrimp

[Lyn LeJeune]

HALLOWEEN PARTIES BUILD NEW ORLEANS LIBRARIES. You did it for Harry Potter, you can do it for PINCH & SCRIMP!

Bonjour, my Friends; it’s me, Lyn LeJeune, author of The Beatitudes, Book I in The New Orleans Trilogy. As you may remember, I am donating ALL of the royalties from the sale of The Beatitudes (amazon.com! and all fine booksellers, on and off line)) directly to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation to help rebuild the public libraries. My organization is called The Beatitudes Network- Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans(www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com). The Beatitudes is about New Orleans, a voodoo priestess (Scrimp, aka Hannah DuBois), a heroic ghost (Pinch, aka Earline Washington), a secret society that is trying to take over New Orleans, and a host of supernatural and paranormal characters that haunt, eat, kill, and seek redemption. Mon Dieu!

Halloween is coming and I am here to give you the ingredients for a supreme supernatural Halloween party. You will have fun and you will help rebuild the public libraries of New Orleans. Ready?

Buy as many copies of The Beatitudes as you can. Read one, and use the others as prizes for contests such as the best costume (Pinch, Scrimp, Romeo, Harlan Boudreaux, n’est pas juste characters), the best reading from The Beatitudes, the best horror or ghosts story about New Orleans. Let your imagination run wild. Your guess will know that their participation is helping to rebuild the libraries of New Orleans. Hell, they may even buy some of the books themselves. (email me at [e-mail] for Readers’ Discussion Questions or to book an event where I cook Cajun!)

Here are some of my Cajun/New Orleans recipes you can serve at your party; very ghoulish and bloody mixes.

PEPPER SAUCE ( Satan’s Holy Water)

Fill a clean jar or bottle with jalapeno peppers and then pour in white vinegar to

almost the top. Add ½ cup of salt. You may add whole cloves of garlic and dill for taste. Cap or use a cork stopper. Store in icebox at least overnight or best ready for use after about one week. Pepper Sauce will last for a

very long time in the frig.! Use it to add zest to gumbos and stew and soups, adding a few drops at a time as to your taste.

SAUCE PIQUANTE (blood of a virgin)

¼ cup vegetable oil

5 large fresh tomatoes, chopped

1 lb can stewed tomatoes

1 tablespoons tomato paste

1 cup chopped yellow onion

½ cup chopped green onion tops

2 cloves of minced garlic

¼ cup chopped parsley

½ cup chopped green pepper

¼ cup minced jalapeno or other hot pepper

3 cups water

4 hit sauce, red pepper and salt to taste

In large skillet sauté yellow onions, chopped tomatoes, garlic and minced hot peppers in vegetable oil until yellow onion starts to lightly brown. Add stewed tomato, tomato paste, water, chopped green onion tops, green pepper, hot sauce, pepper and salt to taste. Stir well so that paste thickens mixture. Cover and cook over low heat for about one hour. Turn off heat and add parsley. Let stand for about one-half hour before using.

Sauce Piquante is used mostly for sauce-baked dishes, such as the sauce poured over whole baked red snapper or chicken. The sauce is poured over cooked rice as the side dish. Or in a large skillet, chicken cut in pieces is browned and then the piquante is poured over the chicken and simmered for about an hour. Serve over rice. Sauce Piquante has many uses as the cook wishes to spice up meals. It can even be used as a barbecue sauce when allowed to thicken adequately to stick to the meat or vegetables.

JAMBALAYA (The Voodoo Princess collected body parts)

¼ cup vegetable oil

1 lb boneless chicken breast cut into bite-sized pieces

2 lbs sausage sliced into bite-sized pieces

½ lb ground round

1 cup chopped celery

1 cup chopped yellow onions

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup of Sauce Piquante mix

2 cups water

½ cup chopped green onion tops

½ cup chopped parsley

1 teaspoon red pepper

1 teaspoon black pepper

2 teaspoons hot sauce or to taste

3 cups uncooked rice

In large pot, combine ground round and vegetable oil and cook until ground round is slightly browned. Add chicken and sausage and cook until all meat is combined and browned. Add celery, onions, garlic and cook for about five minutes or until onions start to turn brown. Add water, Sauce Piquante mix, black and red pepper and hot sauce. Cook for about five minutes. Add rice and turn to low heat and cover. Cook until rice is tender and all liquid is gone. Gradually stir in onion tops and parsley and let set for about five minutes in the pot. Serve immediately.

Shrimp may be substituted for chicken, or you may us any combination of seafood, including oysters, and meats and poultry as you wish. As an added taste, add one-quarter cup of the okra paste at the same time you add the rice.

SHRIMP AND OKRA GUMBO (guts and gory)

4 lbs peeled and deveined medium shrimp

2 quarts water

1 cup okra paste

1 cup finely chopped yellow onion

2 tablespoons roux mix

¼ cup celery

1 large, ripe tomato, minced

¼ cup chopped parsley

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

salt, red pepper and pepper sauce to taste

In large pot, pour in water and bring to boil, add okra paste and roux and cook until liquid starts to thicken. Turn down heat to low and add onion, celery, and tomato, cooking for about one-half hour, stirring so that mixture does not stick to bottom of pot. Add shrimp and cook for another fifteen minutes, but no more that twenty as that would make the shrimp too rubbery. Turn heat off and add parsley. Serve in large bowls with cooked rice.

This gumbo recipe is very versatile. Sausage, oysters, crab or chicken may be used either together or mixed and matched. The oil riggers that Inez cooked for especially liked sausage and oyster gumbo.

Excerpt from THE BEATITUDES – Introducing PINCH & SCRIMP

I

THE PURE OF HEART

To course across more kindly waters now

My talent’s little vessel lifts her sails,

leaving behind herself a sea so cruel;

Dante, Purgatorio

My best friend Pinch was murdered while I slept. The police reported that she was caught off guard, snuck up on, as Pinch would have said. I don’t believe that for one blasted minute. I know she looked her killer in the eye, sized him up, laughed, then spit in his face. It all happened before my very eyes; I had dreamed about her death over the past year. The first dream came the morning after the murder of the first foster child. Marisa was found fully clothed, wrapped in a pink swaddling blanket, as though dreaming of many tomorrows and games and parties and toys; and then eight more dreams, eight more foster children murdered, all left on the trolleys of New Orleans; then again the same dream after the presumed murderer had been arrested; and finally the last one, after I had lost my job, accused of negligence in the care of two of the slain children under my charge. And when Pinch was butchered, my dream coming horrifyingly true, my life spinning out of control, I had, for the second time in my life, lost everything, lost control, was unwittingly blown away by the winds of a dispassionate fate. Or so I thought at the time.

Pinch, born Earline Washington, had been my friend and colleague in the social work department located in Greater New Orleans for almost five years. In a bureaucracy that seemed always under siege, its employees ceaselessly dispirited, Earline was one of the few welcoming faces I encountered when I started my first day as a social worker. I had the feeling that I had walked into a hive of Sisyphean slaves; but this woman’s splendid, dark face, embellished with green eyes and an earnest smile, captivated me immediately. My innate and all-consuming reticence vanished. It seemed a natural coming together, our early fraternity, as though we were soul mates. She called me Hannah love, and then our relationship grew to perfect friendship. We read each others’ thoughts, knew when the melancholy clouds of sorrow from our pasts had suddenly descended upon us, even as the bright nimbus of southern nights beckoned. All of my life I had experienced Sundowner’s Syndrome, but with Pinch the carmine shadows of evening became an event not without hope. We shared our failures as potential social saviors, but never allowed each other to give up.

She had grown up in a New Orleans housing project shamefully named Desire. Desire had been constructed in an isolated area northwest of greater New Orleans, bordered by industrial canals and railroad tracks. Pinch often recounted her nights as a young child lying on the floor under a matted blanket listening to gunshots in the night. Desire had been built in the late 40s over the Hideaway Club where Fats Domino had played his first gigs. Pinch swore she could hear Fats sing “My Blue Heaven” just for her. As Pinch’s childhood tumbled forward, she learned survival skills. By the age of twelve, she had tried just about every street drug going and stole to keep from going hungry, acquiring the nickname Pinch. She would have been doomed to a child’s death but for the help of an aged aunt. Pinch pulled herself up, finished high school, and made it through college by working sometimes two shifts as a housekeeper in seedy hotels that bordered the Ninth Ward. A city auditor once asked her why she hadn’t worked in the Lafayette Square District or the famous 625 St. Charles suites. “You could have paid for a Ph.D. with the tips alone.” And she replied: “Well, I guess ‘dis sista just feeling mo’ secure wid da brothers. Ozanam Inn be my place, homeless peoples and all.” Then she rubbed his arm. The poor guy broke out in a sweat, brushed his thinning hair back with an aged-spotted trembling hand, and looked at me for intervention. Later I asked Pinch why she’d stuck it to the auditor; she shrugged her shoulders and replied: “I guess just every once and a while I have to remind myself where I come from. Pride has many forms, love.” Pinch had overcome. She was the bravest person I ever knew.

My name is Hannah DuBois. I grew up on the banks of the bayous that run between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. This area was once God’s breeding ground, for it held the muck and stuff from which life evolved. But by the end of the Reagan Administration, fouled by oil, gas, and the rapacious march of progress, it came to be called Cancer Alley. My grandparents did not speak English, and my mother stopped talking altogether the night my father went to town for a beer and never came back. Like Pinch, I grew up poor; I was sixteen before I ate pizza, and saved almost every dime I made. I moved to New Orleans soon after my mother died, leaving the only home I had ever known; I exchanged the precious land for the urban jungle. My grandparents had left me a little money and a small monthly income from the Standard Gas Company, so I kept my promise to my long-gone father and enrolled in college. All of my money went to school and rent, and it seemed my hunger was unending. You can eat well in New Orleans if you find the right places, places where food was cheap, good and abundant. But I also loved junk food. I guess any food. My pockets were stuffed with crackers and sugar, mustard, and ketchup packets from fast food joints. “Want not” was my motto. So Pinch nicknamed me Scrimp. We made quite a pair.

In May of 2005, the New Orleans Social Services Department finally got divine guidance and mandated that all social workers had to have a partner. The division called it “the buddy system.” The new directive came as a result of what the Times-Picayune dubbed The Foster Child Murders. Nine children had been murdered in the last year; “suffocated tenderly,” said the Medical Examiner, “their baby bodies placed in the back seat of the city’s trolleys.” He continued in his clinically obtuse, yet lyrical, way, for which he was famous: “Fragile spirits fluttering into the moss latticed oaks, riding to God on the St. Charles line.” The children had already endured endless and unexplainable pain during their short time among brutal adults. Sexual abuse, torture, starvation, all criminal in their lack of connection with life. One of the trolley drivers, a black man who had worked the St. Charles Line for over forty years and had witnessed life on the mean streets, broke down in front of the cameras and wept. He said he saw a fine mist swirl around the child he had found, a little black girl of eight years old, the “dancing fog” vanishing into popping fireflies as he approached her. The same Medical Examiner, always around for public events, used the word “reposed,” saying that in all his years of working on the most vicious murders, this was the first time he was truly terrified. “When I cut them open,” he told a reporter, “I saw their little souls rise up, and then I heard a child giggle.” His name was Harlan Boudreaux and he retired after autopsying the ninth child.