Remember that community yard sale near my house where Terry & Cathy, the husband and wife, offered to let me look through their cookbooks? They had already donated a ton of their cookbook collection to a library but the wife thought I’d like to have the cookbook from Entergy (like Duke Power but in New Orleans). I gave the husband a ride over to their new house and he took me to their cookbook collection in their kitchen. They were so unbelievably generous to open their home to me, but the Entergy cookbook was nowhere to be found.
Could you imagine? It sounded like an insider’s guide through New Orleans cuisine! That cookbook has been in the back of my mind for a while. I kept checking eBay for a copy and finally found one for sale. A fierce bidding war ensued and I eventually won out to the price tag of $13.79.
That’s a little steep for me. But I always wonder about how many New Orleans cookbooks and recipes were lost during the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. I’m so glad to have a copy of Cooking Up a Storm which was compiled from recipes published in the Times-Picayune but this one seems different. Kinda like your neighbors and co-workers sharing their favorite home-tested recipes.
From Woodstoves to Microwaves: Cooking with Entergy. It’s a really large cookbook printed on 8 ½ x 11 paper. Plus, there’s 200 pages, so it’s thick as well.
Flipping through the pages and you see lots of shrimp, crawfish, oysters, crab and about two full pages of Jambalaya recipes. Plus, someone had tucked in a paper with a Bread Pudding recipe—there’s no mention of a bourbon sauce (what’s the point?).
I think I’ll file this one with my Junior League cookbooks from Louisiana….seems very fitting.