Given the calls we’ve taken over the last few months wondering what ever happened to Family Meal, or family-style dinner series, we can’t even remember why we stopped doing them. We’ve heard your comments, they mean a lot to us, and so without any further hesitation, we’ve brought family meal back! Here’s the deal with […]
Family Meal: A Foggy Mountain Getaway, ca. 1880 or, A Hillbilly Homecoming
If you read this blog or visit Big Jones regularly, you’ve likely noticed that the focus of our cooking is gravitating ever-so-slightly to the mountains. There are many reasons for this, chief among them that I repeatedly felt I was selling Southern cooking short by leaving out one of its great regional cuisines, that being […]
A Creole Lenten Dinner, ca. 1900
During this past Mardi Gras season, I came upon a realization of what should be obvious – the whole point of Carnival is to live it up before the lean times of Lent. It’s easy to get caught up in the revelry without thinking about the cultural context and why these traditions evolved the way […]
A Cajun Country Ramble, ca. 1955
For our next Family Meal beginning Friday and continuing through Mardi Gras, I wanted to do something different from your typical, expected po’ boys, red beans and rice, and whatnot that’s associated with the revelry in the French Quarter, and instead travel west of town into the countryside for a taste of Cajun country cooking. […]
Our next family meal: Four Centuries of Heritage Grains
This past fall, when we were filming for a segment with CBS Evening News, they asked if we had any old grains on hand they could shoot with the camera. Straight away we set to the four corners of the kitchen and the freezer to pull together everything we could, and on a random Tuesday […]