Louisiana

Is there any better excuse for debauchery than Mardi Gras?! Get in the purple, green, and gold spirit with provisions shaped by and inspired from the city's rich history and culture. Start off your day with a Ramos gin fizz, and end it on a sweet note with a decadent ice cream bombe topped with flambéed bananas Foster! Here are a few of our Nola favorites; for more, check out all of our Mardi Gras recipes.

Treme Cocktail	Muffaletta	Ramos Gin Fizz
Bananas Foster Bombe	Vegetable Gumbo	King Cake

Couldn't make it to Mardi Gras this year? If you're lamenting the fact that today's Fat Tuesday and the French Quarter's a plane ride away, then do what I like to do. Bring the purple, green, and gold to your kitchen instead with a comforting platter of saucy shrimp étouffée.

Although some variations of the seafood recipe take hours to cook, enjoy a snappier version, since tonight's a school night. While the tomatoes and aromatics simmer together, steam a bowl of grains in the rice cooker (dabbed with a bit of butter, of course) so everything's ready to hit the table at the same time. Settle in with an Abita, some extra hot sauce, and your party hat, and you'll be ready to dig in! Click through for the quick recipe.

In 2008, I featured Lenny Kravitz's New Orleans home, and now that 1,725-square-foot, one-bedroom, two-bath property is on the market for $775,000. Kravitz's home is a Creole cottage (not to be confused with a Creole townhouse) in the heart of the New Orleans's Vieux Carré district. The exterior looks quite run-down — in fact, a lot like the famed Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, one of the oldest structures in the city. The interiors have the sort of funky, eclectic, and luxurious vibe you'd expect from the home of a rock star — except that Kravitz designed the digs himself. In 2005, Kravitz formed his own design firm, Kravitz Design, focusing on commercial, residential, and product design, and of course this was one of his projects.The pièce de résistance of the NOLA bachelor pad is an 18-foot marble island in the kitchen and open plan living area. The rest of the room features a black alligator leather sectional sofa, tall wing chairs upholstered in zebra hide, black fur floor cushions, an opulent crystal chandelier, and Warhol-esque pop art. An upstairs sleeping loft overlooking this grand room is accessible by a built-in ladder. Outdoors, there's a cozy courtyard with lush tropical plants and cushioned wicker chairs — key for warm evenings in the South. Meanwhile, a foyer sitting area features the geometric Highway 66 Wallpaper by New Orleans-based Flavor Paper, with whom Kravitz Design actually collaborated on a wallpaper collection, Tropicalismo. Take the full tour below!

This story was written by member syako and comes from the Kitchen Goddess group in the YumSugar Community.Mardi Gras is a couple weeks away, and this New Orleanian gal — who's been transplanted to Maryland — misses this holiday the most! Even more, I miss the yummy gooey king cake that goes with it. So I made one myself this weekend and the result was fabulous! It's definitely worth trying. Hope you enjoy.

To get her recipe, keep reading.

The Saints' first Super Bowl victory and Mardi Gras in less than a week gives Southerners and Northerners an excuse to celebrate the eclectic Creole culture that is so unique to New Orleans. Want to get crazy? Simmer up a steaming pot of seafood gumbo. Keep things basic with canned chicken broth, frozen okra, and two simple shellfish elements — crab and shrimp. Or, if you're feeling more elaborate, peel your own shrimp, saving the shells for a flavorful stock, and throw in the works, from andouille sausage to fresh oysters. Either way, you'll wind up with a gumbo worth getting jazzed up about. For the recipes, read more.

Adding to the long list of weird American sex laws, Louisiana — along with eight other states — has a crime-against-nature law. It's an unused, archaic law in most places, but New Orleans has been reinterpreting the 200-year-old law for its own purposes. The city now defines "unnatural copulation" as anal or oral sex and uses it to brand convicted sex workers with the title "sex offender."

Of the 861 registered sex offenders in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of crimes against nature, and 78 percent of those are black and almost all are women. What's that mean for them? There's a stamp printed on their driver's licenses, labeling them as sex offenders. They can't get food stamps or public assistance, much less jobs, and if there's a hurricane they need to go to special shelters reserved for sex offenders. They can't even dress up for Mardi Gras!

And guess what happens when a person can't get a job or public assistance, New Orleans? Probably something illegal like prostitution!

For true mid-Winter comfort food, look no further than the wallet-friendly pairing of red beans and rice. The Louisiana specialty starts with "the holy trinity" of chopped celery, bell pepper, and onions then combines the veggie medley with red kidney beans and pork to be served over steaming hot rice.

You can follow a recipe that calls for canned beans and is easy on the time, number of kitchen steps, and ingredients. Or stick to the classic version, simmered low and slow with ham, sausage, and bay leaves for added flavor and body. Decide which one when you keep reading.

It's an age-old question: is there a distinction between Cajun and Creole cooking — or are they really just the same thing?

The answer is somewhere in between. Creole cooking evolved out of the cosmopolitan culture of New Orleans, a city affected by the influx of international colonists who settled there after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans's denizens adopted spices from Africa and the Caribbean, butter and cream from France, tomatoes from Italy, and peppers from Spain and took advantage of the abundance of oysters, shrimp, and crab abundantly available in the Gulf.

Cajun cooking developed in Louisiana's rural backcountry. Acadians drew from their French and Southern roots, cooking whatever could be farmed and trapped locally, along with other inexpensive ingredients such as crawfish, rice, beans, and pork fat. Some of Louisiana's dishes are distinctly Creole, like shrimp rémoulade. Others — take crawfish étouffée, for instance — are credited to the Cajuns. But certain dishes shared by both cuisines, such as jambalaya, possess subtler differences: the Creole version typically contains tomatoes, while its Cajun counterpart employs a roux.

Over time, as the two terms have been used more generically and interchangeably, the differences between Cajun and Creole cooking have become blurred, and food historians have taken to focusing on regional differences within the state. What's your take on Cajun versus Creole? Which do you like more?