Marie-Grace's Red Beans and Rice

My own twist on a classic from the Crescent City!

Like I've said, one of the best things about doing this blog is getting to try making things I never would have considered making on my own. We've gotten to try lots of food I'd never have thought about eating outside of a restaurant before, like the flan I made last weekend, or the nian gao. Anyone remember that one? Hands down the coolest thing I've made for the blog.

The thing is, sometimes my geographic location means making a truly authentic version of a classic dish is going to be difficult, prohibitively expensive, or just totally not going to happen. I'm not importing camas roots from Oregon for a Kaya post, for example. This one caught me off guard a little with how tricky it would be to find the exact right ingredients up north, but with a little creativity, I think we managed to pull this one off.

It's just not exactly your grandma's red beans and rice.

Marie-Grace's Shrimp Creole

Spicy, warm, and perfect for the middle of winter!

I think it's pretty safe to say that spicy food can be the perfect thing to eat year round. Sure, I like variety too, but spicy food is (perhaps surprisingly for some people) good to eat in hot weather, and nothing hits the spot like a good bowl of chili on a cold day.

But if you're tired of chili (as one of my frequent taste testers apparently is), I've definitely got a dish for you to try. Although it's not quite a one pot meal, it's close to it, and it doesn't take too much time or finesse to get right. It's also a dish with roots back to the early, early days of New Orleans, and it's definitely something Marie-Grace could have enjoyed with her father after a long day of volunteering at an orphanage, or exploring the city with Cécile.

Cécile's Yumbo Gumbo

Super tasty, but what was it doing in a kid's cook book??

I've been dying to break this book and recipe out for months at this point, if not years. After last year's Mardi Gras post was kind of a disaster (you may remember the King Cake that never rose and then didn't bake through and just turned into a giant, sticky, inedible mess on my dining room table), I was looking for something that was hopefully simpler and wouldn't turn me off the idea of doing any New Orleans style recipes on this blog ever again. And because Cécile is actually only my second favorite awesome fictional lady from Louisiana, I knew just where to turn to.

Of course, this didn't actually get posted on Mardi Gras - I'll explain why later - and there were still quite a few road bumps a long the way because I'm still not very good at cooking dinner under a time table, but overall? I think I'm going to count this one as a win.

Marie-Grace's Bourbon Bread Pudding

Bringing a taste of New Orleans to the holiday season!

Now, I will be the first to tell you that I enjoyed Marie-Grace and Cécile's books quite a bit, and I definitely don't think the series should be overlooked just because American Girl picked a pretty obscure point in history to focus on. However, when it came to picking out what to feature with them for the holidays, I found myself shaking my fist in frustration that they didn't have a book focusing on how people in 1853 New Orleans celebrated Christmas. Meet Cécile starts at the end of the Christmas season, with Cécile and her mother taking down their Christmas tree and Cécile commenting on some of the things she looks forward to and enjoys during the holiday season, and Cécile's Gift ends in mid December, and there isn't much focus on what the two girls' families are doing to prepare for Christmas because they're all much more focused on finding ways to help people affected by the Yellow Fever epidemic. Obviously, this is a more important topic for the series itself, but when you compare it to the other girls having books that very clearly detail how their families celebrate winter holidays and traditions, it was sort of a bummer to not be able to immediately turn to the book or the collection and find lots and lots of inspiration there.

Obviously, that doesn't mean I gave up. After a lot of consideration, I decided to make a bread pudding for Marie-Grace, and a very different, equally tasty treat for Cécile, which you'll hopefully hear about tomorrow! I'd never even had bread pudding before making this recipe, and I was very pleasantly surprised by what we ended up with.