Southern Po' Boy Cookbook offers history you can eat

My mama sure will forgive Todd-Michael St. Pierre for being verbose in defending the perfect soft-inside, crisp-outside bread for a po’ boy sandwich. She does the same thing. He asks for such forgiveness in his Ulysses Press release, “The Southern Po’ Boy Cookbook: Mouthwatering Sandwich Recipes from The Heart of New Orleans. You just want to start crying a few pages in when reading about “history you can eat,” and how the sandwich makers Bennie and Clovis Martin offered free ones to those “poor boys” on strike from conducting street cars. They said they’d feed them ‘til hell froze over, then they’d offer blankets. Before that an oyster loaf was called a peace maker, when men brought them home to wives to stop complaining about their coming home late. Now the author loves a classic dressed or scantily  clad, and also shares some twists like the Who Dat barbecued shrimp variations of muffuletta and debris and The Algiers Boy with fried scallop and chipotle. The Italians, Vietnamese and Mexican cultures want in on this po’ boy thing, too. You can pull open a bag of Zapp’s chips with just about any of them.

The Lafayette is made with boudain and the Plaquemines edition features turkey and stuffing. Now here’s where I insert my weekly pumpkin trending update. Have a slice of P pie after your sandwich.

New Stubb’s stuff

Sticky Sweet Stubb’s All Natural Bar-B-Q Sauce. Sound good to you? My daughter is marrying a Stubb’s-lovin man, so she was more excited than I was to try it. When my mother asked if she could prepare us all a meal on her recent visit, we suggested she do any old thing with this bottle of new Sticky Sweet I got, featuring brown sugar and molasses. She showed us up by saying she already had a jar. So we all slept tight waiting for barbecue on Sunday. Imagine our surprise when we opened the door and smelled . . . Mexican food. It’s the other Texas comfort food. A misunderstanding, but still delicious.

So the next time we all got together, I understood she was picking up a box of Chinese food to go with a pot of rice I made. She showed up with a roasted chicken. Another misunderstanding, but our family can get on board with a food switch pretty quickly. Jasmine and I took the opportunity to slather our chicken with the long-awaited Sticky Sweet and can say, old Stubb’s has done himself proud. If you didn’t know, Stubb’s is an Austin thing.

Downton Abbey Red and White

There were literal gasps as I announced the guest at this party: two wines with the donton Abbey label. Fans devoured information on Mr. Carson bringing wine on a silver platter and info on the notes of wild berries. It was a hit all the way around, with samplers commenting that these flavors may not be what  they would normally reach for, but they enjoyed this step up into another world. My favorite is the red, which poured a lovely purple in my glass. No wonder, as it features black and blue berries, red currents and aromas of spices and violets in the notes. The white Bordeaux features apricot notes. Grapes used to create the new Downton Abbey Wine Collection were grown in the same Bordeaux region as was imported by the British aristocracy in the 1900s, Is that a conversation starter, or what. This is fun stuff.

Chinese are buying American

Here’s the story as makers tell it. “NYC based entrepreneur Sol Wahba says that the several of the colorful and tasty products in the NuvoSport Smart Meal-SNX line are striking a chord with people in China.

“We’re seeing significant and growing interest in two of our high density nutritional drinks,” he said. “We’re shipping more and more orders on a regular basis.”