Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman Chef Roland serves customers himself.

I can live with, even appreciate, the old desk and piles of paperwork you pass by when walking into Chef Roland’s dining room. The cordless drill left on the floor near a table. And Roland Joseph himself shuffling across the room to a zydeco beat that’s moving twice as fast as he is.

All of which would give pause if it didn’t fit so well the languid, slightly-tattered, gumbo-gothic motif that makes New Orleans and bayou country itself so darkly intriguing. A tidy and polished Bourbon Street, after all, would not a Mardi Gras make.

But fueling that soulful imperfection, whether here or there, is the food – Louisiana food. And that food had better be good.

That’s why on a June lunch visit I was encouraged when Chef Roland dropped a live crawfish on our table. He flies the squirming mudbugs up from Louisiana; the crawfish fishery is one of the few in the Gulf that hasn’t yet been impacted by the BP oil spill. After so graphically proving their freshness, he brought out a heaping, flame-red pile of boiled-in-the-shell crawfish tumbled with corn on the cob, red potato and hot link sausage ($18.95).

The spices clinging to those Louisiana Reds, as the variety is called, were hot enough to cure a head cold. And the bits of crawfish a friend and I sucked out of the tails and tiny claws were sweet, with none of the muddy notes common to freshwater crustacea. The whole tasty platter wasn’t far off the flavor of crawfish boils I’ve eaten in actual Cajun country.

Chef Roland himself was born in Lake Charles, La., and although his family moved to California, he went back to New Orleans for culinary school. Eight years ago he moved to Boise as food service director for the Boise Rescue Mission. He ran a food trailer after that, then opened Chef Roland’s 2Ý years ago. He says the restaurant life on this lonely stretch of Boise Avenue hasn’t been easy. Chef Roland, who has had to cut back on staff, is also the restaurant’s only waiter. But business is getting better: “One day” he says, “the Lord told me, if I keep showing up, he’ll keep the doors open.”

Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman Crawfish platter filled with boiled Louisiana Red crawfish with corn on the cob, red potatoes, hot link sausage and hush puppies.

As if fulfilling prophecy on another afternoon, Chef Roland was busy serving tables icy Abita beer ($3.75) and bowls of gumbo and jambalaya ($5.99 each at lunch; $6.99 at dinner). He seemed a bit overwhelmed, though, and the crawfish etouffee ($14.95/lunch) I’d ordered tasted of it. The dish had a slightly swampy flavor that, along with an accompanying plate of under-seasoned beans and rice, suggested Chef Roland is sometimes spread too thin.

In contrast, the Cajun BBQ pork ribs ($13.99), swimming in a sweet red sauce, were falling-off-the-bone delicious. So were the nearly baseball-sized cornmeal hush puppies that accompany virtually everything at Roland’s. The pork Po Boy sandwich ($7.99) was also quite good. But overstuffed with pork and a moist remoulade sauce, it self-destructed between a friend’s fingers after a few bites. Still, some might argue that’s proper Po Boy behavior.

Stuffed with breadcrumbs and smothered in jambalaya, a Friday-night pork loin special ($17.95) was also messy good. The less complicated blackened prime rib ($18.95) was tender and tasty. And the key lime pie and bread pudding ($4.50 each) – well, I wish I’d saved room for more.

Maybe I’m going a little easy on Chef Roland’s restaurant. After all, he ain’t the fastest waiter in the world, and his restaurant is far from polished. But Chef Roland and the region he came from still have heart after suffering more than their share of tribulations. That matters.

As he says: “I spend 14 to 16 hours a day here six days a week. And that’s all right. I’m all right with that. The kitchen is just like my own little heaven.”

Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/06/25/1244113/cajun-cuisine-and-bbq-has-lots.html#ixzz0rrYIAV2i

Janie Burns's lamb boudin © Guy Hand 2009

Janie has been working on the recipe with sausage maker Lin Hintze of Big Lost River Meats in Mackay, Idaho and they’ve just about got the recipe down. Janie was giving away samples at the Capital City Market on Saturday to get some feedback before beginning to sell the final product.  Here’s a little audio of Janie Burns explaining her path to boudin.

Janie Burns: “Well the boudin is a Louisiana sausage that has unusual ingredients.  It has rice and lamb, peppers and some different spices.  It’s a new introduction.  I’m giving it away today to some of my select customers so they can try it and tell me if they like it and then when I do a bigger batch, I’ll have the recipe down.

In working with Lin Hintze of Big Lost River Sausage, he is always coming up with great ideas that when he goes to sausage conferences and perhaps talking to his fellow sausage makers around the country, he comes with lots of ideas and so he and I like to collaborate on new kinds of sausage.  And he does all the specialty sausages that are locally done in this area.

It’s not a sausage that I’m really familiar with and so I have a few customers that I know are from Louisiana and I’ve given them Trial 1, this is now Trial 2 because we didn’t quite have the sausage right and now I’m going to solicit their opinion actively.  But also my clientele is not people from Louisiana, it’s people from Idaho so I’m going to have to balance their regional affiliation with this sausage with the tastes of Idaho.”

Janie Burns © Guy Hand 2009

By the way, there’s a great article on the search for the perfect boudin called “Cajun Country by Car” by Thomas O. Ryder in the November 2007 issue of Food & Wine. The story is included in the anthology Best Food Writing 2008 too.  Donald Link, the renowned New Orleans chef, also talks about boudin in his new cookbook “Real Cajun.”

Walking into Seasons for the first time, it’s easy to mistake the place for a simple neighborhood deli. It’s got a stylish enough veneer (this is Eagle after all), but it just doesn’t have the look of a full-blown restaurant. There’s the white-enamel, supermarket-size beverage case humming along the wall; there’s the purchasable culinary knickknacks stacked around a mere handful of tables; and there’s the flier-like menu, a seemingly unsurprising assortment of wraps, sandwiches and salads.

Joe Jaszewski / Idaho Statesman

But look a little closer. You’ll see that this year-old business tucked into a back lot near the now-shuttered Sixonesix is a whole bunch more than a standard-issue deli.

First, the beverage case is filled with a far higher number of good wines and beers than Diet Cokes and Sprites. Around the corner from that cooler hides a rather handsome wine bar. A bit farther still, there’s a single-tabled hideaway surrounded by floor-to-ceiling cabernets, pinot noirs and chardonnays. Then there’s that menu: The tip-off for me came with the muffulettas and crawfish po-boys that lurk quietly among the BLTs and Reubens.

Owner Rachel Hurn, her chef brother Eric Peterson and parents Barbara and Dan Peterson are all from Baton Rouge, in the heart of arguably the most food-obsessed state in the Union. Think gumbo, crawfish boils, pralines, Paul Prudhomme and the vast Emeril Lagasse empire. Still, the family doesn’t make a big fuss over their Louisiana heritage in either the menu or decor. It’s like Seasons itself: a pleasant surprise.

Take, for instance, the sophisticated nightly specials not printed on menu; they’re decidedly more bistro than delicatessen. The duck in hazelnut crust ($18.99) is Eric Peterson’s invention (he’s a formally trained chef who’s worked from Baton Rouge to Disneyland). Pink-centered slices of duck breast coated in a toasted hazelnut, shallot and breadcrumb crust arrived irresistibly un-deli-like. They sat over rice with mushrooms and just-tender haricot verts. Eric’s mother Barbara makes the cherry sauce that (pardon my Emeril-speak) kicks the dish up a notch. She simmers dried cherries with wine, orange juice and honey until they spark a little alchemy: a sauce that’s slightly sweet, but rich with dark, subterranean notes. (The confident complexity of that cherry sauce isn’t surprising when you learn that Barbara Peterson ran a Louisiana catering company and cooking school for 38 years.)

She also cooks the Asian rib appetizer special ($8.99), her take on Chinese pork, marinated in soy and hoisin sauce, honey and garlic, then roasted to a golden sheen and served with a tangy Thai dipping sauce. I had to fight my dinner mate for those ribs.

Son Eric put together the other specials that night. The aroma of the bruschetta with pesto, roasted tomato and asiago ($6.99) preceded that excellent dish and the shrimp buerre blanc over penne pasta ($13.99) was light-years more delectable than the roadhouse versions served at lesser establishments.

But where, you might ask, was the gumbo on the menu? Well, they’d run out. Owner Rachel Hurn says they regularly make cajun and creole dishes but quickly adds they don’t limit themselves to a single cuisine. “We’ve got a lot of things going on in this crazy circle (of a family),” she laughs. That family reflects the true nature of Louisiana cooking: a gumbo mashup of cajun, creole, Spanish, French, German, Italian and who knows what else.

One example is the menu’s huge muffuletta sandwich ($9.50 half/$18 whole). Invented by Sicilian immigrants in 1906 at the still-open Central Grocery in New Orleans’s French Quarter, it’s a hub-cap-shaped loaf layered with provolone, ham, salami – and the magic ingredient – olive salad. While traveling a couple of weeks ago, I was eating through New Orleans, re-tasted the Central Grocery original, and I’ve gotta say it’s got nothing on the Seasons version. OK, my favorite was a messy, four-napkin wonder I found at a funky French Quarter market called Verti Marte. That sandwich was so fat with olives, marinated carrots and celery, its oregano-scented olive oil was dripping off my elbows.

Rachel Hurn says her Eagle customers tend to prefer their muffulettas a tad more tidy. But she’s happy to “dirty ‘em up” with as much olive salad as customers (and their wardrobes) can handle.

That’s just one more thing I like about Seasons.

For full story go to: http://www.idahostatesman.com/204/story/681040.html