Cajun Vegetables at Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen by Ruth Paget

Cajun Vegetables at Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen by Ruth Paget 

Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen is most famous for its deep-fried chicken sandwich combination meals, but I sometimes like going to Popeye’s for a spicy Cajun vegetable meal. 

Louisiana vegetable sides often feature an addition of spicy andouille sausage, whose ancestor is a mild andouille sausage from France. Andouille sausage from Louisiana is made with pork butt, garlic, salt, black pepper, and spicy cayenne pepper according to the Taste of Artisan website. 

This type of andouille sausage is added to a sauté of onions, green bell pepper, celery, tomato paste, garlic, cooked red beans, chicken stock and hot sauce to make a stew according to the Damn Delicious website. Once the stew is cooked, these beans are served alongside cooked white rice. 

Red beans and rice is a Cajun comfort food from the Louisiana countryside. I like to order it with a chilled coleslaw, a chopped salad made with cabbage, carrots, and onions with a cream dressing. 

Popeye’s also offers Cajun fries with cayenne-heavy Cajun seasoning and mashed potatoes with spicy Cajun gravy. 

Monterey County does not have a Popeye’s as of August 2024, but there are two locations within the Congressional district: 

-Watsonville Auto Mall outside Santa Cruz 

-Gilroy Cross Mall by Barnes and Noble outside San Jose 

I like exotic fast food at a reasonable price, and Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen is just perfect for this. 

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Omelets All Day $ Money Hack by Ruth Paget

Omelets All Day $ Money Hack by Ruth Paget 

Going to French-Canadian Cafés in Windsor (Ontario, Canada) when I was in high school in Detroit (Michigan) taught me that you could eat omelets any time of day as a meal. 

I loved omelets with melted gruyère cheese and mushroom ragout that I could eat there topped off with a sprinkling of sweet paprika from Szeged, Hungary. The omelets usually came with a side of salad in tangy vinaigrette and two slices of crusty, country bread. 

Sometimes I would even make those omelets on Friday nights after skating at Hartt Plaza on the riverfront. We had a Larousse Gastronomique cookbook at home that gave me a recipe for slow-cooked mushroom ragout made with melted butter and an addition of freshly chopped parsley at the end. 

I did a presentation to my high school French club about omelettes aux champignons et fromage (mushroom-cheese omelets). I duly noted that eggs bring protein for muscle building to this dish and that cheese brings calcium for bones. I also noted that mushrooms have fiber for unclogging arteries. My cost-conscious French classmates noted that this dish was inexpensive for a lot of health benefits. 

I still make omelets for my husband Laurent and me. I use three large, organic eggs per person from Costco as well as the cheese from Allgäu Alps in Germany and mushrooms from Oregon and Canada that I buy there. 

Now that I live in California, I eat Western omelets when I go to Denny’s or other Route 66-type diners made with sautéed green peppers, onions, mushrooms, strips of ham, and melted low-fat Monterey Jack cheese. 

And, best of all, omelets are still pretty low-cost to make. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Montana and South Dakota Trip by Ruth Paget

Montana and South Dakota Trip by Ruth Paget 

In 1973, my dad took me on a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana during the Watergate Trial. We left from Detroit, Michigan and set out for an overnight stay in Minnesota with one of his pen pals from Field and Stream magazine (their mutual interest was fishing in the wilderness). 

I woke drowsily after the overnight stay in Minnesota, but became wide-eyed once I hit the van for a day’s worth of travel through the Badlands of South Dakota and Montana. Dad turned on the radio coverage of the Watergate Trial. He was a Republican and commented on the commentators, “Politics just ruins good people like Richard Nixon.” 

“What about the robbers?” I asked. “They’ll be found guilty. No one will know them or know anything about the robbery,” dad remarked. 

Prairie dogs raced in front of the car in the Badlands. I kept asking dad to slow down and not squash the prairie dogs. The speed limit was 75 miles per hour then, so we were flying and squashing away. 

“I’ll get in an accident, if I slow down for all them, Ruthie,” he said. 

We were both transfixed by the moon-like landscape. Vast rock plateaus were broken up by higher rock plateaus with caves in the landscape. I thought snakes might live in the caves. 

I thought it took forever to get through South Dakota and Montana was a longer state I saw as we crossed the state line. Dad stopped at the visitor center where I picked up travel brochures. Glacier was the big deal in Montana. Dad gave me saltine crackers with liverwurst to eat in the car. 

I looked at one of the travel brochures for Butte, Montana and asked dad, “Are we going to Butt, Montana?” 

“That’s not how you say that,” dad said. “Okay, are we going to Booty, Montana, then?” I asked. “That is pronounce ‘byut.’ It’s a French word meaning ‘hill.’ The French were the original European explorers in this area, “ dad said.

I sat chuckling at my kid joke.

“We’re going way up north right to the Canadian border to see Glacier National Park,” dad said. 

There were towering pine trees at the entrance to Glacier that cut off the sun. 

 “We’re going up the ice mountain now,” dad said. 

We went up, up, and up. I looked down at the pine trees, which became progressively smaller the higher up we went. The pine trees looked like stick trees you put on a Christmas mantelpiece we were up so high. I was glad to read the summit. 

We went to a picnic area where dad took out his Coleman gas stove and made a breakfast-dinner in Lodge cookware. He filled his Coleman thermos with coffee several times. We breathed in the thin, high-altitude air. 

With a belly full of bacon, I agree to go to Banff National Forest in Canada, so we could see Canadian pine trees and say we’d been to Canada. 

Even as a kid, I knew dad was thinking the Glacier vacation was ice, pine trees, and dead prairie dogs.

Dad carefully drove down the steep glaciers that had patches of water on them from melting snow. I fell asleep and woke up in South Dakota. 

Dad turned on the Watergate Trial when I woke up. 

I told dad, “I want to be president. I think I can do a better job than this.” 

“It’s all headache,” dad said.

“But, I think I could do it. And, I’ve traveled internationally after this trip. I have a head start on international affairs,” I said. 

We both were laughing about Canadian pine trees. 

Surprisingly, my non-feminist dad said, “Study hard, and even if you’re not president, you’ll still be able to do something you like eventually.” 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about French Culture in Windsor (Canada) and In Detroit at Moliere plays, the art museum, and other activities by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about French Culture in Windsor (Canada) and in Detroit at Moliere plays, at the art institute, and other activities with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Thanks to my high school’s French club in Detroit, Michigan, I felt like I made a trip to France every week for an hour before school started on Wednesday mornings.   The Club was open to students who had completed one year of French with a “B” or better average.

I was elected Social Chairperson for my ability to come up with activities to do on a weekly basis.  On easy planning weeks, we would play Milles Bornes™, the French card driving game, and learned all the vocabulary and insults that went with it.  We also played Parlor Games, the French play these at rallyes at home, like 21 Questions, Simon Says, Who am I? and I Spy in Franch.

We went to see Molière’s (1622 – 1673) Tartruffe with the third- and fourth-year French class that was performed by the drama department at Wayne State University.  Before going to see the play, we read the play in French, so we could understand what was being said.

When many of us became advanced French students, we wrote a play based on Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and performed it before the junior French classes and the high school’s drama classes in the school auditorium.  I was the lamppost lighter, who chose to light up the world or dim it.

Despite a heavy homework load, I arranged trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA) to see: 

-the Detroit Industry Murals (1932 – 1933) by Diego Rivera 

-Martha and Mary Magdalen (c.1598) and The Fruit Vendor (c.1635 – 1620) by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610)

-The Wedding Dance (1566) by Pieter Breugel (1520 – 1569), called Breugel the Elder

-The Visitation (1640) by Rembrandt (1606 – 1669)

-Ruisdael’s (1628 – 1682) Jewish Cemetery (1654 -1655), Canal Scene (late 1640s), and Landscape (1665 – 1668)

-The Nigerian sculpture collection

-The medieval knight armor hall 

The DIA had docents at the time from the University of Michigan, who gave tours for free, if you reserved ahead of time.

Going to museums is a French national sport, so we planned several trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts, which we traveled to by city buses.  We also visited the Detroit Zoo, the Botanical Garden, and the Aquarium and learned all the French vocabulary to describe what we saw.

Sometimes I had to stretch my imagination for activities to do like planning a baseball and picnic outing on Belle Isle.  Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. 

The island has a French name which reveals Detroit’s French heritage.  The name Detroit is derived from D’étroit, meaning “from narrows," because the Detroit River is indeed narrow.

On other occasions, I would contact the French consulate in Detroit to get films, posters, maps, and brochures for our club.  We all learned about Loire Valley Châteaux, Paris, the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera), and Normandy from these films. 

We organized dinner parties at club members’ homes and tried our hands at French onion soup, crêpes, and tarte tatin (apple, upside-down cake).  I was more of a taster than a cook then and was happy that several French Club members knew how to cook.  I am a good French cook now thanks to a lot of practice from both necessity and pleasure.

I liked organizing lunches in French restaurants in Windsor, Canada for about thirty to thirty-five people usually at a fixed price. 

 

The restaurants would have us arrive early and gave us a choice between two main dishes such as roast chicken or ratatouille.  We would start the meal with vegetable terrines and French onion soup.  Cheese, salad, and chocolate mousse or ice cream would follow the main dish.  Water or sodas accompanied the meal.  

Long walks around Windsor followed the meal down Oulette Street to the flower gardens by the Detroit River before boarding the Detroit-Canada bus to go back through the tunnel and our life in Detroit.

We danced to Jean-Michel Jarre music on the Boblo Ferry Boat as our last club activity before college.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about Canada‘s French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget

Learning about Canada's French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget 

I learned about the vestiges of French exploration and/or colonization from my high my first French teacher in Detroit, Michigan. She was from Guadalupe and ran an efficient classroom.

She told us that French was a language of diplomacy, business, art, cuisine, and fashion to introduce us to the language we would be studying.  

She also gave us expectations for classroom behavior and homework rules.  She emphasized that if we wanted to go on the spring break trip to Montreal that we would have to keep our grades up.  “Up” meant a “B” or better.

I loved traveling and studied hard to make it onto the train to Montreal in the province of Quebec, Canada for a week.  Instead of taking the tunnel under the Detroit River to Canada, my mother drove me to Windsor in Ontario over the Detroit-Canada Bridge, so I could see the Detroit skyline.  

As soon as you enter Canada, the signs are in English and French, signaling a different way of life.

Almost all of the students in my school including me had been to Windsor, Canada.  Windsor offers visitors river front gardens, a great view of Detroit with John Portman’s (b. 1924) Renaissance Center in the middle of the skyline, beautiful restaurants, and crystal and china shops galore along Oulette Street.

Montreal was a cousin to Paris albeit colder, we had learned in our teacher’s orientation session before we set out on the trip.  I thought Montreal must have had massive traffic jams as it is located on an island where the St. Lawrence and Ottowa Rivers meet.  

Our teacher made sure that we could order in a restaurant, buy clothes, purchase movie tickets, and get directions in French before we headed out to Montreal.

Everyone stayed up all night on the train talking with our friends, telling jokes, and playing logic games like 21 Questions and Who am I?

Upon arrival in Montreal, we loaded our suitcases into a tour bus and took an all-day city tour, which required several stops and walks up steep hills.  The hills seemed steeper than they were, because we were tired.

The stop that interested me the most was our visit to St. Joseph’s Oratory.  I had been in Catholic Churches before, but had never seen a pilgrimage site before.  Canes lined the walls along with crutches and wheelchairs left by people, who had been cured by a visit to the Oratory.  

According to the Michelin Guide I read years later, Brother André, born Alfred Bessette (1845 – 1937) created the devotions to Saint Joseph at this church that healed ailing pilgrims.

Some of us lit candles and prayed for loved ones.  

Our next hilly stop was Parc du Mont Royal which was planned by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmstead (1822 – 1903), who had planned New York’s Central Park.  

We drove through the exclusive Westmount neighborhood to get to the park and took many photographs of the nineteenth century mansions, which reminded us of Detroit’s exclusive neighborhoods of Palmer Woods, Indian Village, and Sherwood Forest.

Later in the week, we took another tour bus out to the Olympic Park built to host the 1976 summer Olympic Games.  These games were fresh in our teen minds in 1979.  I loved the excitement of sports; the skier Franz Klammer was my favorite athlete.

We all complained to our French teacher that she had not arranged for us to go swimming in one of the six pools of the aquatic complex.  I think she might have wanted to throw all of us into a swimming pool after five days in a youth hostel.

The best part of our trip, though, was getting to spend a day in a bilingual high school.  We attended algebra, English, and biology classes.  In English, we read parts in a readers’ theatre of part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a Grade 13 class; Canadians go to school for thirteen years.  The algebra and biology classes were taught in French.

I could keep up with the algebra class and was happy, because I knew that Canadian schools at the time were among some of the best in the world when using international testing standards.

I also learned from one of the English-speaking teenagers that she liked studying French, because it reinforced her understanding of English grammar.  I was not entirely sure of what she meant until I studied French for another year. 

When and why to use certain verb tenses became very clear to me in English as I studied the same verb tenses in French.

When I diagrammed sentences in English class, I knew exactly what to do with subordinate clauses thanks to studies of French as well.  French was my insider secret to doing well in English class.  That secret was the best souvenir I brought back from Montreal.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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