Amite Oyster Festival Parade — great place to boogie down!

You know how sometimes you see a word in print, and it sticks with you — not just that day, but sometimes for days afterward?  Well, that’s what happened with this week’s Travel Theme by Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack?  When I read Travel theme: Pink, I was on my way to Baton Rouge to visit my Mom.  But after scanning the listing of area events in The Advocate, my husband and I took off to yet another any-excuse-for-a-Louisiana-party day — the 2014 Oyster Festival in Amite where the color pink stood out like the piles of oysters everyone dug into!

At the parade that morning, we didn’t need to shout, Throw me something, Mister, since these pretty-in-pink riders were all female!  And they wanted to throw us somethin’ whether we yelled or not!

Float riders, Amite Oyster Festival 2014

Some pink participants just rode in a flat-bed truck with their Mom.

Scanning the crowd for where to throw those beads

And some willingly posed with Mom in front of Cooper’s Bakery — lovin’ the camera and ready for music and mayhem at the festival!

Posing with Mom at the Amite Oyster Festival

Even the sign for Cracklin’s was pink — hot pink, of course!

Get your cracklins right chere!

But who could resist staring at this precious row of blushing pink performers just waiting for their time in the limelight?  In the pink, right?!

Watching the “big girls” while waiting to perform!

For more entries for Travel theme: Pink, click here.  I have a feeling it’s a veritable pink explosion!

To read more about the Amite Oyster Festival, go to http://www.amiteoysterfestival.com/

Just take a look at the pictures and select your favorite by posting a comment below or on Facebook.  We’re in the home stretch and will be making our final selections this weekend.

Here are three photographs for the red category.

Today’s Vote: RED

1. Welcome to Nepal

Upon our arrival in Nepal to build two mud and stone houses for Habitat for Humanity International, we were greeted by ladies dressed in red bearing strings of marigolds to lay around our necks.  Surprisingly, they also brought a red gloppy concoction which they scooped up and smudged onto our foreheads.  Namaste, they said.  And then we knew.  We weren’t family, of course, but we were as welcome as any Americans could be.

2. Simply Elegant Tapestry

It was difficult to find something understated in the Hermitage (St. Petersburg, Russia), but this simple, yet exquisite, red tapestry was as classy a piece as any we saw.  Simply elegant.  Simply divine.

3. Dancers in Breaux Bridge

Standing still next to a guy wearing a red Peace, Love & Cajuns shirt and a lady brushing by in a crimson swingy, swirling skirt was no easy task for a neophyte photographer.  In fact, just about everyone at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival (Breaux Bridge, Louisiana) was movin’ and groovin’  — unless they were busy racing mudbugs and “suckin’ dem heads!”

Please take a minute to vote in the Comments section below.

If you missed any of the previous entries, here are the links to those posts.  There’s still time to help us decide!

Help us decide: Capture the Colour 2013 — GREEN

Help us decide: Capture the Colour 2013 — WHITE

Help us decide: Capture the Colour 2013 — YELLOW

Help us decide: Capture the Colour 2013 — BLUE

Many thanks for your support and ideas!

Rusha and Bert Sams

But since we were visiting relatives in Baton Rouge on Father’s Day weekend, I checked Yelp (Click here) for a listing of beignet shops in the area, and then “kidnapped” my hubby for a surprise visit to the number-one rated shop:  Rue Beignet.

It’s a clean little place — bright yellow walls, original artwork, a counter facing a wall of mirrors where folks sit on stools and may avoid (May, I said) covering themselves with a fine dusting of the white stuff that inevitably showers my lap whenever I take the first bite!

We lined up to order a plate of three sweet treats for each of us along with a café au lait.

We were handed mugs so we could serve ourselves from a contraption I wish we’d had when we were first introduced to strong Louisiana java laced with cream at the Cafe du Monde (Click here)  in the New Orleans French Quarter:  a self-stirring contraption that kept the creamy, light brown café au lait hot and all stirred up and handy if you wanted more!

I peered into the kitchen just in time to see owner Brent Sandrock rolling out mounds of light, cakey dough that he sliced and diced into squares and then plopped into the swirling oil.  As you can see, I could hardly hold the camera still with that great smell wafting into the dining area making my mouth water for these rarely-gotten delicacies — so soft, so squishy, and so not beignets for very long!

My husband grabbed our favorite Louisiana read — Country Roads magazine.  It’s part journalism with stories of people and happenings in the area and part annotated calendar — if you want to know where to take in the sights and sounds of Cajun country, you need to frequent this publication! (Click here for the online version.)

But before I could commence reading, a lady took out her very own apron, tied it around her waist, and got serious (very serious!) about the task at hand.  A true beignet aficionado, Claire Landry — whose name I learned later after we hit it off immediately — dines here regularly with her husband Larry and friend Jeannette. Although they were displaced from their home in New Orleans after Katrina, Claire and Larry have come to enjoy Baton Rouge — and breakfast at Rue Beignet!

When the beignets arrived, we almost grabbed them from the waiter’s hands and then doused ’em with another liberal sprinkling of the white stuff.

Don’t breathe in, I’ve always heard it said.  (I guess you’d get a cloud of sugar filling up your lungs.)  But I was also pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to breathe out either — unless I wanted to make Father’s Day a white-out event!

We savored our morning delicacies, sipped our café au lait and then said our good-byes.  I couldn’t resist asking this proud papa if I could take a picture of him and his adorable daughters.  (It was Father’s Day, after all, and they were taking their dad out for beignets.) The man gladly pulled them around him and said something we’ll never forget: I don’t know how I could have ever wished for a boy when I am so happy to have these two lovely girls in my life.

So, if you’re in Baton Rouge, stop by Rue Beignet and tell Brent hello.  Order the always-good beignets or what we’re having next time — a heaping plate of beignet fingers (loads of little sugary squiggles instead of square pillows).

But by all means, don’t forget your apron!

Rue Beignet

18135 E. Petroleum Drive, Suite H

Baton Rouge, LA 70809

225.448.3942

http://www.ruebeignet.com

Turn up that zydeco and get your cajun on!  There’s nothing like a Louisiana festival for food, fun, and fantastic movement — and this is one of the best: Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival in early May when mudbugs are runnin’ and Cajun thoughts turn to etouffee and fais dodo!

Might as well dress the part — fun this big deserves all you got — homemade or otherwise.

When you come to Breaux  Bridge (about 45 minutes from Baton Rouge), you enter Parc Hardy, buy a ticket, and pass through the big crawfish gate to the vendor section.

You’re sure to find crawfish-themed stuff for sale: stained glass windows with crawfish turned chefs, visors and sundresses made of crawfish print fabric, and jewelry, t-shirts and the like — all with those signature red crawly things on ’em! Or my favorite — with a warning to heed!

Immediately after the vendor booths, you spill out into wide open spaces (except for the elbow-to-elbow dance fans) and hear that hard drivin’ Creole music played with an accordion, violin, bass guitar, sax, or washboard! (Right on his chest? Really?)

It’s so much fun some folks just choose to sit it out and watch, but the foot-tappin’ goes on and on nonetheless.

Kids get their faces painted with big ol’ crawfish.

And adults turn to more serious work:  Crawfish eatin’!! Like crawfish pies (no file gumbo!) served hot and spicy.

Or crawfish etouffee from  this Ragin’ Cajun fan (University of Louisiana at Lafayette) who couldn’t scoop ’em up and pass ’em along fast enough.

Even the usual festival fare like corn dogs and turkey legs became larger than life and spicier than most in Breaux Bridge.

Spraying water on turkey legs to keep ’em from drying out!

I opted for a Cajun Pistol — “a spicy combo of crab, crawfish, shrimp and special cheeses stuffed into a bread roll” — and fried at that!  Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

My sister Marilyn and brother-in-law Collins from Denham Springs shared a wish-I-had-this-back-home treat:  shrimp wrapped in bacon, dipped in batter, and fried on the spot.  Festival heaven!

We tried crawfish rolls, crawfish balls, and crawfish boudin (spicy mixture of sausage, crawfish, and rice), but I’ll be darned if I can name a fave.

Crawfish rolls and crawfish balls

Some folks stood around a plastic table-like contraption that sat on top of a large garbage can.  It’s serious crawfish eating:  you peel ’em and eat ’em and toss ’em —  heads, tail, and all — into the hole in the middle!  (Not a bad invention, but we still use newspaper spread out on a table in our backyard!)  I’ve heard tell that you can get these things at a home improvement store Down South, but you’ll have to check that out for yourself.  However you dine at a crawfish boil, you can still say one thing:  Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Let the good times roll!)

We topped off our Creole goodness with some homemade fudge whipped up right there in a tent on a marble table some strong person brought in for the day.

And then we took some Bourbon Praline Pecans back home  — well, some of ’em made it home.

The 2013 Crawfish Festival Queen stood up to greet us.  She’s Anna Angeles, a senior at St. Thomas More Catholic High School.  (Beautiful, right?)

But at 3:00, we pushed into a circle of folks crowded around a huge board bearing a pot full of crawdads — it was time for the Crawfish Races.  All you had to do was register your critter, get a number painted onto his back, and toss him into the pot when your heat was called.

And then they were off!  Crawfish wobbled, flipped, uprighted, wriggled, and ran until the first one to cross the outermost line was named winner of that heat.  Who knew you could cheer on a crawfish as if it were the MVP in Tiger Stadium! But we did.

The Crawfish Festival is over for this year, but there are always more opportunities to party in Louisiana.  You just have to keep on top of the calendar and get yourself in shape for more dancin’ and eatin’!  I know one thing:  I’d come back — and I might even suck dem heads!

Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival Association

P. O. Box 25

Breaux Bridge, LA 70517

337.332.6655

info@bbcrawfest.com

www.bbcrawfest.com

For more information on Louisiana Festivals, click here.