Food Archives

November 14, 2025November 14, 2025

I Used to Rue Roux

The first time I attempted Cajun cooking, Wife Lila said, “Oh, you had to make roux. That’s not always easy.”

Ignorance is bliss. I didn’t know it was hard to make until she told me. That intimidated me after that.

I had a craving the other night and found I had most of the makin’s in the cupboard: sausage, chicken thighs, shrimp, okra, potatoes, carrots, the holy trinity of onions, peppers and celery, plus various spices.

Almost all of the recipes I read started off with “make roux” from butter or oil and flour. They called for whisking the mixture for nearly an hour in some cases.

Easy dry roux

Then, I found one that let you create dry roux mix that could be stored for future use. It called for a pound of sifted flour poured into a 9×13 baking pan and put in the oven for 20 minutes at 400 degrees.

After the 20 minutes were up, you stirred the mixture, resifted it and put it back into the 400-degree oven for another 20 minutes. It was starting to get a rich, brown color.

One more sifting, and baking, and the roux-to-be had a nice caramel color. I put half a cup of this in my instant pot along with half a cup of oil. It turned a beautiful brown.

The process wasn’t much shorter than doing it the normal way, but it meant that I could be prepping the other ingredients without being a slave to whisking the roux.

Blackstone to the rescue

I had already sautéed my onions, peppers, celery, and garlic, and browned the sausage and thighs on my Blackstone griddle. The 36-inch surface gave me lots of real estate to be able to spread the stuff out. I started with the veggies, then moved them over to a cooler zone while I did the meats.

I put that mix in the Instant Pot with the roux, poured in four cups of chicken broth, some spices, a box of Zatarain gumbo mix (mostly for the rice), and some microwaved baby potatoes. After giving that a good stir, I put a layer of shrimp and frozen okra on top.

I switched the IP to pressure cooking for seven minutes, with a 12-minute natural release after that. I had planned to add fresh mushrooms, but my six-quart pot was already above the max fill line, so I left them out.

It tasted good, and I have enough of the dry roux in a jar so I can duplicate the dish with minimal hassle in the future.

October 1, 2025

Cape Comfort Food

When I started spending most of my time in Cape , Wife Lila was sure I would starve to death and perish in my own filth. The latter is still a possibility, but I’ve turned into a passable cook.

I saw a picture the other day of something that reminded me of one of our frequent family meals – something Mother dubbed Hungarian Goulash. I’m not sure where she got the Hungarian part – maybe she was thinking of Hungry Goulash.

Anyway, I looked up several recipes, extracted the common elements, and started creating my own version.

This contains two pounds of ground beef, five strips of bacon cut one-inch long, onions, peppers, and garlic, all prepared on my Blackstone griddle. When the meat and veggies were ready, I moved them into my 6-quart Instant Pot because that was a convenient place for everything to come together.

I added beef broth, water, two cans of tomato sauce, two cans of Rotel diced tomatoes and green chilies (instead of just plain diced tomatoes), a bunch of seasonings that just happened to be in front of me, and three bay leaves (what they do, I’m never sure).

I’m a memory cooker – meaning that I remember having something extra on the shelf that needs to be used up. That caused me to add a package of frozen corn.

Once everything was well-mixed, I let it bubble for about 25 minutes.

The next step was to throw in a box of elbow macaroni. I thought that stuff was sort of small (it eventually expanded), so I remembered I had a box of Zatarain’s black beans and rice sitting on a shelf.

After that was well combined, I added a whole bunch of cheddar cheese (abut three times as much as the recipe called for), then about the same amount of Mozzarella cheese.

You can never have too much garlic, onions, bacon and cheese, after all.

About 25 minutes later, the cheeses had melted together nicely, and the noodles had expanded. I was ready to see how my 6-quart experiment in culinary time travel went.

It turned out well enough that I wasn’t ashamed to farm out most of the pot to friends and family in town.

May 6, 2014

What Is the Green Stuff?

Mother and I were cruising around Allenville for a followup on an old story when we started passing field after field of green stuff. She thought it might be wheat, but she wasn’t sure.

I divide the world into two classes: food and feed. Food has feet or fins. If it doesn’t have feet or fins, then it must be feed for food.

So, what were we looking at? You can click on the picture to make it larger.

Travel update

Got a late start leaving Cape Monday, so I didn’t make it east of Louisville as planned. I stopped at a rest area with a decision to make: do I take a 22-minute nap and push on, or do I search to see if there is any lodging nearby. I selected Door Number 2.

There was a motel five minutes away in Ferdinand, IN. It was sometime around midnight-thirty (more about that in a minute), so I decided to stop.

I earned one discount because of the alphabet soup of travel organizations I threw out (I didn’t actually SAY I was a member of them; I just asked if they cut prices for them. I got another reduction by pointing out that I was the last person they were probably going to see that night, and I got another cut by being a member of their chain’s organization.

Time is a little confusing

Just before I headed to the room, the desk clerk said, “Time is a little confusing here. The motel is the the Eastern Time Zone; your cell phone is going to show Central time because the dividing line is the Interstate.”

He wasn’t kidding. My cell phone alarm went off at 9:32 a.m., but the motel’s alarm clock said 10:30. Must be tough to live around there.

I got into Athens in time to have dinner with Curator Jessica. She says I have to put on my shoes and pants tomorrow for a 3-hour oral history interview with the Ohio University School of Media Arts and Studies. Jessica is supposed to be asking me questions about what it was like to have gone to college shortly after the earth’s crust cooled. They told her that we don’t have to fill the whole three hours, but Jessica said, “I don’t think he’ll have any problem talking that long.”

November 20, 2012December 5, 2023

The Pie Safe

This is the time of year when thoughts turn to pie and presents. Sharon Rose Penrod and her Pie Safe in Pocahontas can help you.

Let me go on record that I support buying from local businesses like The Pie Safe, where most of the ingredients are locally grown. Some of the vegetables come from a 100-year-old garden on on a farm owned by her husband’s family since the 1880s.

Pie Safe used to be bank

The Pie Safe started out as the Pocahontas Bank in 1910 with deposits of $10,000, but it didn’t survive the Crash of 1929. It served a variety of uses over the years, including being an insurance office and a home.

Safe has 24-inch walls

The ornate safe with its 24-inch-thick concrete walls still dominates one wall.

“It found me”

Sharon Rose and her husband, Monte, had been active in Jackson’s farmers market when she decided to turn her talent for baking into a business. “I didn’t find the bank, it found me,” she said of her building. The cafe has been open since June 12, 2012.

No real menu

The Pie Safe doesn’t have a formal printed menu. There’s a whiteboard with the specials scrawled on it, but “some days I run out of stuff, so I’ll tell customers, ‘Here are the ingredients I have. What would you like to make me out of them?'”

I showed up the other day just before closing time. “I’ve got my heart set on some of your coconut cream pie (topped with REAL whipped cream, not “calf slobber”).

“I don’t have any left,” she said.

The lip quiver worked

I put on my saddest face and gave her the patented lip quiver.

“OK, I might be able to whip one up while you’re eating,” she relented.

“I’ll chew slowly,” I promised.

When I finished up, she said, “I don’t think this is going to have time to set up.” I offered to eat a piece and take two with me.

“I don’t want to sell this”

“I really don’t want to sell this,” she remonstrated. “The whipped cream is sliding into the base. I’m not going to be able to cut it.”

“How about if I take the WHOLE pie? I’m headed up to the museum at Altenburg. I can pop it into the fridge in 20 minutes.”

Against her better judgement, she let me take it.

For the record, she was right. It never DID set up solidly, but Mother and I didn’t care. We were more interested in taste than appearance. We managed to polish it off in two days.

Got her baking skills from mother

She says she got her baking know-how from her mother, Shirley Schroeder Petschke, whose photos grace the walls.

Where is it?

If you can find Pocahontas, which is north of Cape Girardeau and south of Altenburg, you won’t have any trouble finding The Pie Safe, which is in the heart of downtown. (Don’t blink.)

It’s open from 6 am to 2 pm Wednesday through Saturday. The phone number is 573-833-6743. You can send Sharon Rose email at srpenrod@gmail.com

Tell her Ken said “Hi” and to start working on a coconut cream pie for when I come back in a couple of months.