to katie.lani.donald.matt.sine-qua-non.

I wish I had taken more pictures, because we did send out some nice plates; but the pace didn’t usually invite picture-taking–and I’m pretty sure my phone didn’t have a camera when CR was in operation.  The recipes won’t include pictures of the plates as they were presented in the restaurant, but they will have been tested by ten years of use.

Most of the recipes have two things in common: (1) they’re resilient, that is, able to withstand a number of errors, such as misreadings and substitutions, and (2) they often have a mix and match quality; for example, a wine mixture that can be used to poach fruit and as a sauce for desserts.  Most of us alter recipes for one reason or another; my m.o. was to delete all nonessential ingredients–cost, cost, cost.

The early Cane River was a far cry from its later iterations, the last of which was the Loading Dock. In the initial plan, the restaurant would serve only one thing–Natchitoches meat pies.  Eventually, several Louisiana entrees were on the menu but meat pies never were–I’m not really sure why; in any case, I include them here for nostalgia’s sake, and because I love meat pies..

I am going to be adding recipes in a highly piecemeal fashion as blog posts in printable versions.  Katie just asked me how to make boursin–a good place to begin.

Don’t click on the thumbnail–it takes you away, somewhere.

The picture, taken by Roxann Haislip, was always my favorite, and Alan Hubbard used it when he built the website. I saved the thumbnail, but I don’t know how to stabilize it.

That’s a problem to give to my favorite son-in-law, Will.

Someone once told me they thought having a B&B would be fun, a comment I thought about afterwards while cleaning 9 toilets–not so fun.  I often wonder if the realism of this scene from Mostly Martha would have reached me if I had seen it  pre-restaurant; it still makes me tense, even though ours was a much scaled-down version.