Black Bean Casserole, Noodles and Honey
Written Spring
Semester 2007
By Tom Cole
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I brought the recipe for black bean casserole back with me from New
Orleans just three months after my dog Noodles died and a couple of
weeks before Katrina smashed into the city. I had looked in my journal
and found that I hadn't visited my sister Sally there in four years,
and so I called and told her I was flying down.
Now, to me, New Orleans is a city of food as much as it is a city of
jazz. The young Louisianan in the plane seat next to me said, "Ya'll
lookin' forward to gettin' back home?" He was speaking to the people
across from us as he and I had got odd, aft-facing seats and were
flying backwards with no choice but to stare at these people as we flew
and, of course, them at us.
They told him that they were.
"I just want to get some gumbo," he went on.
"Okra is what makes gumbo gumbo, isn't it?" I asked him, for I'd heard
that this was so but wasn't really sure and felt I had been afforded
here the opportunity find out at last. I knew my niece loved the stuff.
"I don't know what's in it," he said with a smile. "I just like it."
Sally lived in Lakeview, a fairly nice, middle class neighborhood. She
had a small house there, which she loved, with a decent back yard, and
she lived alone, two of her kids being successfully employed and the
other, my niece, away at college.
Now, I was born in the south, and I feel even today that my life really
began when we moved west in 1958 to the clean, unspoiled desert of
Arizona. So I didn't used to like the fact that my sister and my niece
and nephews lived in New Orleans. The city was rife with crime and
corruption and despite its culture and rusticity was rather
unattractive. The place seemed to have a dreary, hosed-out appearance
and what's more, there didn't appear to be an easy escape from it. A
fishing trip I took once out on the nearby ocean convinced me that the
color "battleship gray" had been invented on the Gulf Coast, and I
found that dredging around with an oversized hook in those shallow,
oily waters for "reds" was marginally fun as a one-time thing, but not
much more. And I wouldn't eat one of those icky fishes if you paid me.
I remember once watching a bunch of workmen trying to direct traffic in
New Orleans, and I said to my nephew, "Those idiots are directing cars
into each other. Someone's gonna crash. You ought to call the cops."
"They wouldn't come," he told me.
My other nephew, a jazz guitarist, came home late one night from a gig,
and a drunk ran a red light and totaled the family car. By the time the
cops arrived on the scene, the driver was cold sober.
But it is not just the establishment that has a lawless quality; it is
the mindset of the people as well. A high school graduation ceremonies
note sent home to my sister read, "A limited amount of beer will be
served to the graduates."
There's truly a different culture in New Orleans from anywhere else
I've been in America, and as I said, I didn't used to like the idea of
their living there. I began to change my mind, however, when I saw the
convenience of my sister's neighborhood. The veterinarian was two
houses down, next to which was an Irish pub named Parlay's, which was
next to a coffee house, which was next to the bank, which was next to
the hair cutter's. The supermarket was right across the street. She had
endless little pubs within easy striking distance and there was live
music in them half of the time. The beer you get in a local saloon in
Arizona is what my irreverent sister refers to as "panther piss," but
New Orleans has its own signature brew called Abita, and it comes in
several styles, one of which is a wonderfully hoppy concoction that is
a joy to drink. Such local flavor is missing where I live. There are
good brew houses in places like Phoenix, but their offerings are not
available in every single pub and restaurant in the city, and po'boy
sandwiches stuffed full of shrimp or oysters are not standard fare
either, so despite their Mexican restaurants, cities like Phoenix still
seem to lack a culinary identity.
Sally didn't go into Parlay's because the joint seemed too rough for
her, and in fact about a week before I flew down, somebody stabbed a
fellow patron in there and the poor man crawled out and died on "the
neutral ground," which is what New Orleaneans call the grassy area that
separates the two lanes of any divided roadway. I went in and had a
beer, but the pub was no good at all to Sally; I didn't say her
neighborhood was perfect -- just convenient.
As for my nieces and nephews, it didn't do them any harm to have grown
up playing music in the funky coffee houses and bars that one finds
everywhere in New Orleans, and the awful Louisianan public schools were
a blessing in disguise: it was a foregone conclusion that they would be
sent instead to excellent private ones, where all three of them turned
into rocket scientists, one going on to Yale, one to the prestigious
North Texas University, and one to Oberlin with a nice
scholarship just because they liked the way she sang.
On this visit, I went down to the French Quarter to watch my nephew,
Davy, play one of his last gigs in the popular band "the Hot Club of
New Orleans." Davy had just got married to a Brazilian girl named
Angela, and they lived in his house with their little dog, Linda. I was
given the dog to hold in the bar because Angela had to work, and they
didn't like to leave the dog in the house alone.
Linda yapped nearly constantly through the show, and I got some
sideways glances from the tourists and locals at the bar. I kept
saying, "It's the guitar player's dog!" But I don't think anyone heard.
Linda, however, wasn't the only distraction. Her barking was drowned
out by a Dixieland jazz band that stormed into the bar, bass drum
pounding in the lead and trombones and trumpets blaring out "When the
Saints Come Marching In" at the decibel level of a major earthquake.
Davy and the other "Hot Club" musicians just kept playing, and when the
marching band left, someone said, "Take it home, babe," and they closed
their song as if nothing had happened.
John Coleman, the fiftyish clarinet player, got the microphone and
said, "We'll be taking a ten-minute break, ladies and gentlemen. In the
meantime, I suggest you sample some of the top shelf liquor in this
fine establishment. Crystal will be your bartender. She has the
heaviest pour on Frenchman Street, and I know you'll appreciate that
when she makes one of those top dollar call drinks taste positively
affordable."
Coleman would know. He was a notorious lush. But that wasn't going to
get him fired. These jazz bands never work the crowd. Showmanship would
be considered gauche in such a venue, and so the rummy clarinet player
could sit in his chair completely toasted and sleep while the rest of
the band played. When it was time for him to solo, he'd stir, come
awake, pick up that licorice stick, and blow it like nothing you ever
heard. Drunk or sober, he was simply fabulous.
Now for a year or so, I had been watching Rachel Ray's show "Forty
Dollars a Day" in which she is given 40 bucks and visits an interesting
city to see how well she can eat on that much money. Well, it just so
happened that one of the shows was filmed in New Orleans, and I watched
it and had my sister take me to the place where Rachel had eaten
something called a muffeletta. A muffeletta is a very large, round
salami sandwich with home baked bread and an oil and vinegar, chopped
olive dressing. The thing is huge and, therefore, somewhat pricy, and
while Rachel had been able to cut a deal with them for the sake of the
show and get them to serve her a half a muffeletta at half the price,
they insisted that I purchase a whole one. I asked them if I was
getting the same sandwich that Rachel Ray bought, and they said rather
proudly, "Yes, sir you are."
I bought a beer and was advised by the restaurant that if I wanted to
drink it on the street, I had to put it in a brown paper bag, this in
order to pull the wool over the eyes of the naive New Orleans police, I
supposed. I went out and chomped on the sandwich and drank the beer on
the same cement steps by the Mississippi where Rachel had eaten on the
TV show. I couldn't finish the muffeletta and winded up lugging it
around with me for a few days before it was all gone, and in the end I
must admit that I was rather glad to have finally finished it.
One night Sally showed me how to make a roux. She was getting things
ready for dinner guests and the roux was in preparation for the crawdad
dish she was going to serve. That seemed to be another example of the
different culture in the city. I remember once when I was invited to a
friend's house for dinner, his mom was quick to say, "Oh, we're having
waffles." (You know, just in case I didn't like them.) In New Orleans,
however, you don't even think to tell the guests they'll be eating
mudbugs on a bed of rice. You just invite them over and don't say a
thing. They'll eat the crawdads all right – and cry for more!
The next night she showed me how to make black bean casserole. I liked
it, so I had her write up the recipe.
BLACK BEAN CASSEROLE
2 cloves garlic
2 tbs olive oil
1 pound ground turkey
1 16-ounce can tomato sauce
2 heaping teaspoons chili powder
2 heaping teaspoons cumin
1 small can corn drained
1 can black beans drained
1 can green chiles
8 ounces of shredded longhorn cheddar
Cook garlic in oil.
Add the ground turkey and brown it up.
Add tomato sauce.
Mix in chili powder and cumin
Mix in the corn, black beans and green chiles
Cook together fifteen minutes.
Now lay flour tortillas in a casserole dish and then layer in the
mixture of meat and then cheese and then tortillas and mixture
and tortillas and cheese, until the dish is full.
Bake at 350 covered until bubbly and yummy!
Serve.
Sally's close friend Katherine was kind enough to take both of us to
the airport. Sally had decided to visit Arizona, and she and I flew
there together and toured the state for a week or so. Then I drove her
to Sky Harbor Airport for the flight back to Louisiana.
On August 27, 2005 she called to wish me happy birthday, and I said,
"Hey, there's a huge hurricane headed at you!"
"I know," she said. "I'm leaving now for Baton Rouge. I hate this!"
I watched the news reports and watched the storm smash into the city.
It was a national disaster, and though the country was "at war" even
the president of the United States was forced to curtail his five-week
vacation to get right to work on it, pausing only to cut a cake and
play a guitar so there would be time enough to rush the first bottle of
water to the scene in four days flat.
The family got word that Sally had made it to Baton Rouge and Davy had
escaped to Mississippi with his guitar, his dog, and his new bride. We
couldn't contact them for a couple of weeks because communications were
down. Katherine stayed in town because she didn't want to leave all of
her cats, and there was no word at all from her for some time. Sally
finally learned that gunmen were walking down Katherine's street
blowing the locks off the doors, and just when they reached her place,
a coast guard helicopter sent down a spotlight and plucked her off of
the balcony of her three-story walk-up.
Sally's house was under 16 feet of water for two weeks; Davy's had no
water damage.
When the town dried out, I flew back to walk through the ruins of what
had once been Sally's house, and she and I drove through the endless
miles of ghostly neighborhoods with the unmown lawns, the dead trees,
the abandoned cars, and the ever present yellow water lines on the
walls of every house.
Afterwards, back in Arizona, I remembered the black bean casserole and
started to make it nearly every week. I remembered how my dog Noodles
had loved to eat any spicy dish, and so I let another dog, Honey, have
some. Honey is my brother's cocker spaniel and when construction
started on his new swimming pool, it was decided that Honey would live
with me. She liked the black bean casserole and soon refused to eat her
dog food, choosing instead to wait me out until I finally gave in and
she got the people food. Because of the dog, I had to have the
casserole handy every day of the week. She would eat fully half of
every batch I made.
Honey was Noodles' nemesis. I once brought Noodles over to my brother's
and Honey attacked her. Noodles was a Chihuahua/terrier mix and no
match for the much larger and stronger cocker. Noodles withstood the
attack pretty well, but did not survive her three-year fight against
Cushing's disease and died on April 21, 2005 at the age of 15.
Before Honey came to live with me, she had always been relegated to my
brother's back yard summer and winter. Now, with Noodles gone and the
summer blazing hot, Honey could squeeze in and out of my house at will
through the undersized doggy door and sleep in the house in
air-conditioned comfort.
The black bean casserole called for flour tortillas, but I am fond of
corn tortillas. I have heard that the mixture of corn and beans
produces a very strong protein, and this is perhaps the reason why
tamale pie and other bean dishes taste so good with cornbread and why
succotash is a popular dish. Sometimes the taste buds automatically
recognize the taste of nutrition. I remember studying the Hopi Indians
and learning how they put ashes in their cornmeal before cooking it.
The alkali ashes allow the body to absorb vitamin B and prevent
pellagra, but the Hopis who invented this recipe didn't know that --
they just knew that it tasted better that way. When my brother
mentioned that Honey liked corn chips, I had still another reason to
replace the flour tortillas with corn ones. I also doubled the amount
of canned corn and used ground beef because I felt the flavor of turkey
didn't stand up to the cumin and chili very well.
It began to become a hassle to prepare the casserole so often, and so I
tried to wean Honey back to dog food. I would take pupperoni dog treats
and stick them into the dog food like sweet waffle cones in some doggy
parfait. It didn't work very well. She ate the pupperoni but held out
for the casserole.
I worried a little that Honey's diet was getting unhealthy. I knew that
once I had taken to feeding Noodles jerky treats every day and one
night she couldn't urinate because a bladder stone was lodged in her
urethra -- a stone I later learned might have been formed by the high
ash content of the treats. It was a Sunday night and the vet down the
road wasn't available and Noodles suffered all night at the brink of
getting toxic peritonitis until I brought her into the vet's and she
passed the stone on the floor in a pool of urine and relief.
The vet said that Noodles would have to eat Science Diet for the rest
of her life. I tried that for a while, and Noodles didn't like it much,
so it wasn't long before I put her back on regular dog food -- but with
no treats at all.
I took other liberties with Sally's recipe. I began to tire of baking
the casserole when all I really had to do was put it in the dish hot,
and the cheese that I layered in would melt just as well as it would in
the oven. I also gave up layering the tortillas. It was easier to cut
the torts into triangles and stir them in. As the dish sat, the
tortillas would float in the mixture to find a kind of horizontal
equilibrium on their own, and when you cut a slice of the casserole,
the cross section revealed a neat stratification.
There were two other changes. The cumin and chili powder obliterated
the taste of even the garlic, so I left both the garlic and the green
chiles out of the recipe. I told Sally, and she said that if only for
the extra nutrition I should leave those things in, but I was
skeptical. In addition, I didn't want to bother to brown up the ground
beef. I wanted a time-saving alternative to having to cook the beef,
and I knew of an easy solution: I could get a can of pre-cooked
Brazilian parboiled beef and use that. The Brazilian beef, however,
presented a problem that was very real to me.
A little more than a year before, I took Noodles in for a check-up, and
the vet noticed that she had gained weight. I had switched to Mighty
Dog, which Noodles liked better than other brands of dog food. The vet
told me to put her on Science Diet and she would live longer.
Reluctantly I did, and Noodles hated it. In a couple of weeks she
wouldn't eat at all, so I brought her her favorite food: Brazilian
parboiled beef. She wouldn't touch it. Noodles was having kidney
failure brought on by Cushing's disease and lack of appetite was its
tell-tale symptom.
The vet embarked on a treatment of dialysis that involved a saline drip
that was designed to cleanse the blood through the kidneys by the sheer
attrition of constant, unremitting hydration. Noodles stayed in a cage
at the vet's with an IV for three terrible days, and on the third, I
was directed to bring Noodles' favorite food to see if she was better
and would eat it. When I arrived, I found her in an absolutely ghastly
condition and knew that she would never eat again. After we put her to
sleep, I buried her in the back yard and threw the can of beef in the
trash.
It took more than a year for me to finally use Brazilian beef again,
but I finally added it to the recipe. Honey loved it, and I found that
I was able to eat it too, but still not without a pang brought on by
the memory of how Noodles died.
On the morning after I added the Brazilian beef to the casserole, I
went out into the desert back yard and got the pooper scooper. There in
the yard, I saw Honey's stool stuffed fat with the extra corn I had put
in the recipe, and it brought to mind the time I had seen Noodles'
stool similarly filled with the milo maize which I had left out on the
lawn for the Inca doves back before the desert landscaping when the
yard was cool and green with grass. And I couldn't help but remember
how I had thought the milo might do her harm and how for years
afterwards I had given up feeding the birds.