re: Baton Rouge area "Cajun" food sucks

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Not a single friend of mine, other than a poster here, can make a from-scratch jambalaya. I sure as shite didn't grow up in a house where mom was making it. On average, the ability to execute these dishes properly is only a % of people.

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It depends widely on where you grew up.

I can fully believe that Baton Rouge wouldn't have the largest percentage of these kinds of people, but the more rural the area, the higher the percentage of cooks simply out of necessity. I don't cook that often living in Mid City. It's far easier to just go around the corner to Serop's or Thai Pepper. However, when I was living out in St. Amant, where it was a 10 minute drive just to get to Gonzales where the fast food restaurants were, I cooked 3-4 nights every week. Most of my friends grew up cooking, and nearly all of them (men and women) know their way around the kitchen. People I know in all of the little small towns around South Louisiana are the same way. The only person I know that can't cook SOMETHING reasonably well is my oldest brother, and that's mostly because he's scared to work the stove

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Not a single friend of mine, other than a poster here, can make a from-scratch jambalaya.

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Your friends suck.

Most of my friends, and myself, can make a jambalaya from scratch without looking at a recipe.

I agree with KingBob. Cooking is more than a sporadic hobby here. It's an ingrained in the culture way of life for many many people. Some of my earliest memories are helping my mom or dad or grandparents in the kitchen and learning it cook. I don't think twice on Sundays about cooking meals for the week from scratch.

I always took this for granted until I started traveling around the US a bit. You have no idea how amazing and ingrained food is to South Louisiana until a native of Colorado or Boston serves you there "famous home cooked w/e" and it's some oven baked bland nonsense served with white rice and no butter.