Thought you’d tasted everything? It seems, an undiscovered Louisiana delicacy has been floating right under our noses. Or perhaps right under the bows of our pirogues. Graine à voler in Cajun French, or American Lotus to everybody else, the huge, sweet-scented late summer bloomer of the swamps turns out to be a choice snack food of those in the know. Pluck the green seed pods and split them open to reveal the large, grape-size seeds. Raw, they are addictive, according to Houma native Derek Usea. “When you start, you can’t stop,” he told the Houma Courier. Usea also simmers them with crab boil, while his mother, Shurlene Usea prefers simple salt water. “I’m 60 years old,” she told the Courier, “and I’ve been eating graine à voler for 60 years.”
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
Thought you’d tasted everything? It seems, an undiscovered Louisiana delicacy has been floating right under our noses. Or perhaps right under the bows of our pirogues. Graine à voler in Cajun French, or American Lotus to everybody else, the huge, sweet-scented late summer bloomer of the swamps turns out to be a choice snack food of those in the know. Pluck the green seed pods and split them open to reveal the large, grape-size seeds. Raw, they are addictive, according to Houma native Derek Usea. “When you start, you can’t stop,” he told the Houma Courier. Usea also simmers them with crab boil, while his mother, Shurlene Usea prefers simple salt water. “I’m 60 years old,” she told the Courier, “and I’ve been eating graine à voler for 60 years.”
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