When the editors sent us food writers a list of recipes to choose from out of “Cooking up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans,” a book that was put together to help rally and comfort the Louisiana diaspora in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, my eyes immediately gravitated to the crab and corn bisque.
That’s because I have long associated the fraught feelings of Louisiana storms with the sweet flavor of our water bodies’ incomparable creation: blue crabs. Three years after Katrina, I found myself serving as co-director of Louisiana’s Joint Information Center, housed at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, during Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.
I had sent my wife and kids to stay with her family in Texas, and for good reason: the hurricane knocked out power at our home, and I worked 12-hour shifts for three weeks. But as proactive as I thought I was at the time, one thing that I overlooked was the gallon-sized zipper bag of boiled crab meat in the freezer.
When the electricity finally came back on, and my extra job duties came to an end, I discovered, to my horror, that the whole batch was spoiled and had to be thrown away…