(Prisoner at the Yokosuka, Japan, police station. He is eating a cracker, which my pal Tom “Big Smoke” Duvall provided to make the interrogation more effective. Everyone else in the room had a glass of tea and the interrogee eventually discovered how really thirsty he was….Photo Big Smoke.)

I am starting to panic. The radio was brightly commenting that it is exactly
two weeks to Christmas Day, and I have done nothing, zip, nada except throw up a few decorations.

The storms- oh, I know, pathetic ones, really- put a dent in the week that won’t be repaired, and the Big Melt of yesterday afternoon left pools of water and crunchy snow to freeze hard overnight as the temperatures plummeted. It did not stop a venture out to Willow, where the topic of discussion with Tracey O’Grady and her husband Brian at the bar was about the shockingly timid nature of Willow aficionados.

Crowds were brisk at Liberty Tavern and Screwtop and Lyon Hall, so Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Get out there people and support Willow!

Anyway, I was on the verge of despair about the impending holiday and the mountain of pictures that have come my way. I have used a service to have them digitized before, when a slide carousel showed up in the pile of wreckage, but the last big load cost more than I am willing to pay.

I invested in a Wolverine-brand photo digitizer to drive me crazy, and in between watching the snow fall and then melt, managed to scan a few hundred assorted images. They are of moderate quality, but will be much easier to forget about once they are scanned and sent off into the ether.

I was on a roll, but when I ran into Tom “Big Smoke” Duvall’s 40-odd black and white images from Fleet Activities Yokosuka, Japan, taken in 1951. In those days he was still an enlisted man, charged with police functions and liaison with the local Japanese authorities.

I scanned them as the dawn rose, and then edited, cropped and enhanced the images. Then I realized I had to capture the notes on the back of the photos, and got lost in that, and then only now notice lunch is crashing down on me.

The annotated photos are on my Facebook page, and the link to the original story is at: http://vicsocotra.com/stories/3-9-08-craker_caper1.htm

At some point I realized breakfast had gone somewhere unidentified, and I opened a note from my old Coon Ass pal Boats who is retired down in Metairie, Louisiana.

He got me going. He said: “Its “winter” here in Metairie, Louisiana, as I write. The West to East wind that brought blizzard conditions to so much of the nation has had a noticeable effect here. For several days now we have been experiencing “bitter cold”, about 22 degrees below season normal. That translates to lows between 34 & 40 F at night and highs of about 52 to 58 F.

Despite the” bitter cold” the two crops that every South Louisiana suburban gardener looks forward to in late November and December came in just fine, oranges and “plantains” (our local bananas).

My 28 year old daughter spent the night at our house last night and this morning I taught her how to make “breakfast plantains.” Basically, you take the just-turning yellow plantains, peel them and split them down the center as you would to make a banana split.

Then you put them in an iron skillet with a light coating of butter, and fry them until some brown flecks appear, then flip them and repeat. Haul out of the skillet and put them on a plate, then dust them with about a spoon full of white confectionery sugar.

Its pretty similar to the dessert “Bananas Foster” but the native plantain is less sweet and a bit more fibrous than the table banana. Some folks call the plantain the “Cooking Banana”. You can also use it green. Among the many things you can do with the green plantain is make a semblance of hash browns.

The green plantain isn’t sweet at all and the white part is about as hard as a raw potato. You peel a bunch and dice them up just as you would a potato.

Then you fry them till light brown in an iron skillet, add a little salt and black pepper. You can pretty much use them like hash browns, some people can barely taste the difference, but that’s not how real Cajuns and other inhabitants of plantain country use the green ones.

Generally, just before they turn light brown we dice up some green pepper, and a very little onion and toss it in.

Some times we might throw in some diced red pepper as well for a little sweeter less spicy taste and some color. This goes great with scrambled eggs. Despite the fact that Thanksgiving-to-New Years is Plantain Season and everybody from the Cajuns to the local Vietnamese use the plantains in almost identical ways around here we refer to the resulting dishes as “Cuban.”

You will find plantains in the suburban residential landscaping, truck gardens, etc. all over the region but you’ll never find a plantain dish in any of our restaurants except the ones that advertise “Cuban Cuisine”.

About the only thing that we do with oranges that everybody else doesn’t do is that down in Palquemines Parish we make an orange wine. You know when you look at a globe focused on the United States the distance from Chicago to New Orleans doesn’t look that great.

But you already know what you look forward to in December up there. Here its banana and orange time.

Oh yeah, and because of the “cold” in the fall we switch our third or forth garden crop from cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, bell peppers etc. to carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and other “hardy winter veggies”.

We loved living in Annapolis nine months of the year, but Christmas signals the Cajun that its banana-and-orange time, and time to get home and change the crops to “winter hardy.”

I think, on the whole, having had a taste of winter, I would prefer to take Boat’s sage counsel, and head for Plaintain country for the duration of the meteorological unpleasantness.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra and Boats
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303