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Letter from the Editor By Marcy Nathan

In addition to celebrating 100 years of City Produce, we are celebrating our Rouses Magazine ; I’m personally celebrating 10 years as Editor in Chief of the publication. We’ve spent a lot of time, as we worked on this landmark issue, remembering where we’ve been.

W e’d seen other grocery store publications, and wanted to start our own. The majority of these publications are recipe-focused, which is great. But the Gulf Coast gives us so much more material to work with — the culture here is like nowhere else. It was important to us that, along with recipes, we also feature the people, places, restaurants, bars, music and everything else that make our region so unique. Those are the things that I love about living here. From our very first issue, which had Creole tomatoes on the cover — and quite a few typos — we quickly gained a loyal following. FOOD & DRINK In our early issues, we featured so much about red beans and rice, white beans and catfish, jambalaya, and an inordi nate amount of spaghetti — spaghetti and meatballs, spaghetti mac and cheese, even weenie spaghetti with hot dogs or Vienna sausages — that at one point, I worried we might’ve run the same story twice. So, we expanded our menu. New Orleans was home for me, but like most New Orleanians, I was well-acquainted with and cherished all of the Gulf Coast, from the beaches of coastal Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, to the inland towns and rural areas where so much of the country’s produce is grown and harvested each year. With so many great stories to tell, we also started theming our issues. We began dedicating entire editions to Bourbon, Barbecue, Pizza, Pasta, Hamburgers, Garlic, Seafood, Steaks and comforting Southern Food. (One of the stranger things I learned while researching that Garlic issue is that you can taste garlic with your feet. Really!) We argued endlessly about gumbo and whether or not it should have tomatoes, as

well as what color jambalaya should be. We unwittingly left the rice out of Tommy Rouse’s jambalaya recipe and got hundreds of calls and letters and emails telling us just that — it was ricemaggedon . We did a word search in our 60th anniversary issue and acciden tally cut off the last line. We blackened absolutely everything for our Cajun issue…including the table that we were shooting on. We’ve created multiple Italian issues because, let’s be real here, one helping of Italian food is never enough. And two Mardi Gras issues. To be perfectly honest, we might not be done covering these themes; we are truly spoiled with a wealth of subject matter. We drank so much tequila for our Cocktail issue that I can barely remember writing any of the stories — or my letter. I freaked out a colleague in Thibodaux when I told him that I cracked a very expensive bottle as I was moving it to New Orleans for a photoshoot for our Bourbon issue — that is still one of my favorite pranks. I tried to prank our chef Marc, but he spotted someone filming and quickly stepped out of the way; I got pie in the face instead of him. In every issue, we’ve shared tips from our experts on choosing steak and fish, and on baking, including sharing popular recipes like our Gentilly cake and Cajun tarte à la bouille pie. Now, we intentionally repeat ourselves every once in a while, rerunning your favorite stories and recipes; we run our Holiday 101s every year. Thankfully, we have avoided repeating the same holiday recipes and stories every year — do you really need a recipe for a sandwich made with leftover turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce? One year we fried turkeys with Chef Nathan Richard, a 20-year veteran of the volunteer fire department in his hometown of Thibodaux. Last year we featured an

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ROUSES SUMMER 2023