Rouses_May-June-2018

LOCAL SOCIAL

[LEFT] Chicken Sauce Piquant; photo by Romney Caruso [RIGHT] Jason Derouen, Cajun Ninja; photo by Channing Candies

Three years ago, he was laid off from his job in the oil business. He had spent the previous seven years working for starched-shirt companies that frowned upon social media use by employees and associates. It was still new at the time, social media, and management hadn’t yet come to grips with the idea that people could have an online presence after hours and during the day on breaks. They took it as goofing off on company time. Derouen had always wanted to start a website. He had money saved, and now that he no longer had to worry about offending corporate types, it was as good a time to get started as any. He created a Facebook page. At first, he posted videos of whatever he found funny. Jokes and slapstick. When his sister introduced him to Snapchat, on a lark, he filmed himself cooking gumbo in six- second clips. When he was finished, he was about to upload it to his personal profile when he got cold feet. Most of his friends already knew how to cook gumbo. He’d probably catch flak from them. It just wasn’t worth it, the ribbing he would receive. So instead, he uploaded the video to his Cajun Ninja page. He had 400 followers. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something, and maybe one of those strangers from around the world might enjoy it. He didn’t think much about it. Meanwhile, Disney was getting grief from Louisiana natives for posting a video recipe called “Tiana’s Healthy Gumbo” on the official Princess and the Frog page on Facebook. In it, Louisiana’s own Disney princess — a New Orleans chef at that! — prepares a gumbo … with whole wheat flour? Kale? Quinoa? Well, it was an abomination. Where is the roux, Tiana? As far as scandals went in 2016, it ranked pretty low overall, but for locals, it was a real tempest in a cast-iron pot. The timing was right, and when Derouen posted his gumbo video, he wrote: “Take note, Disney” followed by a smirk emoji. He thought it was funny — as if Disney needed to take notes from him.

made an assistant instructor at his dojang at the tender age of 11. It was his job to help newer students learn techniques and forms. He learned that it feels good to teach, to explain, to demystify, to “pour knowledge into someone,” as he describes it. That love of martial arts and teaching is where the “ninja” half of his cooking show gets its name. The “Cajun” part is more obvious, from the University of Louisiana- Lafayette Ragin’ Cajuns hat he wears, to the zydeco intro music before each show. Taken together, it’s who he is by birth and by training. ORIGIN STORY Derouen had no intention of being a cook on social media. “Like a good recipe, it happened by accident,” he says. The extent of his formal training includes having a mother who is a great cook; working as a busboy—and later,a server—at Copeland’s in high school; and even later working at Outback Steakhouse. (The Outback job only lasted six months, though he met his future wife there, so it was time well spent.) The jobs taught him a new appreciation of food and forced him to learn how to really put himself out there, to go up to strangers of every walk of life, again and again, every single day, and introduce himself.

a Baton Rouge native, “and I know that feeling.” When he started Cajun Ninja, he was surprised by how many people in Louisiana didn’t know how to make a roux, or weren’t familiar with how to cook jambalaya — staple state recipes. “It’s because they didn’t know where to start. So it’s been really cool to help people who were just like me.” He learned how to teach at an early age. A lifelong student of taekwondo, he was

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