Bruce on just another Sunday in the Bywater

This is an excerpt from an e-mail from Bruce at NoLAdder that I had to share with you. Doesn’t this sound and smell about as good as it get??  Bruce is trying to explain to me about cooking fish on a plank. But, I don’t know nuthin’ about fish and planks!

I was walking in da’ByWater on one of my visits to town, maybe even
Christmas, down Royal around Piety, and there was a pack of gay boys
having a soiree in their back yard and really throwing down the food. I
mean I could smell it for a couple of blocks before I found them. I say
gay boys but you know everyone was there from within a few blocks…the
St Ann crowd. They had 3 (THREE) 55gal cookers going, 2 shrimp boilers
and a ton of other stuff going on at the table. Really these cats were
swingin. I just stood there thinking that this is of course what it
means to miss New Orleans…when they opened one of the cookers and
started pulling out these plank fish: Salmon, Red Fish, Mahi (each mahi
with its own portabella mushroom on top), catfish,  a pile of crawfish
mixed with…hmmm…peppers and maybe chow chow (that one was to
absolutely die for but I can’t even begin to say what was in it. I do
remember corn and the peppers which had been grown right there beside
the cooker:), so where was I…Judith, they pulled out about ten
planks. Rockin. So the wood, guy told me he might get 4 good cookings
with one plank but sometimes he’ll use a thick piece of particularly
good pecan and try to make it last and soak it all up don’t’cha know.
They said that it really did not take long for the fish to cook on the
planks. Now as for the heat? They had one of those side fire bins, you
know connected at the bottom of the cooker, for the heat and smoking.
Dude was good with the wood fueling too to whip that many fish.
Now in one of the other cookers they had a whole hog with a pomegranate
in its mouth and truffles for eyes and total mystery stuffing. The 3rd
cooker was all veggies and only smoked…or roasted peppers in the
bottom?
So there, just another Sunday afternoon in da’bywata.