Laurie and I went to New Orleans a few years ago. I was only there for a couple of days, long enough to decide that, unlike in most of the US, the average quality of food was very good (even at touristy places). The exception to this rule is vegetables, which aside from okra do not seem to be part of Louisiana cooking at all.

The disdain with which vegetables are treated in New Orleans became apparent our first night, when we had dinner at Susan Spicer’s restaurant, Herbsaint. I had something delicious with duck confit, and ordered a side of the vegetable of the day, which was broccoli. This turned out to be plain steamed broccoli on a white plate, exactly the same stuff you receive alongside your General Tso’s chicken.

It was easy to forgive the broccoli, though, especially after I tasted Laurie’s dinner, which was shrimp and green chile grits cakes with tasso cream sauce. Herbsaint was one of the first restaurants to reopen after Katrina, selling out its first night back. Presumably the shrimp and grits had something to do with it.

Later, Laurie had some even better shrimp at [Uglesich’s](http://www.uglesichs.com/). I had already gone back to Seattle. I don’t remember why I had to leave early; probably to teach a class or something else that in retrospect was obviously not worth missing Paul’s Fantasy at Uglesich’s (trout topped with grilled shrimp).

The idea of shrimp and grits has stuck with me since that trip. It’s one of those perfect combinations like pork and cabbage or osso buco and risotto milanese. I say the idea has stuck with me because I hadn’t actually eaten shrimp and grits again until last night.

In my previous shrimp post, I mentioned that nearly all shrimp in the US are frozen at sea or at the shrimp farm, and if you buy unfrozen shrimp, they’ve been defrosted. In the Gulf region, that’s not necessarily true, nor is it necessarily true at [Mutual Fish](http://www.mutualfish.com/), Seattle’s best fish market. A couple years ago I went into Mutual and found wild gulf shrimp that had never been frozen. It turns out they get these in fairly regularly, and at $13/pound they’re priced about the same as the equivalent size of frozen shrimp.

But I couldn’t serve these awesome shrimp with instant grits from a box. So I mail-ordered artisan grits from [Anson Mills](http://www.ansonmills.com/). They call their grits “antebellum,” which is really not the way a northern liberal wants to hear his southern agricultural product described. I think the word they’re going for is “old-school.” Their web site is also kind of antebellum. You have to order by email. So I sent my credit card number off into the ether and a week later received a priority mail envelope stuffed with four bags of corn products. (In addition to the stone-ground grits, I got Anson’s quick-cooking grits and their polenta.)

Anson grits are so coarse-ground that they basically look like gravel. The directions warn you to stir the grits into water, let them sit, then skim the chaff off with a tea strainer. I did my best, but I ended up missing a fair amount of chaff. Cooking these grits takes time and practice. They cook for about two hours, and they’re still pretty chunky, but the flavor is unbeatable. Like the time I ordered hardtack from Vermont, ordering the Anson grits made me feel a little weird, since this is a product people used to eat because they had nothing else to eat, and now it’s a gourmet treat.

So we invited some friends over and made shrimp and grits from the recipe that came with the bag of grits. Kale was also served. I didn’t get a great sear on the shrimp, and I mentioned the chaff issue, but overall, the ingredients were so good that they resisted my attempts to screw them up. Shrimp freeze very well, of course, but you can’t beat the texture of fresh shrimp, which have the platonic shrimp crunch. For a sauce, you make shrimp stock with the shrimp shells and some vegetables, and then thicken it with beurre manié.

I was hoping to have some leftover grits for making grits cakes, but we ate them all. Particularly Iris, who requested seconds.