Laissez les bon temps roulez

That's what they say in New Orleans, "Let the good times roll"!  Dayle and I had a doctor check up visit on Thursday at 4:20 -- by the time we got out of there, it was dinner time.  Enter, Teresa, who always knows where a fun place to dine when we're in a different part of town.  We drove through old neighborhoods filled with gorgeous old homes and wound our way to Acadia, which is located on 13th and NE Fremont.  It's a Cajun restaurant and the food took us back to our 5 years of living in Louisiana in the early 70s.  This is Bonnie, our waitress who lived in NOLA for 6 years, so it was fun to share experiences.  In fact, I had to ask Dayle to let her go put our order in.. he was enjoying telling of his days on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico when he was a helicopter pilot there.

We usually don't have an appetizer, but when Bonnie suggested BBQed shrimp, I heard myself say, that sounds good!  And it was -- the shrimp were cooked on the barbie and then nestled down in a sauce of spicy roux and some crispy French bread to dip in the sauce.  

We both had Crawfish étouffée, and it was delicious!  When we lived in Louisiana we had the opportunity to fall in love with Cajun cooking.  We'd go to the Riverside Inn in Lafayette, where we lived, and have the Crawfish dinner.  Here's what was included -- crawfish salad, crawfish gumbo, crawfish pie, crawfish etouffee over rice, crawfish boulettes, crawfish au gratin and fried crawfish tails.  LOL!

All I can say is I blame my sister Denise for this -- she said the pecan pie was delicious there.. so we had "Pecan Pie with Praline Bacon Ice Cream and Steen's Cane Syrup".  We shared and brought most of the pie home.. groan.  :-)

The restaurant is in a very old part of Portland and was a store of some sort (probably several different shops over the years) but is now this charming "New Orleans Bistro".

Yesterday after swimming I snapped this shot of some apples in our tree.

And Kristi visited her friend yesterday and she sent her home with these fun tomatoes - Kristi took her several cupcakes she made, peanut butter ones with Nutella cream frosting.  We enjoyed the rest!

And I had to show you this -- can you guess what it is?  Kristi found this albino caterpiller!  This is the black and brown striped variety, have you ever seen one like this?  Caleb brought it in to show me and it was very wiggly, I got a quick photo and then sent them both quickly back outside.  :-)

I must tell you that going to that place to eat stirred up a lot of memories for Dayle and I of our time in Louisiana.  In fact, he's been searching through photos looking for some of our time there.  SO, our next post will be a walk down memory lane.  Do you want to see New Orleans back in the day of the early 1970s?  Stay tuned.  We're having a wonderful relaxing day here and more to go tomorrow.  I hope you're having your perfect kind of weekend.

((hugs)), Teresa :-)