Bertram Picou's Red Beans and Rice - a weekend recipe

French Quarter bartender Bertram Picou is a recurring character in my French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans. After appearing in Big Easy, he's developed a life of his own that transcends fiction. Like many Southerners, Bertram served in the Army and did his basic training at Fort Polk in Leesville, Louisiana. The Fort is the subject of Tigerland, a gritty but powerful movie starring Colin Farrell. It’s probably the best movie Farrell ever did and you might want to check it out. Anyway, the place was a hell hole and some say the chances of getting killed or wounded were greater there than in Vietnam.

Rutted dirt roads, tracts of heavily forested land that had never seen a chainsaw, miles of seemingly endless rifle ranges, and swamps so murky and misty that they looked like the backdrop of a Lon Chaney horror film, comprised Fort Polk. Alligators, armadillos, water moccasins and frightened, pissed-off young G.I.’s, soon to be bound for Vietnam, populated the musty old Fort where fever and meningitis were everyday occurrences.

And it was hot and humid! The World War II-vintage barracks had no air conditioning in the summer and little insulation in the winter. A soldier’s day started at 4:30 AM with thirty minutes of physical training before breakfast. This was followed by more PT, a one to seven-mile hike to the rifle range, orientation, target practice, a one to seven-mile hike back to the barracks, more PT, then bed. Bertram lost forty-six pounds in six weeks at Fort Polk.

Some of the drill sergeants were mean, some practically psychotic. Nice wasn’t in their vocabulary. Bertram is the personification of the term laid-back, but two words can still evoke memories of distress and instantly raise his blood pressure and heart rate. Those two words — grease trap! If you ever spent any time in the Army, you probably know what I mean.

Food in the mess halls was simple but filling. All you could eat in fifteen minutes or so. They served red beans in abundance and rice. The problem was, not together. Army regulation said you can’t have two starches on one plate. Good idea for the Army, bad idea for Bertram Picou who thinks RB&R should be part of the Government’s food pyramid (or whatever shape it is now!)

Bertram breathed a large sigh of relief when he finally got out of the Army. He cooks RB&R almost every day at his bar on Chartres Street in New Orleans French Quarter and here is his personal recipe.

Bertram's Red Beans and Rice

1 ½ lbs. dry red beans

2 stalks celery, chopped

3 cloves garlic, crushed

½ green pepper, diced

1 red onion, sliced

½ tbsp. oil

10 c. water

1 veg. bouillon cube

1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper

1 ½ c. rice

3 c. water for rice

Soak beans overnight. Saute garlic, red onion, green pepper, celery in oil in large pot. Add 10 cups of water, vegetable bouillon cube, and beans. Let cook on medium flame until soft. Cook rice separately. When rice is done, serve topped with red beans.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.

Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

As a longtime geologist, I’ve heard many oil patch stories, some true, some likely false. Here is a story I heard about the discovery of the El Dorado Pool, the largest oil field in Kansas. Believe it if you will. I don’t know the truth, just the story.

As I’ve mentioned before, many of the early, giant oil fields were found by mapping formations at the surface, then using the surface geology to interpret what is happening in the subsurface. During the early days of Kansas oil exploration, citizens in the town of El Dorado, a small community in the south-central part of the state, hired a University of Kansas geology professor to do a geologic survey around their town. What he mapped using surface geology was a huge anticline.

Excited by the results of the study, residents of El Dorado pooled their money and drilled a deep well at the site proposed by the University of Kansas professor. The test well was drilled and, to the dismay of El Dorado citizens, was dry as a proverbial bone. They sold the leases for pennies on the dollar to Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company, the predecessor to Cities Service Oil Company. The Kansas professor, like so many would-be oil finders after him, became the reviled scapegoat.

ITIO had geologists of their own at the time and was unconvinced that the dry hole was a legitimate test of the huge surface feature. They risked their money, bought the leases and drilled a well of their own — the result the discovery well for the giant El Dorado Field.

The El Dorado Field is the largest oil field in the State of Kansas and has ultimately produced more than 40 million barrels of oil. To this day, the only dry hole in the field is the original well drilled there by the citizens of El Dorado and the hapless University of Kansas geologist.

What happened? — An extraordinary stroke of bad luck. The people of El Dorado drilled down a vertical fault plane — the only place they could have drilled and not hit a producer. Fact or fiction?

Like all history, I suspect, as my Grandmother used to say, that it lies somewhere between the Devil and the deep blue sea.

http://www.ericwilder.com

South of Weslaco

I graduated from college in 1969 and took a job mudlogging for a Texas company named Core Lab. The second well I sat was near the south Texas town of Weslaco. The well was a joint venture between Shell and Texaco and on its way to a depth of 13,500'.

Since this was only my second well, a senior mudlogger, Jack Bowie, was assigned to show me the ropes. Jack was as colorful as his name and show me the ropes he did. I would work the well site from seven in the morning until seven at night. Jack would usually spend the day doing other things and would check on me around quitting time when another mudlogger spelled us for the night.

Weslaco was very close to the Mexican border town of Reynosa. Usually, Jack and I would leave the location and drive to Reynosa where the food, fun, and drink were cheap. We often stayed out until the wee morning hours before returning to our motel rooms to clean up and then go back to the drilling well.

The well was a wildcat. That means it was more than a mile from the nearest producing well. The well was wild for more reasons than that. We were drilling through an extremely thick sequence of alternating sand and shale called the Frio. As close as we were to the Gulf of Mexico, the stratum was unconsolidated and we penetrated 300 feet or so every hour. And there was gas, lots of gas, coming up out of the hole.

The gas and unconsolidated strata had caused problems on the well since the day it began drilling. The hole was crooked, dog-legged we called it, and there had been problems cementing the intermediate casing. Two drilling supervisors had already been "run off" and a crusty old tool pusher promoted to finish the hole.

I can’t remember the tool pusher’s name so I’ll call him Mike. Mike was of average height and build but he had a badly bent nose from some past altercation. He also had a resolute expression that caused the wild Texas roughnecks to take his directions seriously. He was a former World War II fighter pilot and it only took one look at his dark eyes to know he was likely good at it.

One hot July day found me more tired than usual from the past night’s Cerveza drinking and senorita chasing. Jack was nowhere around and I reclined on the couch, "just to rest my eyes for a moment." I awoke to a sound peculiar to the giant drilling rig: silence. Awakening instantly, I rushed outside to see the backs of every man on location running as fast as they could, through the dry Texas cornfield, away from the location that had suddenly gone deathly quiet. Every man except Mike, that is.

Ten feet from me, he was moving faster than I had ever seen him move, twirling and closing valves, pulling levers, throwing switches. Finally, the diesel engines coughed, then sputtered, then again began circulating mud in the well. Seeing me looking, Mike grinned and walked over to the trailer door. As I stood with my mouth open and hands in my pocket, he pulled an old Zippo out of his pocket, fished a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket, put it in his mouth and lit it. After a long, satisfying pull he looked at me and said, "Another thirty seconds and you and me would have been blown straight to hell."

Mike didn’t elaborate but Jack did when he finally returned to the location. "The gas pressure’s so high that the mud’s not heavy enough to contain it. As long as the mud pumps are working, it’s cycled out of the hole. If Mike hadn’t restarted them, the pressure would have blown ten thousand feet of drilling pipe straight up into the air and all over this corn field. It wouldn’t have been a pretty sight."

Jack didn’t bother telling me how stupid I had been not to follow the roughnecks off of the location. He didn’t have to because I’d already figured it out. That night Jack and I drank an extra Tecate for Mike, yet another unheralded oil patch hero that I’ve met, somewhere along the way.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.

Early Northwest Louisiana Oil Exploration

When oil was discovered in northwest Louisiana, rolling hills, massive pines and a few small settlements dominated the landscape, farming and cattle the two major occupations. Some thirty years before, Army engineers had blasted and methodically dismantled the natural dam known as the Great Red River Raft that had raised area water levels for decades, perhaps centuries. What were left were shallow bayous, isolated ponds and Caddo Lake.

Caddo’s coffee-colored water was also shallow, no more than 20 feet at it’s deepest. Turtles and alligators populated the sprawling lake along with miles of impenetrable cane brakes and mazes of giant cypress trees with water-gorged trunks and branches draped with Spanish moss wafting in a damp breeze. And it was hot, temperatures rarely below 100 degrees in the summer and humidity through the roof. The shallow, often stagnant water bred mosquitoes, and many early inhabitants died of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Despite the hostile environment, something began drawing oil hunters to the region — news of oil seeps and gentle rolling topography that possibly signaled subsurface closure. These explorers, drawn by the lure of black gold, pooled their money and drilled a few exploratory wells. Believing correctly that oil existed far below the shallow depths of Caddo Lake, wooden pilings were driven in shallow water and platforms built on them. The explorers constructed drilling rigs on the platforms from native timber and began drilling in Caddo Lake. This was a first, Caddo Lake the birthplace of offshore drilling.

Like the gold rushes of California and Alaska, men and their families began pouring into the area, intent upon sharing in the prize. Boom towns sprang up — Oil City, Trees City, Vivian, Rodessa.
What explorers had discovered was the giant Sabine Uplift. This single subsurface feature underlies several Louisiana parishes, and even more Arkansas and Texas counties. It not only trapped millions of barrels of oil beneath it, but formed the stratigraphic barrier for the Woodbine Sandstone, the primary reservoir of the super giant East Texas Field.

Caddo Lake sits atop the Sabine Uplift. Even with thousands of wells already drilled in the region, the deepest horizons of this giant subsurface feature still remain mostly undrilled and unexplored. What are the ramifications of this little-known fact? Possibly several hundred million barrels of untapped oil that could ultimately help the U.S. ease its dependence on foreign oil.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Bugeye Sprite

As I was driving south on I-35 last Saturday I saw the distinct hood of a Bugeye Sprite approaching from behind me. I haven't seen one in many years so I snapped a picture out the window as he drove past. Those of you that have read my books, Big Easy and Murder Etouffee, will remember the Bugeye as Mama Mulate's - the voodoo mambo - car of choice. I also downloaded another picture off the web of a 1959 Bugeye so you could get a better look at the distinctive headlights. Just like Mama Mulate, they don't build them like that anymore.

http://www.ericwilder.com/