[Colleens_Husband]

Bill:

Normally, I don't like talking about myself, and by normally, what I really mean is almost never. Since we are sitting around a campfire, I suppose I could say something about myself, you know, like a get to know you story.

I was a teacher in Kansas for ten years and I eventually became a department head. I had to travel a bit in my duties and one place I always volunteered to go was Mobile, Alabama. I love trying new and exotic foods and if you enjoy eating great food for not too much money, then Mobile was the place to be. They had the perfect confluence of Cajun food and French cooking.

If you left town and headed into the swamps and bayous, they had the best restaurants in the world. They looked like ramshackled old barns stuck along a roadside in the middle of nowhere, but in the evenings they were always packed. Most of these places had a boat dock at the back of the restaurants which they got their fresh seafood which was swimming in the Gulf just hours before.

And one thing they also had was cajun zydeco music on Friday nights. One Friday I was in one of these restaurants and the guitar player dropped an amp on his hand so they announced, "Unless there is a guitar player in the house, the music is going to be canceled." So I thought, what the heck, if someone tells me the chords to the songs while they are playing, I can pass as a reasonably good zydeco player. Oh, and it helps if you yell 'Etoue' (If that's how it's spelled) every now and again.

Anyways, I didn't play real good but the cajuns in the band appreciated the effort and they invited me to spend the weekend with them in their cabins in the swamp. It was a real honor because the Cajuns are pretty reclusive. So we went hunting, teasing alligators, and generally engaging in debauchery.

So the Cajuns liked to make jokes about themselves, even though they don't tolerate jokes from outsiders. One of the jokes they told was about burning the toast for breakfast. They said it was 'cajun toast' because it was blackened and hot. So anyways, that is the origin of cajun style marshmallows, and anything else that gets a bit charred.