Michael Daniels
March 11, 2015Jindal budget relies on millions in shaky funding
March 11, 2015
The 18th Annual Wild Game Supper hosted by the Larose Bayou Civic Club was a wild affair.
Various cooks showed off their unique dishes featuring meat from as far as India and Australia. Dishes included Smothered Nutria, Kangaroo Pouches, King Cake Jambalaya, Pregnant Shrimp and Nilgai Jambalaya.
Forty-one dishes prepared by some of the best professional and amateur chefs of the Bayou Region were voted on by diners for best dish in three categories: fin, fur and feather. There was also a best overall dish.
Proceeds from the Wild Game Supper go toward the Bayou Civic Club long-term endowment fund, which operates the Larose Regional Park. The Bayou Civic Club is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and gets no government funding. The Larose Regional Park provides the Larose Region with youth sports, summer camps and swim teams, among other things to the community.
This year’s Wild Game Supper Outdoor Icon Award went to Larose native Kent Fagan.
“At first it was a surprise,” Fagan said. “I thought it meant probably the world to me.”
When Fagan was named the Outdoor Icon, he glanced up from a conversation he was having with a look of bafflement, the announcer having to explain, “Yes, you! You’re this year’s Outdoor Icon!”
Fagan said he played at the Larose Regional Park as a child and so have his children.
The Outdoor Icon Award is given to “an individual, group or organization… [that] has made an outstanding contribution to the conservation of Louisiana’s natural and renewable resources” and supporting Louisiana culture and Larose Regional Park.
Fagan began hosting wounded veterans at his ranch in Patterson, Mississippi, for a Wounded Warrior Weekend in 2014.
This year’s Best Dish Overall was James Bouvier’s Crawfish Bisque. This is Bouvier’s fourth year in a row taking home the award. Bouvier’s Crawfish Bisque also won Best Fin Dish.
The Best Fur Dish this year was Brian Cheramie’s Rabbit a la Nu. It is rabbit, salted and peppered then cooked in apple jelly.
“‘Nu’ is my dad,” said Cheramie. “I just named it after him because I guess how I grew up with it; that’s how he used to make it.”
This year’s Best Feather Dish was Camp Duck Routee by August Bruce.
The supper sold a record number of tables, said Jasmine Ayo, executive director of the Bayou Civic Club.
“And we started getting emails early this morning [asking], ‘Do we have a 2016 date yet?”‘ she said. “…We thought that was real cool.”
Ayo said that she doesn’t yet know how much money the event raised for the club, but that “it was a great year.”
“It was more or less to entertain the local hunters, you know,” said Magnus Arceneaux, the 2014 Outdoor Icon and one of the men who started the Wild Game Supper more than 30 years ago with brothers Pat and John Brady. “If you had a piece of meat you wanted to get cooked that night, you brought it.”
Arceneaux said the supper started with only a handful of men, numbering around 20, but now, “it’s unreal, the people that come to that thing!”
Hundreds gather at the 2015 Annual Bayou Civic Center’s Wild Game Supper. Proceeds support the Larose Regional
