Richard Holledge

When trombonist Craig Klein came back to his house a few days after Hurricane Katrina tore though New Orleans on August 29, 2005, he found – like thousands of others  - that his house was in ruins.

“The water was ten feet high, almost reaching the second floor,” he says. “Everything was in turmoil. All I could do was throw all the contents into the street, tear down the inside walls, clear out the foot of sludge and wait for it all to dry.”

While he waited he got in touch with friends in the music community who were in the same plight and they decided to help each other get their homes and their lives back into some sort of order.

“I knew I had to be here because this is the best place to be a musician but I didn’t know what was going to happen to the music scene because so many had left and not come back Some were dead.

Read more in The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/aint-no-city-like-new-orleans

Love lost; love regained. Freedom; oppression. The casual cruelty of great nations; the plight of the weak and dispossessed. And against all hope—survival and a new life.

The Scattered dramatizes the incredible life of one man and the people he loved, caught up in the saga that befell the Acadians, a simple, peaceable people, who were expelled by the British from their homes in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1755. The great powers—France and Britain—were caught up in a titanic battle for power in North America. The small enclave of French-speaking Acadians were in the way and were brushed aside.

To find out more, please go to The Scattered at Amazon

One of the most moving - and beautiful - exhibitions is Armenia: Masterpieces from an Enduring Culture at the Bodlean Library in Oxford as you can see in the Gulf News;  http://gulfnews.com/culture/arts/armenia-s-history-and-culture-at-the-bodleian-1.1656929

On Christmas Day 1863, John Bowes and his wife Joséphine sat down to celebrate at the fashionable Hotel Clarendon in Paris. The menu included four lamb cutlets and veal for breakfast, followed by two dozen oysters, partridge, steak and Roquefort cheese as well as two bottles of Bordeaux. 

He was the illegitimate, but very rich, scion of the Bowes family which had made its fortune in land and mining in County Durham. She was an actress at the Théatre des Variétés which Bowes owned in Paris.

Together they enjoyed the high life – he once ordered 100 bottles of champagne for her name day - but more, they were passionate collectors of art.

They married in 1852 when he was 41 and she 27 and by 1862 they had bought 200 paintings. In the following 12 years in a frenzy of acquisitions they amassed 15,000 objects, including 5,000 ceramics.  

Now in a timely combination, food and art come together in an exhibition at the museum which Bowes built in the style of a French chateau near the quintessentially English market town of Barnard Castle.

Read more in The Times

In the wood-panelled formality of the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library an intense, rather nervous, woman is holding an audience in rapt silence. 

In gentle cadences Lebanese playwright Maya Zbib is performing her one-woman show, The Music Box. There is a lightness to her voice which contrasts with the shelves of portentous books and elaborate tapestries that stuff the room but it is a lightness that is deceptive, because her story tells of life in Beirut - a world of violence to women, disappointed marriages, mislaid dreams and untimely death. It is so affecting that when the short performance ends there is a silence, then heartfelt applause and even tears.  Few shed more than the charismatic theatre director Peter Sellars who is sitting in the front row. 

“I was crying my eyes out,” he said. “I knew the text but this is the first time I have seen Maya perform.  So much in the Middle East comes from a sense of desperation so it is beautiful to see something of intelligence, of balance, of quiet and understanding that comes from an inner clarity.”

Read more in The National

As parties go it was quite a do. A soldier with a machine gun on the roof. Yards of black limos ferrying in 2,000 admirers, all coiffed and coutured. A guest list headed by the Russian president Vladimir Putin and to make it go with a swing a cast list of stars that included the soprano Anna Netrebko, Placido Domingo, the ballet dancer Diana Vishneva, not to mention scores of the world’s leading dancers, musicians and singers. Yes, happy sixtieth birthday maestro Valery Gergiev. 

It was a happy coincidence that his important birthday coincided with the opening on May 1 of the new Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg which was marked with a thrilling gala which was as much celebration as performance.

In fact, the party went on for three days with Mariinsky Director Gergiev, who, with his designer-stubble looks as if he has been up all night anyway, at the centre of a whirl of activity. Talking, making music, talking, making music. He met the press, conducted the gala, joined a post-opening party that went on until dawn. Next afternoon he conducted a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, before a reception at the yet-to-be-officially-opened Four Seasons Hotel. More applause; more happy birthdays. 

For more read The Gulf News

London is on the rise. 

Almost 250 buildings of 20 or more stories are being built or planned for the city and its suburbs. in the next few years, about 150 of which would be residential blocks. Recently, a fresh tranche of planned developments were announced for Canary Wharf and in to the east, including a several skyscrapers - one 58 stories. 

And those numbers have grown as recently as the end of July, when a new group of high rises, including one of 58 stories, was announced for London’s East End.

The high rises are hailed by some as the only solution to the city’s chronic housing shortage, and are the result of overseas investment that has flowed into the capital since the global downturn of 2008, most of it attached to high-rise projects.

But others argue that the buildings will clog London’s skyline and that the city’s post-World War II practice of grouping towers on streetless sites, in a kind of residential version of an industrial park, produces a sterile environment -- and actually does not provide as many housing units as traditional terraced housing.

Read more in the New York Times

From the outside, it looks like a prison. At least that’s what some of the well-heeled residents of the Scottish village of Kilmacolm say of Windyhill  — and the house does look somewhat austere, with its uncompromising cement and stone finish.

But the moment a recent Japanese visitor stepped inside, she was overcome with emotion and burst into tears. To her, it was perfection. 

Windyhill is one of only two surviving houses built by the architect, designer and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh - the other is the Hill House in Helensburgh on the northern banks of the River Clyde, now a National Trust property. Mackintosh was acclaimed throughout Europe in the early 1900s but his talent was little celebrated in his hometown of Glasgow until long after his death in 1928. He now is considered one of Scotland’s most famous designers.

Read more in the New York Times 

Most years Brazilian gallerist Juliana Cintra would have promoted her artists and their work at the key international art fairs such as Frieze New York and Arco Madrid.    

    Not this year. Mrs Cintra, co-owner of the Silvia Cintra + Box Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, says: “People are not in the mood to buy. We have a political crisis, the president may well be impeached, the economy is weak and the dollar is too strong. Then there is the situation in Paris and Brussels with terrorism and the confusion in Europe.”

    Add to this the rising cost of the Olympic Games opening in Rio this August - now at 39.1 billion reals (£7.6 billion) - throw in the chaos caused by the building of new infrastructure, and it is understandable why she laments: “We have had to take a step back and go only to Art Brussels and Basel Miami. Art is something that people buy when they are happy. It isn’t something that people need.”

Read more in the FT. 

Felicia Browne is a name known to only a few art historians. Yet she was not only the first of the British volunteers to die in the Spanish Civil War, shot in the chest and back, but she became a galvanising influence in the involvement of British artists in the war.

    Her body had to be left where it lay, near the front at Saragossa, but in her satchel was a sketchbook with drawings of her comrades. The book was sent back to England and shown in an exhibition organised by the Artists International Association, an anti-fascist group who were fiercely in support of the Republicans in their struggle against the Franco-led Nationalists.

    The show caused a sensation. The reviewer of the New Statesman noted that the “absence of all sentimentality, all propaganda, all effort to be ‘proletarian’ deserves the consideration of those who fancy that it is an artist’s business to use his art for the expression of his political beliefs.” 

    An exhibition at The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, entitled Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War, coincides with the 75th anniversary of the end of the conflict and successfully redresses the received wisdom that the war was an inspiration primarily for writers and poets such as George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden.  

    Instead, the exhibition highlights the involvement of the many artists who used their craft as a means to highlight the suffering of the Spanish with works that were fierce, uncompromising and often unashamedly propagandist. 

    Felicity Ashbee - a committed Communist - produced a series posters entitled They Face Famine in Spain (1937) which includes the depiction of a despairing young brother and sister with the word milk repeated behind them. Some found them so shocking that the London Passenger Transport Board refused to display them.

    Sir Frank Brangwyn, on the other hand, was a pacifist, unimpressed by the political impulses that drove many of his contemporaries. Yet his concern for the plight of the suffering is passionately expressed in Spain (1937), a lithograph in support of the General Relief Fund for Distressed Women and Children in Spain which depicts a Madonna figure holding a baby while destitute children cling to her for comfort.

    If the figurative artists bring an unvarnished passion to the cause, the surrealists offer a fearsome vision.

    John Banting, another communist, attacked what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Catholic church with his caustic drawing Absolution: Spanish Civil War (1937-39), which shows a priest, crudely caricatured as a grinning skull, carrying out prayers of absolution for the dead that lie at his feet. 

    S.W. Hayter, a key player in the Surrealist movement, painted compellingly ugly scenes - none more than Paysage Anthropophage (Man-eating Landscape 1937) in which a figure, contorted in death, lies with arm outstretched, before a stricken female.

    Vociferous though the British artists were in their anger and despair at the conflict - some tried to volunteer, many raised funds for medical aid - the most significant inspiration was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, the epic condemnation of the bombing of the defenceless Basque village by the bombers of Italy and German in which 1,645 died and 889 were wounded.

    The artist Roland Penrose, a long-time friend of Picasso brought the work to England in 1938 and had it displayed to enthusiastic audiences at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and a Manchester car show room among other venues. He also bought Picasso’s anguished Weeping Woman, which is on loan to The Pallant for this show.

    The influence is clear; Henry Moore created the small bronze Three Points in 1939–40 - its spikes a nod to the gaping mouthed despair of the figures in Guernica - and, similarly, Merlyn Evans uses aggressive, angular forms in Tyrannopolis (The Protestors) and Distressed Area (1938).

    Some of the most arresting works were produced by those who were not supporters of the Republicans. Edward Burra, loved the country and was shocked at the scale of the violence, but he takes no sides in The Watcher (1937) with its sinister figures in a ruined landscape or Medusa, (1938), an almost theatrical, grinning figure in blood red, draped in semi-naked corpses.

    Wyndham Lewis too, was ambivalent about supporting the Republicans and their communist supporters but, like Burra, produced startling work. The Siege of Barcelona (1934-37), which became The Surrender of Barcelona after the fall of the city in January 1939, is an enigmatic depiction of military power.   The small figure of a hanged man is almost lost in the towering medieval battlements and the strutting soldiers in their suits of armour.  

    In a compelling coda, a separate gallery displays the portfolio of 1980s prints by Terry Frost entitled Eleven Poems by Federico García Lorca, which were inspired by his admiration for the Spanish poet who was killed by pro-Franco forces in August 1936. Strikingly, the prints are only in red, black and white and are what Frost called: ‘A symbol for death and life, lust, passion, tenderness, fear, love.’

    It’s worth the trip to Chichester alone. 

“Digging, digging, digging, always bloody digging.” That was the rueful refrain of Britain’s First World War soldiers as they gouged out the trenches that stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel.

Nothing symbolizes the mayhem of the 1914-18 war more than those crude lines of defense so it is fitting that one of the most dramatic features of London’s newly-redesigned Imperial War Museum is a re-creation of a trench. More than 52 feet of dark, claustrophobic, passageway, eight feet high, filled with the infernal racket of whizzing shells, the rat-a-tat of machine guns, the roar of planes. A British Mark V tank looms menacingly, a Sopwith Camel biplane ‘flies’ overhead. 

The museum, in Lambeth, South London, opened this summer after a £40 million ($64 million) refit to coincide with the centenary of the war. 

To read more go to Wall Street Journal

What makes a museum or gallery worthy of a £100,000 prize? The Art Fund awards that prize to the museum of the year but how - and who - decides what the winner should be? Should the tiny but brilliant Bethlem Museum in South London be judged in the same wa ay the mighty - but brilliant - V and A?

Read more in the Financial Times  https://www.ft.com/content/76b27722-1e13-11e7-b7d3-163f5a7f229.

Shamsia Hassani patrols the dusty, often dangerous streets of Kabul, with a weapon in her hand. A spray gun.

She is a graffiti artist, possibly the first in Afghanistan, and her work - spectral women in blue burqas outlined on war-damaged buildings, the dirty, dusty walls and corners of the city - invokes praise and hostility - but mostly hostility.

In fact, such has been the animosity she has been compelled to stop painting her distinctive images outside but instead take a photograph of the scene she wants to embellish, print out the picture and superimpose an image using acrylic paint to create something that looks like graffiti but is “ like a dreaming graffiti. It is graffiti but only in my mind. It is not real.”

Read more about Shamsia Hassan

A woman stares enigmatically at the camera, She wears a tight green jumper and jeans. In her left hand she holds an arm, covered in freckles and wearing a wrist watch. It is stretched across her body.  It is her prosthetic arm. 

This is one of the unnerving images that make up one of the most compelling exhibitions held in the UK in the year of the 100th anniversary of the World War One - The Sensory War, 1914-2014 at Manchester Art Gallery.

It examines the art of war from the outbreak of hostilities in the summer of 1914 to Afghanistan by demonstrating the relationship between the senses reacting to the violence of conflict to the work of the artists. The 173 works on display are divided into ten sections such as Militarising Bodies, Manufacturing War; Pain and Succour; Shocking the Senses.

Read more in The Gulf News and Artnews

As a child, Colombian gallery owner José Roca read a story in which jungle explorers discover a lost civilisation that had developed in complete isolation from the West.

For lost civilisation read: Bogota. For decades Colombia’s capital was a no-go area - riven by conflict between leftist guerrillas and right wing para - military groups and devastated by the tyranny of the drug cartels. It was, declared Colombia’s finest writer, Gabriel García Márquez, a country consumed by a “biblical holocaust.”

Who would be rash enough to walk the streets of a city where killings and kidnappings were horribly commonplace, let alone visit an art gallery? Indeed, there was scarcely a gallery to visit until a remorseless crackdown on the gangs by President Álavro Uribe, who held office from 2002 to 2010, resulted in the murder rate falling from 80 murders per 100,000 residents in 1993 to 17 by 2013. 

Bogota has gone from fear to hope.

Read more in the FT

Colombian artist Jorge Julián Aristizábal was 16 when a group of artists and architects converted a small house in his home city of Medellín into a museum of modern art. That was 1978, and Mr. Julián, who is now 52, says “I grew up with the museum. Like many other artists of my generation, it accompanied me throughout my entire career. It held very important shows to promote young artists, and without the museum it would have taken me much longer to be where I am right now.”

In 2009, the Museo de Arte Moderno moved to much larger quarters in a former steel mill, built in 1938, and a dramatically contemporary $12 million extension will open next year. In addition, there are plans for a culture center to house the city orchestra and ballet company. 

“We are an expression of the transformation of the city,” says María Mercedes González, 36, who has been museum director since 2012, “This could not have been achieved before, when the city was in such difficulties.” 

To find out more, go to Wall Street Journal

Lunch time in Mother’s Diner, downtown New Orleans. Plates are piled with po’boys, mighty sandwiches stuffed with fried shrimp, oysters or roast beef. Their gravy-drenched prodigality belies their origins as hand outs to starving workers during a street car strike in the Twenties. 

Muffaletta anyone? It’s like a plate sized flat loaf filled with marinated olive and slices of salami, emmental cheese, mortadella and provolone. Buy one and feed the whole family. 

Maybe a bowl of gumbo, a broth of seafood or meat seasoned in file (acute) or how about a mound of debris, the shavings from the roast joint left floating in the gravy?  

This is Louisiana where the food is born out of hard times - from the Spanish occupation and the wreckage of the Civil War and from outside cultures such as the Creole mix of French, Spanish and African American  and the Cajuns who settled there when expelled by the British from their Nova Scotia homeland in 1755.

Today these are all dishes made exotic by their unfamiliarity to European palates and given extra gusto by another Louisiana classic sitting on Mother’s tables – a good ole, red topped, green necked bottle of Tabasco.

Hard to imagine an eaterie in Louisiana not serving the state’s home grown pepper sauce. Even the most sophisticated of the restaurants in food-loving New Orleans - legendary names such as Brennan’s, Commander’s Palace or Antoine’s - have bottles at the ready.  

Why stop there? Tabasco is sold in 160 countries, including the UK where it has been on sale since 1873, cheering up bland breakfasts and lacklustre lunches, bringing zest to oysters and putting the Bloody into Mary. It is found in London restaurants such as Hix’s Oyster and Chophouse, Richard Corrigan's Bentley's and the Bibendum Oyster bar (of course) and even that stalwart of spice the Star of India.

Now it transpires that this most bravura of exports is a favourite of the British Royal Family, so much so that it has been granted a royal warrant by The Queen  – making it the only independent US firm in the food category.  Heinz, owners of Worcester and HP Sauce, also have the coveted imprimateur. 

It’s an incongruous thought, a bottle of Tabasco on the Buckingham Palace sideboard. How are they on Louisiana cuisine at the Palace?  

Grits with the black ham and eggs, Ma’am?   

Grits! It is hard to find a food more likely to disappoint Her Majesty than the tasteless sludge of ground corn. Even with the reviving tincture of Tabasco, this is alien culinary territory - almost as alien as the bayous of Louisiana, where skeletal trees are laden with eerie curtains of Spanish Moss, where egrets stalk and alligators nose through the green algae.  

But deep in the bayous of this, the least American of states, is the headquarters of this, the most American of brands. 

It was here, on Avery Island in 1865 that Edmund McIlhenny, a banker who had lost his fortune in the American Civil War planted his first peppers. The story goes that he was given a handful of seeds by a Confederate soldier who had fled to Mexico after the war. McIlhenny planted them and was delighted when half a dozen bushes sprang up. He experimented with mashing the peppers, adding vinegar and salt, to make a sauce which he bottled in old cologne bottles. He was better placed than most culinary adventurers. Avery Island is, in fact, the dome of one of the biggest salt mines in America.

The following year he produced 658 bottles. By 1889 production reached 41,472 bottles. Today 700,000 bottles rattle off the lines every day.  

It still has the same ingredients of peppers, natural vinegar and a small amount of salt which are matured for up to three years in old white oak whisky barrels. Grand pere, as he is known by today’s family, would still recognise the flavour.

John McIlhenny, the elder son, who took over in 1890, increased the pepper fields from five to 70 acres and stepped up production. But he was restless, joining President Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to fight in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and helping to quell a revolt against US rule in the  Philippines. His brother Ned spent years exploring the Arctic and his son, Walter, went to war in 1941. Using the combat code name Tabasco Mac, he fought at Guadalcanal against the Japanese where, according to an eyewitness, ‘he leaned up against a coconut tree and started firing. He killed six of them, just like that.’ 

With all this adventuring it’s a wonder that Tabasco flourished but in between hunting, shooting and looking for trouble the company’s marketing accelerated – particularly under Walter, who used every gimmick available to him such as promotional songs on the new 45 rpm records, supplying US servicemen in Vietnam with a Tabasco recipe book. During the Iraqi conflict an advert showed a marine about to hurl a bottle of Tabasco as if it was a hand grenade with the slogan: ‘Defending The World Against Bland Food’ and last month the British army in Afghanistan were sent Tabasco to doing their bit to combat "menu fatigue and taste degradation".

Walter paid for gimmicks such as arranging product placement in the Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun and even having the spicy liquid shot into space with the Shuttle missions.  

Britain was an early market. The first export arrived in 1873, though the grocers Crosse and Blackwell turned down the chance to handle its sales because there was such a glut of sauces that would they thought it would be ‘unprofitable’. Today more than two million bottles are sold a year. 

The Royal Warrant might be one of the company’s highest accolades but it will have to be its most discreet. The manufacturer can acknowledge the warrant only with the ‘By appointment ...’ sign on the label and is not allowed to use it for anything as vulgar as advertising. The warrant is earned by supplying the royals for at least five years and all 800 of the current holders will have passed a series of checks on their environmental credentials and the conditions enjoyed by their work force. 

Paul McIlhenny, the latest in the dynasty, lives on Avery Island like his predecessors and is very much in their mould. He is an enthusiastic fisherman and ‘wing shooter’ – a wild bird hunter. 

“My bit for conservation,” he jokes.   

He is clearly a man who knows his food – no stranger to the best restaurants in New Orleans - and has a reputation for being an accomplished cook. He has introduced new varieties such as a jalapeno-based green sauce, a chipotle smoked version, sweet and spicy and garlic. 

But it’s the original that captures the imagination and, no doubt, challenges the royal taste buds – maybe because it has stayed true to Grand pere’s recipe. 

As Jeremy Lee, the exuberant head chef of the Blueprint Cafe, London, says: “I can’t imagine a kitchen without Tabasco. You can make something out of nothing with just a few drops. It’s like the magic elixir of life.

“And how could you have a Bloody Mary without it?”

Richard Holledge is writing a book on the expulsion of the Cajuns 

Recipes 

Classic Bloody Mary

1 quart tomato juice 

1 cup vodka 

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 

1 tablespoon fresh lime juice 

Half teaspoon Tabasco original 

Lime slices or celery stalks 

Combine tomato juice, vodka, Worcestershire sauce, lime juice, and Tabasco in a two-quart pitcher; stir well. Serve over ice. Garnish with lime or celery.

Serves six. 

Bordertown Burgers with Spicy Onions

1 tablespoon vegetable oil 

1 large sweet onion, halved and thinly sliced 

4 tablespoons Tabasco Chipotle sauce  

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 

1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef 

1/4 cup chopped fresh coriander 

1/4 cup chopped green onion 

1 teaspoon salt 

4 slices Monterey Jack cheese (semi hard cow’s milk cheese)

4 hamburger buns, toasted 

Mixed baby greens 

Heat oil in a large frying pan over medium-high heat; add onion and cook 5 minutes or until golden brown, stirring often. Stir in 1 tablespoon Chipotle Sauce and the Worcestershire sauce; mix well and remove from heat.

Combine ground beef, coriander, green onion, salt and the remaining 3 tablespoons of Tabasco; mix well and shape into 4 burgers. Grill over medium-high heat - about 3 minutes per side for medium-rare. Top each burger with a slice of cheese and grill just until melted. Place on buns and top with spicy onions and baby greens.

Makes 4 servings. 

Eula Mae Doré's Potato Salad

2 pounds medium-size red potatoes, peeled and cut into quarters 

11/2 teaspoons salt, divided 

6 hard-cooked eggs 

Quarter cup vegetable oil 

Half teaspoon white vinegar 

3/4 cup mayonnaise 

1 teaspoon original Tabasco

1 sweet pickle, finely chopped 

1 stalk celery, chopped 

Half green sweet pepper, chopped 

Fill a 3- quart saucepan two-thirds full of cold water and bring to a boil. Add potatoes and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Cook over medium heat about 15 minutes or until tender; drain.

Peel eggs and separate yolks and whites; chop whites and set aside. Mash yolks in a large bowl and stir in oil and vinegar. Add mayonnaise, Tabasco and remaining half teaspoon salt.

Dice potatoes and add to mayonnaise mixture along with pickle, celery, bell pepper and egg whites. Mix well and refrigerate until 15 minutes before serving.

Makes 8 servings. 

Fire and Ice Cream

Half cup milk 

1 (2-inch) cinnamon stick 

1 strip orange peel (from 1 small orange) 

4 whole cloves 

2 teaspoons vanilla extract 

1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk 

1 ½ teaspoons original Tabasco 

2 cups full cream, whipped 

Cinnamon sticks and orange peel twists for garnish (optional) 

Combine milk, cinnamon stick, orange peel and cloves in a small saucepan over medium heat and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 5 minutes to blend flavours. Set aside to cool to room temperature; strain.

Combine milk mixture, vanilla, condensed milk and Tabasco in a large bowl and mix well; gently fold in whipped cream. Cover and freeze until firm, stirring once.

To serve, scoop ice cream into glasses or dessert dishes. Garnish with cinnamon sticks and orange peel twists, if desired.

Makes 6 servings. 

… and a classic: Shrimp and Sausage Jambalaya

2 tablespoons vegetable oil 

Half pound smoked sausage, cut into half inch slices 

1/2 cup sliced celery 

1 small onion, chopped 

1 small red or green bell pepper, chopped 

1 clove garlic, minced 

1 3/4 cups chicken broth 

1 cup diced fresh or canned tomatoes 

1 bay leaf 

1 teaspoon original Tabasco

1/4 teaspoon dried oregano leaves 

1/4 teaspoon dried thyme leaves 

1/8 teaspoon ground mixed spice 

3/4 cup uncooked rice 

1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and cut in half lengthwise 

Heat oil in a large heavy saucepan or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add sausage, celery, onion, bell pepper, and garlic. Cook 5 minutes or until vegetables are tender, stirring frequently.

Stir in broth, tomatoes, bay leaf, Tabasco, oregano, thyme, and mixed spice. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer uncovered for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in rice; cover and simmer 15 minutes. Add shrimp; cover and simmer 5 minutes longer or until rice is tender and shrimp turn pink. Let stand, covered, 10 minutes. Remove bay leaf before serving.

Makes 4 servings.