Join Big Juicy in the kitchen along with the “Cajun in Your Pocket” as he fries up a healthy and delicious appetizer perfect for the Super Bowl or a midnight snack. For the full recipe, go to bigjuicytidbits.com
Bayou Broccoli Balls
This recipe is similar to an appetizer at Copeland’s of New Orleans. This base recipe can be modified into a variety of other appetizers. Keep it juicy!
Ingredients
8 ounces Colby-Jack Cheese, shredded
2 1/2 ounces cooked bacon pieces
4 ounces broccoli florets, cooked and minced
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tablespoon cajun seasoning
1/2 cup plain bread crumbs
vegetable oil
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/2 tablespoon white sugar
1/2 tablespoon white vinegar
4 teaspoons prepared horseradish
1/2 teaspoon Tabasco Sauce
Directions
Add cheese, bacon pieces, and broccoli in a medium-sized mixing bowl and combine by hand until the mixture is uniform.
Portion out to 1 1/2 ounce balls (about the size of a golf ball). You should have about 8 balls. Compress the mixture into a firm, round ball. Place in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, for the tiger sauce, add mayonnaise, sugar, vinegar, horseradish, and Tabasco to a small bowl and mix until smooth. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
In a small bowl, beat egg and whisk in milk. In a second bowl, add flour and cajun seasoning and mix together. Add bread crumbs to a shallow dish.
Coat the balls by rolling in the flour mixture, then coating with the egg mixture. Finally, roll around in the bread crumbs until they are covered completely. Continue with the rest.
Heat up about 2 inches of cooking oil in a large dutch oven to 350 degF. Add all the balls to the oil at one time. Fry for 2-3 minutes or until they are a deep brown color. Remove from the oil and place on a paper towel-lined plate to drain and cool.
Join Big Juicy as he tells the story of Arthur Chevrolet and how a master Swiss mechanic and engineer made his way down to Louisiana. See how Chevrolets, Indy races, Higgins boats, Pontchartrain Beach, French Cyclists, and catholic cemeteries weave together to tell this tale of Louisiana History
What’s Juicy
The Chevrolet Brothers did immigrate from Switzerland at the turn of the century. Louis came over first, then sent money for his brothers to come over as well. If you are interested, the Chevrolet Brothers website has some really neat pictures and articles. Arthur raced in the first Indy 500 in 1911 but did not finished because of engine problems after 30 or so laps. He was driving a Buick and it seems to have something to do with the overhead valve engine design they were using.
When they started Chevrolet with Durant, all of the vehicles were going to have overhead valve engines. The Chevrolet Brothers wanted to make race cars and Durant wanted to make more affordable passenger cars. There was a fist fight and they parted ways after only a few years. The name was kept, but there are several legends about where the bowtie logo came from.
Frontenac was their attempt to do what Durant wouldn’t let them do… make race cars. Albert Champion was a successful French cyclist and was a partner in Frontenac. They had a falling out but there was no mention of the issue (I made up spark plugs) or a fist fight. There is a strange story about Albert’s death though. He died at 49 in a luxury hotel in Paris after his wife’s married lover punched him. The fist fight seemed probable after hearing this.
Gaston ended up winning the championship that year posthumously because he accumulated enough points that no one could catch him. The Frontenac’s were pretty good race cars.
The Chevrolair was a good idea with bad timing because of the depression. The brothers had a falling out at this time and it did become physical from several accounts. I noticed that I mixed the company/corporations with the Chevrolet vs Martin names. That was a mistake. Martin didn’t do too much changing to the Chevrolet logo. Martin did become Lockheed Martin after a bunch of mergers through the years.
I don’t know if the brothers grew tired of making companies for other people but it sure did happen a lot. Arthur took his job working in Columbus, Indiana for Cummins as a research mechanic. He enjoyed bowling and golf. Preston Tucker asked him to come work for his aviation company as he was merging with Higgins. The quote from Arthur is real and it does sound a lot like The Godfather quote, but it isn’t related as far as I know. When I saw that Francis Ford Coppola directed “Tucker: A Man and His Dream”, I couldn’t resist.
Higgins Industries made the Higgins boats and they were said by many to have won the war. The National World War II Museum was built in New Orleans because of the Higgins Factory. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex in his presidential farewell address. Technically, he invented the term.
The bourbon and fist fight tale over the naming of Tucker Higgins Aviation Company was made up. People need to be more creative with names. Maybe some bourbon would help. Too much, and you get stuff like Tucker Higgins aviation Company. The fact about the plywood needing to be warm and damp is strange and true. Once they decided to build the aviation plant, the government took over the boat factory.
That’s when the Army Corps of Engineers comes in. The song playing in the background was written in the 1960s for a government promotion for the group. Their mottos is Essayons or “Let us Try”. The plant became the Michoud Assembly Facility and produced rockets and the fuel tank for the space shuttle. They are currently building the rockets for the Space Launch System (SLS) which will propel the Orion spacecraft.
Tucker and Higgins had no reason to work together without a government contract. The C-76 was a horrible plane and not many were made. There probably wasn’t a fist fight. Tucker went on to make his car company, but that is another story. Just watch the movie.
The house on Carrey St. is supposedly his home. It has been a couple of restaurants over the years. The story about his grandson Gerald is true. There were a lot of people drowning in Lake Pontchartrain in those days. I’m not sure if he paid his taxes or not, but he did hang himself although sources vary on whether it was in the garage or in the house. My bet is on the garage.
Up until 2017, people thought Arthur was buried in Indianapolis. The cemetery name in Indianapolis is really Holy Cross and Saint Joseph. These catholic names get a bit hard to follow at times.
The story about the letter is true as is the request to be in an unmarked grave in Slidell away from his brothers. The records were lost in Hurricane Katrina, but they were not going to put a marker on his grave anyway to respect his wishes. The tradition about what direction graves are facing is real and so is the reason. Check it out next time you go by a cemetery.
The marker for Arthur was left just inside the entrance to the cemetery. They added a part on bottom to make the grave marker more of a memorial. It says, “In These Hallowed Grounds, The Exact Location Unknown, Rests Arthur Chevrolet”
Join Big Juicy as he explores the life and death of Jayne Mansfield. See how lions, beach clubs, satanic churches, televangelists, Hollywood, and the Big Easy weave together into a tale of traffic safety history.
What’s Juicy?
The intro has a mosquito truck sound in the beginning and it continues throughout the video. Although mosquito trucks run year round, I was not fortunate enough to get fogged by one so I added them. It was filmed at the memorial site that is near the actual crash site. I got the Queen of Cleavage from googling “Jayne Mansfield nickname“. if you google “Queen of Cleavage“, you get a different answer.
Vera Jayne Palmer was her birth name, but she went by her stepfather’s last name Peers in high school. Paul and Jayne were married and then had their daughter Jayne Marie 6 months later. Some people question if Paul was the father or if it was another boyfriend. DNA testing on her five children would be interesting to say the least.
I included a tea sipping sound from the Pizza Wars video for The University of Texas reference. Paul did try to get full custody of their daughter claiming that Jayne was unfit because of the nude modeling. Jayne Marie, the daughter, would go on to pose in Playboy in July 1976.
Jayne and Mickey Hargitay married 5 days after she divorced Paul. Jayne was notorious for having well publicized affairs with other men while married to Hargitay. The reference to the question mark curse is from something I heard in a podcast one time. In an interview about Who Framed Roger Rabbit , Robert Zemeckis was asked why the title didn’t have a question mark. He said it was a Hollywood superstition that if you use a question mark in the title, the movie would bomb. There are a whole bunch of movies that followed this logic including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Billy Graham, who wasn’t really a televangelist, was visiting London when he made the quote about Jayne. It was part of a larger quote about making idols who emphasize sex. The second commandment is about idolatry, not gun control–that’s the second amendment.
While the term wardrobe malfunction wasn’t used until the Suberbowl Incident, Jayne’s clothes fell off all of the time in public. She used it to gain publicity. The Sophia Loren episode as well as her account of the incident are true. The rivalry between Jayne and Marilyn Monroe is debated. I think it is fair to say that they were competing for the same movies. Jayne supposedly had affairs with JFK and his brother Robert. Jayne claimed that the shipwreck in the Bahamas was not a publicity stunt, but it is hard to tell. Her quote after hearing the news of Marilyn Monroe’s death is real. There were a lot of similarities between the two ladies.
Jaynes marriage to Matt Cimber, the birth of her child Tony, and her separation from Matt happened in less than a year. From the pictures of the couple, it seems like alcohol was getting the best of her. This isn’t in the video, but Matt Cimber went on to be the co-creator and director of Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW).
Jayne and Sam had a toxic relationship. They would get drunk and get into fights with each other and people nearby. Ireland was not the only country they got kicked out of.
The Anton LeVey meeting is real and this is where things get a bit strange. I think you have to assume this was a publicity stunt, but does seem a bit far. I wonder what Billy Graham thought about that. There is a newspaper interview from LeVey where he tells the story of the curse.
The lion attack at Jungleland USA is real and the lion’s name was Sammy. I never confirm he was actually euthanized though. The car accidents are real as well. They were mentioned in the Anton LeVey interview as well as Jayne and Sam’s interview a few days before their death.
The Gus Stevens Supper Club is no longer in Biloxi. Ronnie Harrison was also Gus’s daughter Elaine’s boyfriend. Unknown to him at the time, the couple was preparing to elope because she was pregnant. Ronnie was 19 years old. The amount of people that fit in a car back then is amazing. I am not sure what that says about us now, but sitting three people in the front seat seems crazy. The four chihuahuas were there too, and there is some film of the NOPD officers with the two dogs that survived.
The story of the accident is true including the detail about the mosquito truck. If you grew up around these things, you know how much fog is put out behind them. Even so, they must have been going pretty fast to cause that type of damage.
The story about Jayne’s wig fueling decapitation rumors is true. The New Orleans coroner confirmed later that it was more like a scalping than a decapitation. I left that detail out of the video.
The story of Mariska Hargity becoming Olivia Benson on Law and Order – Special Victims Unit is true. Shortly after the accident, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommended putting an under ride guard on 18-wheelers. These were referred to as Mansfield bars.
