Summer time in Louisiana means high temperatures and hurricane season. With an early tropical storm in the Gulf, I was really starting to panic thinking about the amount of food in my freezer. Usually, I spend the Spring months cooking all the boudin and smoked sausage from the Best Stop we stock up on when we visit Basile, ducks from hunting season and shrimp we got a good deal on, but too much to eat in one evening. All of these items are certainly best fresh, but when you can score a stock pile of such fine eats, who am I to argue or be particular. Then there's that pork belly, my husband picked up at Emmett's in Harahan to make his porchetta, round two. There are even strawberries I put up before the Louisiana season passed to use in smoothies and now there are blueberries stored away for muffins and breads. We’ve come a long way in this country from where we were several decades ago. The abundance of food in my pantry and refrigerator would likely be an embarrassment of riches should my great-grand parents who lived through the Great Depression where alive to see it. Freezers started out a way to store what was hunted, killed and slaughtered before the times of “pick your cut” at the meat counter at your local Rouses supermarket any day of the week. Louisiana Kitchen and Culture Publisher Susan Ford shared the story of her family’s move just a few weeks before Hurricane Camille hit in 1969 from north of Hattiesburg, MS to Pascagoula. One of her earliest memories she has was that her parents were worried how they would feed the family through the winter if they lost everything they had in the deep freezer. Luckily, one of their new neighbors were generous enough to add them to the generator rotation which prevented the loss of the summer harvest. A colleague at the Louisiana Restaurant Association and I were talking the other day about all we lost following Hurricane Katrina. She lost her belongings, while we just lost our freezer stocked with crawfish tails, pork tenderloin and even our leftovers from our last meal before evacuation at Galatoire's. After eating out of an ice chest for months, I learned a valuable lesson in emptying out the refrigerator and freezer before getting out of dodge. For Gustav, we evacuated to a friend's house with our ice chest in tow. Bringing good groceries with you when you evacuate makes you a beloved house guest. A friend shared her grandmother’s Gustav story with me. She recalled the conversation with a smile and rolled her eyes. Her grandmother said, “Oh, we lost everything.” Pausing before she added, “in our freezer.” She went on to name the perished items sadly as if she lost a loved one or the family pet. As July gets underway, I continue the process of thawing and cooking what's in our freezer. Last week, we baked a stuffed chicken with shrimp rice dressing from the Cajun Butcher Block on the West Bank. Just this morning, I took out some red snapper fillets that were caught only a few weeks ago. The porchetta and the tuna are in the near future too!