I used to be lucky if I got to sleep before 2 a.m. Sometimes it wasn't until 3. Now that I'm, ahem, older I actually do get some sleep these days. It's helped that I don't have a radio show anymore and that I hideously neglect this web site.My old late bedtime was because I had the day job, the
radio shows, the blog, the cooking, the cocktailing, the socalizing, the extracurricular musical activities, the getting stuff done around the house, the grocery shopping, the long-ass commute, the reading, the writing, the rest of the web site, plus I was online a lot. Lots of stuff to do. Which is okay, because I am nocturnal. I am not a morning person. Morning is bad. Morning is evil. Getting up in the morning is one of the worst things I have to do all day.No more radio shows and a lot less weblogging, but I still do all that other stuff and go to bed earlier. All that to say ...
Um ... see above. Why doesn't he answer my e-mail, the bastard?
Please try to remember that I do this website and handle its resultant email in my spare time, when I have spare time. This is not my living; this is not my full-time job. I am not at the computer 24 hours a day. Though I try to read every piece of mail I get, and I promise I'll try as best as I can to answer it all, please understand that sometimes I just can't. I'm only human.
I've tried to get better at reading and replying to emails, but I am frequently overwhelmed by sheer volume. I've cut my mailing lists down to just two food-related ones and one social one. But still ... I run at least one to two weeks behind on my website-related email, sometimes it's a month or more, and a few times I've had to declare email bankruptcy.
I appreciate every single piece of email I get. If you've emailed me and it's taken me weeks to respond, or if I don't respond at all, I truly and sincerely apologize. I'm so busy that I tend to get way behind in my email, and the problem is exacerbated everytime I leave town for more than a day. For instance, when I got back from my nearly month-long trip to eastern Europe in March-April of 1996, I had almost 2,500 messages waiting for me ... *groan*. Mailing lists, website-generated mail, press releases (my gods, frakkin' press releases), personal mail, it tends to pile up. I do what I can -- some mail I'll answer the same day, some I'll put off if I'm too busy, and it might take a long time.
If you're asking me for a recipe that's not on my page and you don't hear back from me, it's probably not going to appear on the page anytime soon. I also don't have the time to be a recipe research service. People write to me asking if I have the recipe for some dish they had in some restaurant. If it's not on the page, I don't have it. Use the Google. The Google is your friend.
People also write to me asking me to do things like come up with an entire custom menu for a dinner party for them, or to research some point about the history of Creole food or a particular dish for them, or to come up with a custom travel itinerary for their visit to New Orleans. I'm sorry, but I don't have time to do this kind of thing, unless you want to pay me to do it. If that's the case, let's talk. Otherwise, what you see on this site is what I recommend.
If you're one of the umpty-ump people who've written to ask me if I have a recipe for Bourbon Chicken ... no, I don't, and such a thing doesn't exist in Louisiana, only in so-called "Cajun" fast-food outlets in malls around America, outlets which generally have no Cajuns anywhere in the kitchen or the home office and which looks and tastes like bad Asian food of nebulous origin. No Louisianian I know has ever heard of it, myself included. Fortunately, these emails have dwindled to almost none in the Twenty-First Century, so well done you.
If you've emailed me with something truly urgent (although I can't imagine what that might be) and it takes too long for you to get a reply from me just noodge me with the words "ARE YOU ALIVE?" in the subject line of your mail, as some of my friends have done. That tends to get my attention.
Do not send me unsolicited advertising email, i.e. spam. Ever.
Okay, I'm going to bed now. G'night!
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