To be in Le Café for lunch on a Friday during Lent was to feel the heartbeat of a community. The small eatery in Breaux Bridge—home to the best fried catfish and shrimp poboys around—has always punched above its weight, delivering food that with one bite exceeded the expectations of anyone who had initially judged it by its square footage alone.

You may know Laura Huval from her band Sweet Cecilia. The Grammy-nominated artist, music minister, speaker and retreat leader also serves as music director for St. Joseph’s Church in Cecilia. We visited her in Breaux Bridge last week to see what she has been up to and to hear about her upcoming projects.

You can trace the life of a folk song breath by breath back to its origin. Who first sang it, and in which deep dark forest it was first sung, those things can be impossible to know. What we can be sure of is this: there was always a human voice at the heart of it.

Donna Angelle is a multi-instrumentalist from Cypress Island who has entertained audiences around the world, both as a soloist and with her band, The Zydeco Posse. This week the trailblazing artist stopped by the St. Martin Parish Tourism office in Breaux Bridge to perform some songs on accordion and keyboard, and to talk about her life in music.

Duchamp Opera House in St. Martinville, built in 1830, is the oldest opera house in the country, and beginning this fall, live music will once again return to this beloved historic space.

The t-fer is a percussion instrument that adds rhythmic and tonal accents to Cajun music. You can think of it as the Cajun triangle. T-fer means “little iron” and if you pronounce it like “tea fair,” that will get you close enough. Brandy Guidry Aubé, a member of the team at St. Martin Parish Tourism, is one of only a handful of people keeping this traditional art alive. I visited her at her workshop in Breaux Bridge, where she walked me through the process of making one.

My mom has two clear memories of her first trip to Catahoula. The first was how long it took her to get there. She grew up in Parks, mind you, only eight miles away from Catahoula as the crow flies, which just goes to show you how the distance between two places can be measured in more than country miles. Catahoula, perched on the western edge of the Atchafalaya, has always been a world apart.

In one sense, music is short-lived. You sing a song, you fiddle a tune, and it’s over in less than four minutes. But in another sense, music lives longer than any of us. Like fire that passes from one candle to another, the performer sparks the listener, the teacher sparks the student, and on and on it goes.

You won’t find them in stores, they grow among thorns, and who knows what wild creatures you might startle with your rubber boots when you trudge through the vines to collect them, but there’s just no substitute for the taste of wild dewberries, and this cobbler is their perfect showcase.

Gammy’s recipe for tarte à la bouillie combines an extra-thick, pudding-like custard filling with a cookie-like sweet dough pie crust.

There’s no sign on the road alerting you to its presence, and driving through the sparsely inhabited area on the outskirts of Catahoula, which is covered with sugar cane like much of the rest of the parish, the rural landscape calls no particular attention to itself. You’d never suspect that remnants of a prehistoric society lie buried just below the surface.

I spent the coldest night of the year at one of the oldest buildings in the parish . . . and I loved it

Initiative to revive native population of Louisiana irises on Bayou Teche gathers momentum.

If autumn in St. Martin Parish is synonymous with sugar cane harvest, then gateau sirop, a spice cake made from cane syrup, is surely the dessert of that season.

My Uncle Cheese has been catching crawfish one way or another since 1938. In February, March and April of this year, I tagged along as he went crawfishing in the Atchafalaya Basin, and I photographed the entire process from bait to boil.

Fig pinwheel cookies are by far my favorite use for fig preserves. Unlike other recipes where the figs get lost in the dough, the spiral shape of this cookie highlights the fig and achieves the perfect proportion of texture, chew and crunch. If you’re a fan of fig preserves, you’re going to love this recipe.

Because of their tartness, blackberries, in my opinion, are best eaten in a cobbler or in a pie, rather than right off the vine. So when blackberries came into season recently, and I found myself with a bucketful, I went looking for a pie recipe

The story behind the contest to name Evangeline’s Daughter

I had heard of black bears in the Basin. I never imagined I would see one in Catahoula. But there it was, two Thanksgivings ago, toddling across the turn-row of the cane-field, so close I could see its nose.

I stopped for a snowball in Henderson last summer, the bow of my bright blue kayak poking up from the bed of my truck, and by the stares it got from the people in line, you’d have sworn I’d just come from Alaska. “What is that?” “Where do you go with that thing?” “What do you do when you get there?” The owner of the snowball stand, serving me my coconut snowball, leaned out onto the counter to get a closer look.