Ingredients

Crawfish Beignets:

• 1 egg beaten

• 1 pound chopped cooked crawfish tail meat or shrimp

• 4 green onions chopped

• 1-1/2 teaspoons melted butter

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour

• Oil for deep-fat frying

Cajun Dipping Sauce:

• 3/4 cup mayonnaise

• 1/2 cup ketchup

• 1/4 teaspoon prepared horseradish optional

• 1/4 teaspoon hot pepper sauce

Ingredients

♦ 40-42 saltine crackers

♦ 1 cup unsalted butter

♦ 1 cup brown sugar packed

♦ 1/2 tsp cinnamon

♦ 1 tsp vanilla extract

♦ 12 oz white chocolate chips

+ more for drizzling Green decorative sugar

♦ Yellow decorative sugar

♦ Purple decorative sugar

Pickens got her bachelor’s degree in mass communications. And, because she “wasn’t ready to be an adult yet,” she continued her education and received a master’s degree in cross-cultural communications from Grambling University. Her particular interests were political campaigning and public relations.

She returned to Shreveport and got a job in marketing in the television and radio industry. But she soon discovered she did not enjoy the sales component of that career. “I was at a crossroads,” she said. “I was driving down the street, and I said, ‘I wonder if they are hiring.’ I stopped in at Southern (University Shreveport) and asked. They said, ‘No, but here’s a number.’ I gave them my resume and everything.”

That’s when a little patience paid off for Pickens. At the end of that semester, an opening came up to teach mass communications. She was 24 when she started at Southern, almost the same age as her students. But she has enjoyed the journey. “It’s something that I love,” Pickens said. “I am passionate about education and educating others.”

She is now in her 20th year teaching at Southern. Recently, her desire to learn led her to launch another journey — this time as a vegan chef. One of the things Pickens presents in her classroom is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s a theory of motivation that states humans are driven by five categories of needs. Ranked from the bottom up, they are physiological (food and clothing), safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. 

“When you ascend to that top level, self-actualization, and take a moment to figure out who you are, you don’t do that one time at 17 or 18 years old,” she said. “I have done that several times. That’s where this transition came from as well.”

In 2011, Pickens was having some medical issues. So, she turned to her lifelong love of learning, or “being nosy,” as her grandmother called it, to find an alternative to the medications the doctor was prescribing. That research led her to make the transition to veganism “cold turkey.” 

“Taking meat and dairy out of my personal diet was something I was interested in doing,” she said. “I had no clue what I would eat. I lost about 65 pounds. I lost a lot of muscle mass. I was very sick. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

She started her vegan journey by herself, but that didn’t last long. She was open about her experience on social media, and soon her family members and friends were joining her. “My mother got off her high blood pressure medicine when she decided to transition to veganism about five years ago,” Pickens said. “There were little wins along the way with the family joining in and my friends coming over seeing different foods.”

The journey took another turn when Pickens became hungry for more — literally. “I posted, ‘Man, I wish someone sold vegan food in Shreveport, because I am starving,’” she said. “I posted that one day in 2017, and people said, ‘You should do it.’

“I thought, ‘Maybe I should do it. But that’s silly. I didn’t go to culinary school.’”

She didn’t let that stop her, though. She took her creativity, her love of learning and the support from her family and friends and went to work. Her journey took her first to Dr. Sebi, a Honduran herbalist known for developing alkaline vegan recipes. She calls that a “traditional” vegan diet — one that “is not fun or good or tasty to eat.” She said it wasn’t until others, especially her daughter, Jalynn, joined her on her journey that “the fun happened.”