Redneck Gravy

When circumstances offered New Englander Patrick Keefe a mid-life career change, he jumped at the chance – right from the newsroom to the galley of a Gulf of Mexico oil rig.

Redneck Gravy is the result of Keefe’s year offshore. The story is a humorous journalistic account of moving south from Connecticut to Louisiana, and breaking into the offshore catering “bidness”. The story recounts the impediments a 55-year-old faces when pursuing a young man’s trade and how those problems become “inexplicabilities” when you have a Yankee speaking Bostonian to a Son of the South from Bogalusa or Pascagoula.

Redneck Gravy is also a cook’s journey from meat and potatoes to Szechuan stir-fry artist to budding gourmet. Each chapter has a recipe that brings the savory text back home to the reader’s kitchen and includes meals important to Keefe’s culinary journey, lasagne, chili and Grand Duke’s Chicken with Peanuts, but also gumbo, etouffee, shrimp creole, biscuits and of course, Redneck Gravy.

Patrick S. Keefe is a native of Dover, New Hampshire. After a normal childhood and undistinguished, though highly-enjoyable, attendance at St. Mary Academy and St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover, he matriculated at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He quit a year later, joined the army, and served as a military policeman from 1971 to 1974. Honorably discharged, he worked for a year as a federal police officer at the Veterans Administration Center in Togus, Maine, before returning to Minnesota and college in early 1976.

After graduation, he moved to Connecticut in 1981 and pursued a career in journalism, starting as a newspaper correspondent at the Willimantic Chronicle and ending as assistant managing editor of the Norwich Bulletin. After a decade newspapering, he opted for regular hours and an improved salary in the Public Information Office of the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, where he remained until he moved to Baton Rouge in 2006.

To earn money, Keefe has worked as a blueberry picker, greenskeeper, construction laborer, caterer, mini-mart clerk, shortorder grill man, production line worker, forklift driver, printer, day laborer, direct-mail marketer, scallop fisherman, and freelance writer. At one point in Connecticut, he owned three chainsaws, and for a number of years he put up by hand five cords of hardwood for winter.