Wednesday, July 2, 2017. The post-holiday catchup begins. I get to work on the pile waiting at my desk for me. The emails run somewhere between 250 and 300 messages. I'm giving about two seconds to each, but it still takes all the evening from sundown until after dark. I go as late as I can see straight, at which time Mary Ann asks if I'd like to watch a movie. She's always urging me to get away from the computer screen and watch the television screen for awhile. She rightly knows that after two weeks of semi-leisure, I want to continue relaxing.
The movie she picks is "The Boss." In it Melissa McCarthy--whose celebrity is so distant from my tastes in film that it takes me awhile to accept her character, let along feel the kind of merryment that Mary Ann gets from the unlikely protagonist. I don't fall asleep, nor am I tempted to get back to catching up with the emails. When MA brings out another of McCarthy's oeuvres ("Spy," which makes "The Boss" seem realistic), I decide that her following is fired by a semi-cult. MA, at least, gets many more laughs than I do.
Wednesday, July 3, 2017. El Paso Passes With Molé! What happened during our search for a place to have dinner calls for a top-dozen list. The targets: days in the calendar on which restaurants are largely closed. Such days are sometimes unexpected and mess up the day, even if one gives some thought as to where they will find open tables.
Today is a perfect example. It's the day before the Fourth of July. Almost everybody takes the day off, including most restaurateurs. But this doesn't occur to many people, who a) don't recognize The Night Before The Fourth of July as a holiday, and 2) might assume that the official holiday is not tomorrow, but today.
Didn't we go through all this a few days ago? Apparently we don't learn. And I say "we" because we were among these dummies. But there was a lucky twist. We had planned to sample the new Legacy Kitchen, which has taken over the former N'Tini's. Surely they would be open, we thought. Nix.
We move on, an in so doing drive in front of the former Macaroni Grill. MA is unhappy that it is gone, but she gets excited when I tell her that El Paso Grill has opened its second location in the New Orleans area. The Florida-based chain has most of its location in central Louisiana. MA loves Tex-Mex food, and we go for it. Maybe it might even have molé poblano, the best flavor in all of Mexican cooking and one of the world's greatest sauces. We get very little molé from local restaurants, so I rush right over when I hear that it has been spotted. And we did. And it was very good indeed. All I'd hope for. The rest of the menu was well executed, too.
This cries out for a list of the best restaurants open when you expect them to be open, but they're not. Next opportunity for this: Labor Day.
El Paso. Mandeville: 3410 Highway 190. 985-624-2345.
Tuesday, July 4, 2017. We Barbecue, Of Course. Mary Ann grew up in a family that seemed always to have a batch of burgers and sausage on the barbecue pit. Her father liked to grill, and her three brothers added to the tradition of grilling on holidays. All of those men have moved to other lives, but we keep the tradition alive. Mary Ann takes charge, of course. Savoie-brand andouille, which has a very hot kick. Thick hamburgers. Grilled vegetables fill the remaining space on the Big Green Egg, which took about an hour to get the heat going to the exciting degree we like. Nobody but me ever cleans out the bottom vent, which is always clogged with nearly-powdered charcoal.
When the sun begins to go down, I take a shot at mowing the Cool Water Ranch's acres of green fields. They are in desperate need, not having been cut for a month or more. But they're still pretty wet from all the rain this summer has absorbed. And the holes the dogs dug about eight months ago--I still have no idea why--make driving the little tractor alarming.
The inevitable happened. About a city block from the carport, the right-side rear wheel fell into a hole and stuck there. Trying to get the tractor out of the hole only made the hole deeper. Great. Something else for me to think about. The best I can do right now is to cover the tractor with trash bags and wait until the weekend to unstick it.
Wednesday, July 3, 2017. Porter And Luke. A nice moment transpired at Porter and Luke, the big neighborhood restaurant in Old Metairie. Abut two tables away from me are two grandparents of two boys who looked to be about seven or so. They stay at the table most of the time, but now and then get up to walk around the table, while talking at a volume that I didn't have to tune in to hear. The boys were having a great time. Their grandparents didn't have them roped in.
Meanwhile, I start my dinner with a cup of red beans, hold the rice, with extra sauce. I had red beans on my mind when I came to Porter and Luke. But the waiter said that he had some big pompano fillets. Well, one side was filleted. The other still bore the skin, which in a pompano bears a good bit of good-tasting fish fat. It was as enjoyable as I am making it out to be.
When I finished, I walked over to the table with the two generations. I congratulated the grandparents for letting the kids play themselves in the restaurant experience, and weren't removed from it. It made for happy tables--theirs and mine. Another nice after-effect from spending three days with my 18-month-old grandson.
Porter & Luke. Old Metairie: 1517 Metairie Road. 504-875-4555.
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Thursday, July 6, 2017. Inspiration In Carpentry. Peppermill.
In the middle of the night, an idea arrived that told me how I will be able to extricate my lawn tractor from the muddy hole it fell into a few days ago. Thus far, I couldn't get past the fact that the entire yard was soft and muddy, such that a truck or even a bigger tractor would also get itself stuck.
My idea is so obvious that I'm sure someone else must have thought of it in the past. I put a wide, strong piece of wood on the ground, between the back wheels (the ones stuck in the mud). Then I used a car jack--the one that used to be part of my totaled PT Cruiser--to jack up the back of the tractor about a foot above ground.
Then I would slide some wide boards between the ground and the bottom of the mired wheel. If all goes well, after I remove the jack I will have the shortest bridge in the world, spanning the pit that the wheel had dug out.
I didn't have time to do this today, but at least I won't be tossing and turning overnight as I think the problem through. The more I think, the better it sounds.
Dinner solo at the Peppermill. I am waved down by Bob O'Neill, the sames manager of theTimes-Picayune for many years. We have a few mutual friends, most of them from the years when I wrote and designed ads for the newspaper. That was a long time ago--1974. Bob and his wife seem to be in good shape physically and mentally.
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Peppermill DiningRoom[/caption]
I begin my eating with crabcakes with remoulade. Then a dish I don't recall: chicken Positano, named for a city in the Amalfi Coast in Italy. I've been to Positano, and tried to get some laughs aout of the idea of a rival community nearby called Negatano. See, the Negatanese people have bad attitudes about everything. Get it?
Again I tell you, I have been trying to get a laugh with this anecdote for over twenty years. The dish itself was not one of the best things I've had at the Peppermill. Chicken, tomatoes, cheese.
