Wednesday, August 30, 2017. It was raining good and hard when I awakened, the heaviest rain we've had since Harvey moved in. Suddenly, the rain stopped. The sun came out. The wind decreased to nothing. I walked out to the mailbox (about a block away from my front door, so I bring an umbrella). The ditch that collects the water from the fields and the road are only about two-thirds full, and rushing right along.
This is a beautiful sight to me. The worst flood we ever had here at the Cool Water Ranch came about twenty-five years ago, when it covered the ground completely to about a foot deep and made the road impassible. We've never had anything close to that again. I know why: whoever is in charge of drainage in St. Tammany Parish hollowed out all the ditches, rivulets, creeks, brooks, and branches, and scoops out the debris regularly ever since. We don't have pumping stations or levees; gravity does all the work, and very well.
I have long been interested by waterways large and small, to an extent that it seems an obsession to the Marys. They think I spend too much time reading and thinking about it. She should understand this, because MA's brother is a major engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, and was heavily involved in the construction of enormous water works on the West Bank. I guess it just doesn't seem like much of a hobby for me to think about.
MA calls to check on me. She says that I should quit studying Accuweather every few minutes. "Why don't you just go to Gallagher's for lunch and have a good time with something you love?" she told me. I was about finished with the newsletter, so I did that. Pat Gallagher's Covington location was busy enough that I got the last table. Once in place, I called MA back to let her know I'd followed her advice. "I'm at Gallagher's," I tell her. "Now what should I do?" She was nice enough to give me the laugh I was looking for.
What I found at Gallagher's Grill was a $16 three-course lunch. It all sounded vey good. I start with turtle soup, which made this a four-coarse lunch. Then came a very generous and well-diversified salad with remoulade dressing. The entree is a big fillet of fried catfish topped with chopped, toasted pecans in a light brown meuniere sauce. Although that was a lot like the lunch I had at New Orleans Food and Spirits two days ago, the flavors were different enough.
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Haricots verts with almonds.[/caption]
The fish came with haricots vert. Green beans and fish have become a very popular ensemble lately. I like the idea except for one thing: haricots verts (the thin little green beans loved by the French) are challenging to eat. They don't respond to the tines of a fork. The best way to eat them is with the fingers, which seems to be permissible in terms of etiquette. After all, we may eat asparagus that way.
The dessert is a sort of peach bread pudding, although they called it by another name.
No rain fell while I was lunching, but the skies cut loose about five minutes from home. A deluge. But I have an umbrella and can park under my carport for the first time in years. Until recently it has been a cluttered pad of junk, not open to cars.
Darryl Reginelli was my guest on the radio show. He's in the studio downtown. I am in my office in Abita Springs. Although this seems clumsy at first, it works very well, and results in our getting a lot of guests we might otherwise not have on the air.
Darryl goes way back with the radio show. We held a few Eat Club dinners there in the 1990s. Those were in his original restaurant, which was more a gourmet Creole-Italian bistro than a pizza place. An oddity of the original Reginelli's was that it made a specialty out of polenta. That never really caught on, but it was pretty interesting.
Darryl's pizzerias have done well, and are set for expansion. Ti Martin--one of the owners of Commander's Palace--is now a partner. They're expanding and reworking the concept such that now there are are ten Reginelli's. Unfortunately, one of them is in Houston, where is the really big story about Hurricane Harvey. Darryl tells me that he and many others in the New Orleans restaurant community have already begun sending aid to their brethren in Houston. Houston was an enormous help to New Orleans after Katrina, and the local restaurateurs are eager to reciprocate.
I spend the remainder of the day working in my office, performing a much-needed clean-up. I must find my missing, brand-new laptop. After three or four hours (and several weekends during the last few months), I find it. Now all I have to do is load it up with data, which is so time consuming that I'm almost glad to have this break in my usual routines.
In the ten o'clock newscast on Channel Six, Margaret Orr announces that Hurricane Harvey is officially no longer a tropical storm. But, she says, there's lots of rainwater that will yet fall. On the other hand, not much of this rain it seems to be headed my way. I look forward to going into town tomorrow for the first time this week.
