Monday, January 15, 2018. Mary Ann says she wants to lunch at Pontchartrain Po-Boys in Mandeville. Love it. She gets a big bowl of large butterbeans with spicy, smoky grilled sausage, something we both love. It's a signature dish at the Pontchartrain, which is a restaurant assembled after Hurricane Katrina by a family that came to St. Tammany from St. Bernard Parish. If there's something that St. Bernard restaurateurs know all about, it's how to assemble poor boy sandwiches.
That in mind, I order a thirteen-dollar special that includes a six-inch poor boy of one's choice, fries or the soup of the day. The poor boy is loaded with thinly-sliced, made-on-site roast beef. I ask to have the sandwich made with a minimum of gravy. Which still entails--as it does in almost every roast beef poor boy--too much gravy for the sandwich not to disintegrate before it's halfway eaten.
I keep thinking that one of the local French-bread bakers ought to rebuild the bread to be shorter from top to bottom and wider. I know that the sloppiness of a roast beef is considered a hallmark of the sandwiches, it would be better if it were bit tighter. The actual flavor of the thing needs no other changes.
At three o-clock, I fire up the gizmo that connects my home studio to the radio station--something I do on Mondays and other days when I have other irons in the fire. I find nobody there. I call the offices of all the people who assist in my broadcast, and find not one available. Ah! It's Martin Luther King Day. I recall now that most of the on-air hosts will take the day off. It has been that way for years. And I forget it every year, to my shame.
I check on the status of my water pipes. We will have very cold weather most of this week. I also get Mary Ann to deliver fifty copies of Hungry Town, my book about how New Orleans came back after the hurricane, from the standpoint of the culinary world. A group that has asked me to speak to them bought all those Hungry Towns. I would have made the delivery myself, but I think I pulled a muscle yesterday. I find it hard to bend over or twist my torso--let alone to haul fifty hardcover books around in three boxes.
Then it's time for NPAS rehearsal in downtown Covington, Singing makes me forget my back hurts. That always happens for me when I have a problem, no matter what kind of problem it is. Today, I'm putting my solo of "If I Loved You" before PAS's directors. They are much more complimentary than I expect. I should have started getting more serious about music a long time ago. But that regret stands on many other potential endeavors.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018. No Show, Two Different Ways. The media and my own sources of weather data both say that it will be a touch-and-go situation for driving around in New Orleans, particularly if it involves a lot of bridges. It may snow, sleet, or both.
I didn't think things were quite that tough, so I drove into town and the radio studios, where not everything was normal. The office staff was sent home at three p.m.--which is when my show begins. I figure that there's no point in staying after the live two hours of the program play out. Traffic reporter Bob Frost (who is the only other person to make the jump from the old WSMB radio when WWL bought that station in 1992) tells me that the Causeway, as of five o-clock, was still wide open. He also told me that wintry mix has begun along my route home.
I leave minutes after I get off the air and head for home. It's already uncomfortably cold. And my windshield is already showing sprinkles. This increases after I travel the world longest bridge over a single body of water, and by the time I'm home I can feel the tiny granules of sleet and a bit of snow on my skin. Time to begin my defense against the weather.
I didn't stop for a restaurant dinner along the way. When I get home, I make a sandwich of the Chisesi's deli-style roast beef round I bought on Saturday for just such a moment as this. If I had all the makings for a Philly cheese steak, I would have made that sandwich. But I was missing most of the ingredients--notably the cheese. Instead, I piled up the very thinly sliced beef onto the flattop grill, then laid it down on toasted 15-grain bread with a horseradish-and-mustard and chow-chow. It was almost a deli sandwich, and hearty enough to satisfy me.
This isn't the first time I've bought Chisesi's roast beef. It comes across to me as having the same general flavor profile as Chisesi's well-known and excellent ham. If I make it again, I'm going to make a mayonnaise especially for it.
It will be three days before we will get back into circulation. This is a winter storm the likes of which I don't remember from any time in the past. Now I know how the Millennials feel when they can't get out to a restaurant.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris January 18, 2018 13:01 in
