Sunday, January 8, 2017.
Forks 'n' Corks With ML.
Our daughter Mary Leigh crossed the lake to have Sunday brunch with MA and me. How could we say no? Even though I know, O patient reader of these words, that I am reporting far too often about North Shore restaurants during these holiday weeks. But if I don't have to cross the Causeway, I don't.
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Deviled eggs at Forks And Corks.[/caption]
Forks & Corks in the Terra Bella section of Covington's suburbs has about a fifty-fifty split of its menu between the frankly brunchy items and the New Orleans gourmet bistro eats. I have two egg dishes. The first is an appetizer big enough for perhaps as many as four: three whole deviled eggs, each cut into halves. I ask for a side of remoulade sauce to recapitulate an old Creole specialty. The extinct Maylie's made this especially well, with a sharp, red-brown remoulade sauce. This one implies the mayonnaise-based white remoulade, which seems to be taking over the remoulade market in recent years. It's very good, but filling (the Marys weren't interested)
The entree could be called "eggs Clemenceau." Poached eggs with hollandaise (like 80 percent of brunch dishes) tower over a few dozen cubes of potatoes, carrots, celery, peppers, and a few other vegetables. Very good.
Mary Ann buys the fish special, a large flounder fillet with a crawfish cream sauce. I had a few of those mudbugs on my plate too. The crawfish season seems to have begun, although the tails look as though they were wearing corsets. We're a long way from the shank of the crawfish season.
It's still very cold outside. We awakened to another twenty-five-degree reading this morning. The pretty blue flowers on a line of weeds next to our road are now dead. What trees still have bright colors will now go over to a decidedly drab brown, and fall off in a few days. And then, three months later, we will remove the Christmas tree from the living room.
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Monday, January 9, 2017.
NOFS.
No freeze last night. By noon, when Mary Ann and I meet up for lunch at New Orleans Food and Spirits (salad for her, pecan catfish with a side of red beans for me. This is as routine as it gets for us, and yet we're not tired of it. Both beans and catfish are always excellent and cheap, too.
I'm glad that NPAS resumed rehearsal tonight, after several weeks off. It's a limited event, attended only by a dozen or so solo musicians who will play for a special dinner at Beau Chene this coming Saturday. Our theme is cabaret music, and that's right up my alley.
I will be singing "Misty." That's not only a great song (do I have to say that it was Johnny Mathis's big hit in 1960?), but it rings a bell for anyone who ever worked in radio. The movie "Play Misty For Me" depicts Clint Eastwood as a disk jockey stalked by a female fan obsessed with him. This is no mere movie plot, but something that really does happen a good deal in radio.
I don't come across as a sexy guy (to put it mildly), yet there were three times the Misty story played for me. One of the women was an irrational nutbar. The other two disappeared when they got a look at me. (I have a face for radio.) On the other hand, Mary Ann--who was on the radio for years before we met--had her share of cranks eager to see her or talk to her in private. This is easy to understand, given MA's fabulous good looks and alluring radio voice.
In singing the song, I have my usual problem installing the first notes in my head. Our second-chair conductor Amy has a good solution. The pianist plays a dozen or so notes, and I hum along. When it's time for me to get going, I'm on the note.
It's so much easier to sing in the shower.
