Friday, October 30, 2015.
Unreviewable Club Dinner.
Vic and Barbara Giancola are frequent Eat Club diners and travelers, and fun to hang with. They invited MA and I to dinner at the Chateau Country Club in Kenner, about which I am limited in my writing, because it's a private club. One topic I can mention is that Chef Dennis Hutley has been in the kitchen there for several years. He was the owner of the extinct Le Parvenu in old-town Kenner, where he showed his skills as excellent. Before that, he was chef de cuisine at the even better (but equally extinct) Versailles, Chef Gunter Preuss's five-star restaurant on St. Charles Avenue.
I think it's also fair for me to say that the superb jazz pianist Rich Ladner plays in the dining room. Richie has noodled at the keyboard in similar venues for decades around town. He permitted Barbara and me to sing a couple of duets.
On my way in, while maneuvering my way into a parking space that I approached from the wrong angle, I made the gears grind for a second. But this is after the three-week, $1600 repair I just had done to my my old PT Cruiser! Get a grip on yourself, Tom. Rattling the gearteeth because I didn't have the clutch in all the way is something I've done in every car I've ever owned. Is it a normal result of aging to worry about every little thing, including those that never bothered me before?
It rains most of the way home. This weekend, we are supposed to get something like five or six inches of rainfall. The weather has been different this year. I think this increases our chances for a fun snowfall sometime around January.
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Saturday, October 31, 2015.
Satsuma, Darkness Arrive.
The Marys have given me permission to adopt a kitten to fill the gap left by the heroic but gone Twinnery. Last Sunday, I filled out a long application that asked whether I would be a good cat owner. I think I have more than enough experience. I go to the St. Tammany Humane Society this morning to pick up Satsuma, a five-week-old kitten who in some ways resembles Twinnery (orange tabby, long tail, white mittens), and who in other ways doesn't (his coloring is a lighter shade, with a hint of brown).
Mary Ann warms up to Satsuma quickly. He is a very sweet little guy, already trusting us innately and rubbing up against our ankles. He checks out the whole house, learning the map right away. He proves this when a loud crack of nearby lightning scares him into running from one end of the house to the other, directly into a cubbyhole in the bathroom where he spent the first couple of hours with us.
Mary Ann beats the storms to Ocean Springs, where she spends the evening with her brother and his granddaughter, who were having a Halloween party. Halloween literally came early this year, playing out last night, because the the threat of dangerous weather tonight. My radio show (back today after weeks of LSU football) was interrupted by four emergency notifications telling of tornadoes in the vicinity.
To dinner through the squalls to Saigon Pho, a year-old Vietnamese restaurant on Causeway Boulevard near the Walmart. I have tried to dine there for a couple of months, but I never found the place open. I got it right today--although, when I left at eight, I had to unlock the door to depart. Nothing new for Vietnamese places to close at around that time. Or maybe it was the weather.
I start with a very good summer roll, with lots of greenery wrapped with shrimp and rice noodles in a thick bundle of rice paper. Spicy peanut sauce for dipping.
Then some
bun with grilled beef. It fills a much larger bowl than I am accustomed to getting, with enough noodles for two people, lots of crunchy greens and vegetables. The meat component lacked something in vividness of flavor, but I can't say I didn't enjoy it.
I ask whether they have ice cream. Most Asian restaurants do, even if it's not on the menu. Sometimes the flavors are green tea and fermented red bean (different bean from the local kind), but that's okay with me. The lady who seems to be the owner says that she does have ice cream, but that she is not selling it. She gives me a couple of scoops of an unidentifiable flavor, but that works for me, and indeed there is no charge. Did she pierce my secret identity? Is my picture posted in the kitchen? That may seem egotistical to suppose, but indeed I have seen my photo in a number of Asian restaurants when the door swings open.
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Sunday, November 1, 2015.
De-Lighted, No End.
During one of the half-dozen stops I made during my errands yesterday, somebody backed into my PT Cruiser. I guess he (another assumption) could have gone forward to put the small dent into the rear, driver-side fender, and to crack the red and yellow lens in half, but somehow this seems like a reverse job to me. I didn't notice it until I got home last evening.
I check with Auto Zone and they say they will have a new lens for me by Wednesday, for $71. But the rain keeps stepping up, becoming a serious deluge overnight. I am kept awake by the image of water rolling into the gap where the taillight used to be, filling the inside of the fender, and from there flowing through the rest of the car. This keeps me awake well into the wee hours, at which time I grab an umbrella and some trash bags to cover up the hole. Had it not been so dark, I would have seen that the fender is open at the bottom. Any rainwater that falls into the gap continues on to the ground. No problem, after all.
Mary Ann wonders how the cat Satsuma will react to the inevitable meeting with Barry the Barricade, our large but very mellow German shepherd. Barry knows how to negotiate with cats. Our now-eldest cat Tumbler has been Barry's pet for years. He nibbles the back of Tumbler's neck and licks her all over. Tumbler seems to like it.
Satsuma's first encounter with Barry brings forth raised hackles, arched back, hissing and swatting with sharp claws. But after a couple of hours the two are nose-to-nose, checking each other out. This is a very cute, sweet kitten we have adopted. Mary Ann thinks that I should go back to the Humane Society and get Satsuma's brother.
I have been asked to judge a cookoff in Covington. It's a fundraiser for the Children's Advocacy Center and Hope House, an organization that offers a means by which abused children can escape their situations, and have legal help to put an end to their plight.
The event is called "Men Can Cook." Of course they can, and they do. Some twenty restaurants work with amateur cooks to present one of the better grazing events I've attended in awhile. Five of the dishes are strikingly excellent. The one that surprised me the most was what looked like a king cake, filled with crawfish stew and topped with purple, green and gold. But the topping isn't sweet: it's colored parmesan cheese. All this is set in puff pastry. It looked and sounded like a pure gimmick, but the flavor was so good that it was in a tie for first place in my scoring. (The other side of the even-steven was Pat Gallagher's great mixed grill of steak, peppers, onions, mushrooms, and such.
Another great dish came from the Tchefuncte Country Club, which seared and marinated a chuck mock filet, then topped with a variation on chimichurri. New Orleans Food and Spirits did the impossible: it served a shrimp Creole that I actually liked. The magic touch: making it with as much catfish as shrimp, and a fairly high pepper level.
The rain was just about done when I left. I hope nobody noticed that the place where my right taillight should have been was covered by translucent red sheeting. All I need is a cardboard "License Applied For" sign in my rear window.
When I arrive home, the power is out. I call the power company and learn that a car ran into a pole about a mile from us, and that they're working on it. This sounded like an all-nighter. What can one do but go to bed? But the lights came on just as I was slipping into sleep. It's only eight o'clock, so I get to work, but can't seem to make any headway. One can't write just any old time.
