Tuesday, November 8, 2016.
Dinner With Andrea.
Almost as long as my radio show has been on the air, Chef Andrea Apuzzo--owner of Andrea's Restaurant in Metairie--has been a sponsor. In the early days, commercials on the show often consisted of phone conversations with the chefs as to what was going on in their restaurants that day. This soon got difficult, because back then I had no producer, and had to assemble the electronic pieces myself while trying to keep a conversation going at the same time. Only Andrea was willing to call in on his own initiative and wait on hold until I could get to him.
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Dining room @ Andrea's.[/caption]Those call-in spots for Andrea's are still running on the Food Show. They go on much longer than standard spots. Left to his own devices, Andrea would keep talking (he hardly ever takes a breath) until he ran out of things to say. Which can be a long time. It's so pervasive that listeners have the feeling that the spots are daily. In fact, they only run twice a week.
Every now and then, Andrea's oration includes something that sounds delicious. Today's was a risotto with crabmeat and shrimp. He created this some twenty years ago, when he opened a short-lived branch in the French Quarter. I remember this risotto as excellent, so I thought I'd revisit the dish. It was as good as I recalled, with a lot of crabmeat and a few large, pretty shrimp. The Arborio rice had the little bit on crunch in the centers of the grains that makes a well-made risotto good.
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Chef Andrea with some fresh pompano.[/caption]
While I was working on that, Andrea pulled a few whole pompanos out of his refrigerator. He gave me my pick of them, then went back and pan-broiled my half of the selected fish. This was as large a pompano as I've seen in awhile, and it lived up to its role in my eating history as my favorite fish species.
It was a very slow night at Andrea's, and Andrea had plenty of time to sit down with me and shoot the breeze. We spoke about our relative health. He and I are almost exactly the same age. (He's about three weeks older than I am.) We are both watching our weight. He had a heart attack a few years ago, but you'd never know that to watch him. He's always had the energy of three normal people. We each have a beautiful woman in our lives. We talk about our exercise regimens. Pretty boring stuff. After a couple of hours, we part. We will always be friends, especially if his food is as good is it was tonight next time.
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Wednesday, November 9, 2016.
Fireworks.
Mary Ann spent last evening with some good friends of ours. Their son and our son Jude were in the same Scout group for ten years, with parents who participated as much as the boys did. Magic days.
They were watched the election results. When the results became clear, our friends found fireworks left over from Scouting events of long ago, and started shooting them off. They were soon followed in that display by neighbors.
At home, I awakened at around three-thirty a.m. and turned on the radio. I didn't have to listen long. A CBS reporter said: ". . . and so Hillary Clinton and her supporters leave their headquarters and try to figure out what went wrong." I turned the radio off and tried to get back to sleep.
Much later, Mary Ann called me as I entered the radio studio. She is in town and wants to have dinner with our friend Maria. It's her birthday, and we take her out to Restaurant Rebirth, which she likes a lot. So do we.
En route to the Warehouse District eatery, we encounter a set-to between a parking officer and someone who was about to have a boot put on his car. This person is caught between the booter and us, and for a minute it looked as if the person is about to hit our car. The bootee had already run over the boot--not the smartest move.
We get out of there and take Mary Ann's car to the radio station's parking garage. Her own car will be booted if the booters see it on the street.
Maria brought a bottle of Champagne to celebrate her birthday. It is "Femme," the tete de cuvee of the Champagne house Duval-Leroy. I haven't encountered Femme in a long time, but I remember it well. The base of the bottle is larger than standard, spreading out from the neck to form emphatic curves. Any man who has ever put his hands around a woman's waist will recognize the shape by touch alone. It's certainly well named.
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A single crab claw, with a lot of stuffing and crabmeat.[/caption]
We start with an amuse bouche of one crab claw, but with a large clump of the stuffing. The women get chicken-andouille gumbo while I disassemble a quail stuffed with andouille. (I keep coming back with increasing certainty that eating a quail is too much work.
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Quail with kale. [/caption]
The entrees include a mammoth slab of bison ribeye steak. The flavor is excellent, and the sauce--chimichurri, which is sort of the pesto of Mexico--gives it a good tang. The steak itself requires a bit of chewing, but that is a hallmark of bison, which has much less fat than a cow does.
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Bison ribeye steak.[/caption]
The conversations at our table and all the others on the same subject, one I don't pursue in this diary.
Restaurant Rebirth. Warehouse District & Center City: 857 Fulton St. 504-522-6863.
