Friday, December 16, 2016.
Zea's Soups.
Mary Ann and I have lunch at Zea for the first time in awhile. For the last couple of year, the most attractive portion of Zea's menu for me was its soups du jour. I like some much better than others. Today they have one of the good ones: a southwestern-style chicken soup with thin tortilla chips. I don't remember running into it before. I will remember that for future Fridays. Also good are the creamy tomato-basil soup on Sundays and the roasted corn bisque. I'm less enthusiastic about the red bean soup, which has more of a pureed texture than that of a soup. Or beans a la Monday.
Another new attraction of Zea is its fried catfish. Like many other restaurants around town, Zea has shifted from the Vietnamese catfish to locally wild-caught Des Allemands catfish. They serve it in small fillets--just the way I like them. They are very good today.
The NPAS Christmas-carol contingent is performing somewhere tonight, but I don't find out where until it's too late. They're also dressing in Dickensian attire, and I don't have such a costume handy. I'm very disappointed in not doing any organized singing for weeks.
Meanwhile, our sad Christmas tree has still not been decorated. Even though its bottom rests in sugar water, it releases a torrent of needles if you so much as touch it.
A nostalgic force within me makes me want to watch Johnny Carson after MA has gone to bed. I discover that Johnny's Tonight Show programs are available on DVDs for a hundred dollars a disk. Some free episodes are out there, and I watch an hour's worth of them. I am reassured that Johnny is as good as I remember. Early in my twenties, watching him one night for the first time since the sixties let me escape losing my mind. (Long story.)
I hope tomorrow isn't as dreary as today.
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Saturday, December 17,2016.
Dining With The Radio Guys @ Tomas Bistro.
A big day for a Saturday. I run my errands quickly enough to allow for a modest breakfast at Fat Spoon: scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuit, and grits.
Announcement to all basic breakfast places: if you don't start making grits with more going on in terms of flavor, texture, and general interest, grits will become nearly extinct (the way Creole cream cheese is nearly extinct already) within our lifetimes. A good model of what grits should be like is at Zea, with its roasted whole corn stirred into the grits with some other flavors.
I am on the radio for three hours commencing at noon. That show on WWL is incomparably easier for me than the weekday edition of The Food Show on WWWL. The main topic, as it always is this time of year, is about roasting prime ribs. Very timely. Prime rib is to Christmas what turkey is to Thanksgiving.
The show ends at three. I take an hour-long walk around the ranch. Mary Leigh's dog Bauer has been brought to the ranch against his will. Our long-standing ranch dogs Barry and Suzie are not hospitable, and are much larger than Bauer. A few crises erupt, but no blood is lost. Poor puppy!
The radio stations have their annual Christmas party at Tomas Bistro. Mary Ann never attends these, but I feel as if I should be there. I know only about a third of the attendees. That is normal for a radio group, since except for the sales people everybody works on a totally different schedule. The many on-air talents for the FM stations are especially incognito.
It's a good party, with the food prepared by Tommy Andrade's excellent kitchens. One of his chefs roasted a whole steamship roast beef round. I haven't seen one of those in a long time, but this is a chef who has been at the job for decades. He doesn't need to consult a recipe book to find out how to cook that massive chunk of cow. I'd like to see one of those young chefs who buy micro-greens, raw fish and wild mushrooms wrestle with a steamship.
The food is good and the company happy. Among the folks I know are Tommy Tucker, Scoot, John Volpe, Bob Frost, Doug Christian, and our Big Boss Chris Claus. Tommy Andrade--one of the most accomplished restaurateurs in New Orleans dining history, circulates around. Why did we not use Tomas Bistro as a place for the wedding receptions I've bought in the past few years?
No music, but there is a dance floor. A long time ago at one of these parties, we had karaoke. I think we ought to do that again someday.
Sunday, December 18,2016.
The Tree Is A Disaster.
The weather is terrible all day, with cold-front storms sweeping across the state and making visibility tough. It could be worse: Natchez is getting sleet. (Or, as they call it up north, "wintry mix.") All this is enough to keep me home. Except, of course, to go to St. Jane's for my singing gig. It was pouring when I left, but a passageway through the rain gave me just enough time to get to the church without getting drenched.
My afternoon fills itself with a few hours of tedious work on the inner workings of the web site. I have Christmas music on from an internet station whose selection of holiday music is both eclectic and almost entirely from the past. Forties to the seventies. It's so different from the usual holiday sounds that I will remember this day always.
Mary Ann and I finally trim the tree. I decide this is a good time to disentangle all the strings of lights I have accumulated since my first Christmas tree in 1971. Among these are some four dozen bubble lights, most of them no longer lighting, bubbling, or either. How low has this descended! There was a time when I could cover the tree with nothing but bubble lights.
I lay out one string of ten sockets and attempt to fill it with working bulbs only. This proves to be impossible. Each attempt to employ the final light either 1) makes that bulb pop and die, or b) cause an already-attached bulb to shuffle off this mortal coil or iii) makes a circuit breaker click off. Especially that last eventuality makes me decide that it's time to retire all this old stuff, if just to keep the house from burning down.
As I hang the lights on the tree, then remove them to try a different string and repeat the process, the tree's needles cascade onto the floor by handfuls. I stop. "We have reached the end of this chapter in my life," I say to MA, the dogs and the cats.
I pour myself a big glass of egg nog. I sit down and watch MA hang our enormous collection of ornaments. In our collection is one ornament that was on my parents' tree when we lived on Ursulines Street in 1956. That ornament--which looks like a disk-like spaceship built in New Orleans--has the honor of being the first ornament on the tree, and the last one off every year.
But this year I can't find it.
After all these years of towing pieces of my life unrelentingly, I and my collection of paraphernalia are breaking down. Who will step in to keep it all going?
