[title type="h5"]Friday, February 28, 2013.[/title]
Mary Ann's sister Colleen, who all her life has loved going to Mardi Gras parades, is in town for the weekend from Seattle. This means I will not see much of Mary Ann for the next few days. She is very tight with her six siblings. The bunch of them are not intolerant of spouses (although those folks were at one time referred to as "The Outsiders Club"), but our orbit is well outside that of the Insiders.
Mary Leigh and The Boy also have predictable Carnival duties. No problem: I have plenty enough to keep me busy at home. And the weather is nice enough for an extra-long walk, although many parts of my trail are interrupted by puddles.
We have several good Thai restaurants on the North Shore, but I rarely dine in them because the Marys have not embraced the cuisine yet. But they're not here, so I could sup at the Thai Spice with a clear conscience. First hot and sour soup (different, but not completely, from the Chinese version). Then red curry with pork. I asked to have it made three-stars hot. The stars are a universal code among Thai restaurants for the possible pepper levels. Here's how it goes:
[title type="h5"]* = Mild
** = Hot
*** = Extra Hot
**** = Thai Hot[/title]
The implication of the last one is that only a Thai person could possibly endure its heat. My experience in the better places--the ones that take one's order seriously--is that this is true. The waiter (I think he's also the owner) of the Thai Spice was concerned that three stars might be too much for me. He kept checking back, noting that my brow and scant head of hear were getting wet with perspiration. The pepper was indeed at the outer threshold, which is just the way I like it.
[caption id="attachment_41496" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Red curry (I know it looks green, but it had the red curry taste) at Thai Spice.
[/caption]
These people come closer to the Thai ways of doing things than most of their competitors. This red curry, for example, was really a soup. But that's how it is in Thailand.
Back home, I got into the editing of the interview we staged at Parkway Poor Boys last week. This new feature for the website would take six hours to edit, bringing down an hour-long interview to eighteen minutes. Okay, so this one was a learning exercise. I recalled how difficult it would have been in the Age Of Tape Recording. That's how I did work like this for about twenty years, before everything went digital. What a huge advance!
I was still grinding the snippets out when Mary Ann came home with Colleen around midnight. They reported that a float in one of the parades made a parody of the Brennan's on Royal Street Massacree late last year. The float depicted Ted Brennan and Ralph Brennan, the latter surrounded by bags of money. That sounded a bit insensitive to me.
[title type="h5"]Thai Spice. Covington: 1531 US 190. 985-809-6483. [/title]
[title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris March 07, 2014 13:01 in
