Diary 3/13-14/14: Got Gumbo? Do We Ever. Mother's.

[title type="h5"]Thursday, March 13, 2014. Got Gumbo. A Little Too Much Gumbo. [/title] Some twenty years ago the United Way organized a gumbo cookoff among a number of New Orleans restaurants, most of them downtown. The event was a bigger success than expected, and that was enough for it to claim a spot on the local calendar of culinary events. I was a judge for that first running, and anumber of them since then, although it seems that the experience of having me there was enough for them to let a few years pass before calling on me again. I was back again this year, sitting between Poppy Tooker and my longtime friend Stu Barash. Stu has a long career in the travel business, and is interested enough in food that he's called my radio show dozens of times over the years. He met his wife through a succession of calls she made to my radio show that resulted in a date at Smith and Wollensky. Good date: they're still together, over a decade later. Mary Ann is a gumbo lover and wanted to attend the event. She should have been a judge, but she has too low a threshold for the unusual. Not that this would have been a problem today. The gumbos we were fed included several with offbeat touches. Duck cracklings, kale, bowls made of bread, beans and vegan ingredients, to name a few. Even so, the flavors were for the most part conventional. The good ones were very good, but no new ground was broken. And there were some bad ones. Stu and I mutually decided that the sausage we found in one of them was a cheap brand of breakfast pork sausage, for example. About a third of the entries had over-the-top levels of salt or pepper or both. To tell the truth, I thought the best thing I ate all night was a cherry custard a restaurant offered as a dessert. The event went on longer than I expected (we had over twenty gumbos to sample). Mary Ann left early. I hoofed the eight blocks back to the radio station, where my car was parked. It was surprisingly rough going, because the city was jammed with visitors--orthopedic surgeons, I learned later. All the restaurants I passed were filled. The oyster bars in particular were having a very good night. I was hoping to be finished with my gumbo-tasing duties early enough to be able to record some of the commercials I must have done before we leave town on Saturday. No such luck. It was almost nine o'clock, and I didn't have the mental energy to undertake that project. I just headed home. [divider type=""] [title type="h5"]Friday, March 14, 2014. Mother's. Spots. [/title] One of the unique qualities of my office at the radio station is that, with a forty-five-degree rotation of my desk chair, I have a bird's-eye view of the entrance of Mother's, the venerable poor boy sandwich joint across Poydras Street. After I got off thei air at three, I saw that despite the large number of visitors in town there was no line at Mother's. So I repaired there for lunch. During the two multi-year periods in my twenties when I worked around the corner from Mother's, I was in there all the time. It's funny that with the radio station so nearby, it's been years since my last sampling of their food. I never felt the need, because Mother's has changed so little in all those years. Which included a long time with both sets of owners, the original Landry family, then Jerry Amato. This time, there was a change. I got my usual sandwich: baked ham with debris. All the pieces were as they always had been. The custom-made bread, a little coarser than the standard. The mix of shredded cabbage, pickles, mayonnaise and both common isotopes of mustard. The light gravy riddled with chips and shreds of beef from the slicing. But one thing was wrong. The ham had not been baked long enough. This is a matter on which I am keen. Although I love Chisesi's VIP ham (it's sort of what Mother's uses, although not exactly) right out of the deli case, cold and cured, I also have a taste for the baked version. When a ham is baked, it loses that wiggly, translucent quality and becomes firm, with a change and intensification of flavor. That baked-ham taste and texture was not to be found in the sandwich I had. And I had a big one, even though it was really a small one. (Your choices are a whole sandwich or two-third of one. I ordered the latter, and could only eat half of that befor my appetite ran out.) The first explanation I thought of for the evolution of the ham is that Jerry Amato has been ill in the recent past. Good news: he recently underwent a double transplant--liver and kidney--and he is recovering well. Mother's catches a lot of flak for the many tourists it attracts. But it does so honestly. Really, not much has changed since the days when the customers were almost all local regulars. And people like me write about it, both here and in the places from which visitors come. You could do a lot worse than eat at Mother's when you visit New Orleans. And even though I haven't eaten at Mother's in a long time, no fewer than four staffers recognized me and came over to say hello. That doesn't happen in real tourist traps. I started grinding out my commercials at around four. These are the ones that I would ordinarily perform live during the show. While I'm away, they must be available in recorded form. I can't decide whether it's more time-efficient to write scripts and read them or to ad-lib, then cut the result down to size. The funny thing is that while I breeze through ad-lib spots while I'm on the air live, I find it difficult to be as glip when it's just the microphone listening. I decided to ad-lib. The first one took twenty minutes. Not good, because I had over a dozen to record. But the job got easier as I went along. Still, I didn't finish until after nine. I love doing radio, but there are parts of it I hate. This particular tasl job is number one on that list. It's bad enough that it has at times made me decide I'd rather skip the vacation. Which is sick. At this point I have to remind myself that I'm doing what I love, and that I am well paid for it. And that before I got my radio career going, I would have done anything to do what I am cursing now. But that's not all I had to do. When on vacation, I keep feeding new material to my NOMenu.com subscribers, if at a slacker pace than usual. So, while I packed my bags, the computer was making copies of the current files I need to keep publishing. I had put a lot of thought into this and have done it many times in the past. What could go wrong? I wouldn't know for a few days. [title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]