[title type="h5"]Thursday, March 5, 2015.
Procuring Beef Consommé.[/title]
It feels really funny for just Mary Ann and me to be home without Mary Leigh around. It's much more peculiar than my being home alone. After nineteen years by myself, I can just shift into my familiar, comfortable bachelor routine, and that's that.
Mary Ann never really had that chance. She came straight from her parents' home (where two of her six siblings still lived) to my house. It wasn't long before Jude was born, and our pattern was set for the next quarter century. Now that we are in a new era, Mary Ann and I have not really learned how to live a deux just yet.
I did the show from home today, because, frankly, I didn't want to drive into town in the extreme cold (twenties last night).
MA and I go for dinner to Tchoupstix, mainly for a reason not related to our hunger of the moment. This Sunday, my preparation for The Procedure requires me to get by on nothing but clear liquids. The only real food on the approved list is beef consommé. Now there's something we don't see in restaurants much. I wonder why. A well-made consommé, served hot and with a little flavor of Cognac, is a delicious soup. The last time I had it was in a big wine dinner some thirty years ago, at the Sazerac. I can remember it was on the menu at Antoine's, in both forms: hot consommé as described above, and chilled consommé, which is jellied on account of its large amount of beef gelatin. The latter is not especially appealing, and is nearly extinct in restaurants worldwide.
When you first sit down at Tchoupstix, they bring you an Asian-style clear soup with rice noodles and mushrooms as an amuse-bouche. I ask them to sell me a quart of the broth only, which qualifies as a consommé. It's not the best I've ever had, but I like it well enough that when we go there, MA passes her bowl over to me and I eat (drink?) it down. Now I am set for one "meal" this Sunday.
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Ramen noodles at Tchoupstix.[/caption]
We eat for today, too. Mary Ann likes the ramen noodles with vegetables, and that's what she gets, for the third or fourth time. I don't understand the appeal of ramen, so I'm glad she does it.
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Mongolian beef.[/caption]
Looking for something new, I find a Mongolian skirt steak. The waitress strongly urges this upon me. The presentation is grand, with a tower of tempura-fried onion rings on the left, and fanned-out slices of beef in a peppery sauce with cabbage and green onions on the right. The flavor is very satisfying, but there's a problem. Skirt steak is one of those cuts which, if it is not cut thinly across the grain, is very chewy.
Word of that issue gets back to the kitchen, which reacts a little more apologetically than they needed to. This was not a disaster dish--just one that needs a little more polish.
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Custard with five-spice powder.[/caption]
Tchoupstix has a very good dessert, one that comes from Pardo's next door. It's a classic caramel custard flavored with five-spice powder. That is wonderful, a just-different-enough rendering of a very familiar dessert. The place gets a little better every time we go.
[title type="h5"]Tchoupstix. Covington: 69305 LA Hwy 21. 985-892-0852.[/title]
