[title type="h5"]Saturday, March 8, 2013.[/title]
The radio show went into a half-hour of overtime today. I use that word "overtime" not because I get paid anything extra for doing it, but for the sports reference. Basketball games move everything around, especially my program. As always, we were just picking up momentum when the show ended. I wish people would call when it first comes on the air. I know why they don't: they're not even there.
Dinnertime rolled around at exactly the moment that the Marys and The Boy showed up at the ranch. Someone said Zea, and suddenly there we were. I was all for it, because the annual Seafood Menu (the secular name for what used to be called the Lenten Menu) was in place. This is Zea's original seasonal selection, one which was so successful from the outset that they started devising special dishes for other times of the year, too.
The best dish on the Seafood Menu is Asian fried oysters. Fried oysters? How much better can that be than the standard crispy article? Quite a bit better, indeed. That was first proved by the invention of oysters Foch at Antoine's a hundred years ago. The Zea take is to encrust the oysters with panko bread cumbers, then to wet them down a little with a translucent sweet-heat sauce and enough aromatic spices to make it unique.
[caption id="attachment_41615" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Asian oysters at Zea.
[/caption]
They were getting $13.50 for a row of a half-dozen of these things this year. It struck me as a little high until I thought about the wholesale price of oysters, which because of various market forces (most of them triggered by the BP oil spill) are higher than most of us are quite accustomed to now. Still well worth it for this remarkable dish, which requires very large oysters for its making. That's what Chef Greg Reggio says, anyway, when I ask why the dish isn't a perennial.
I can never get enough oysters, so I started the meal with the oyster-artichoke soup--another item from the Seafood Menu. The Marys and The Boy all ate their usual salads with chicken on top. None of them like oysters that much, although Mary Leigh is always interested in the sauces that come with oysters. She liked this one, but how could anyone not?
I couldn't stand the idea of going home, which would inevitably put me in front of my computer, tweaking the website, as I do with what feels like every spare second of my life. So we went to a movie. "Monuments Men" is a George Clooney-produced (he starred in it, too) rendition of a true World War II story--one that has not often been told because at first thought it seems insignificant, compared with the other atrocities of that era. The mission Clooney and friends undertook was to save the art that was being destroyed by the retreating Nazis. I've seen tighter movies--a defter hand in the editing room would have helped--but the story was interesting and well presented.
Throughout the film, the characters kept having to say that saving all these masterpieces was indeed worth the deaths of a few soldiers involved in the effort. (Only two, as it turned out.) But I understand their problem. I hesitate to say in these very words that I agree with them, for fear a reader will ask how any piece of art could be worth a human life.
[divider type=""]
[title type="h5"]Sunday, March 9, 2014.
Brunch With The Scotts.[/title]
March forward--fall out. Isn't that the clue to setting clocks for Daylight Saving Time? Whatever, it's welcome, although I'll bet Mary Leigh won't be happy about it when she awakens in the dark to head off to her pastry-chef job this week.
Mary Ann invited me to brunch this morning at The Scotts', the coffee bar and tapas bistro operated by two guys names Scott. They were both there this morning, along with three of their dogs, ranging from cat-sized to Dalmatian-scale. Each was in my lap at one time or another. (The dogs, I mean.)
[caption id="attachment_41616" align="alignleft" width="320"]
Grillades and grits.
[/caption]The Scotts' started as a coffeehouse, but the space--in a hundred-year-old former bank in the center of Old Mandeville--begged for something more. So now they have two dinners a week, lunch, brunch on Sunday, and the coffee bar.
We must have set our clocks incorrectly. (Is it fall forward, spring aside? I forget.) All Scotts' had when we arrived were some pastries, slices of frittata, and coffee. The coffee worked for me: an ideal café au lait, made with a potent coffee and chicory blend. Most coffeehouses would sooner add garlic and sardines to their precious coffee than chicory, to hell with the two-hundred-year-old local tradition. Good for the Scotts.
[caption id="attachment_41618" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Grits and grillades at The Scotts'.[/caption]
I also fell for the fritatta, to stave off my hunger for the full twenty minutes before the official brunch menu went into force At which time Mary Ann had grillades and grits, and I a scramble of eggs, brie and bacon. All good, and enough that I didn't need to eat again the rest of the day.
And the sunny morning was beautiful, if in its chill more like Standard than Daylight season.
[title type="h5"]The Scotts' Coffee Bar. Mandeville: 201 Carroll St. 985-231-7632. [/title]
[title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris March 14, 2014 12:01 in
