Monday, April 18, 2016.
Three Kinds Of Beans, With Spam.
Back to the grind, with the extra grit of something like 600 e-mails. About half of this comes from spammers who send me ten or fifteen copies of the same message. I have tried and tried to intercept them without my having to delete them one at a time. If you're the first to give me a working solution for that, I'll give you two years free subscription to the New Orleans Menu Daily Five-Star Edition.
Since I had my weekly red beans yesterday at the Airport Dooky Chase, I get a replacement. It's La Carreta--the one on Causeway Boulevard near Wal-Mart. The menus for this location and the one in Mandeville seem to be identical, but they could just as well be totally different restaurants. My lunch today is a study in that. The great bean soup in Mandeville is replaced by an equally good but totally different black bean soup in Covington. The avocado salad with cilantro vinaigrette is similar at both places, but presented differently in twice the size. (I don't know how I finished this one.) And the enchiladas in Covington are better.
It all adds up to too much food. But I don't eat dinner on Mondays, because it goofs up my breathing regimen both in the radio show and during the chorus rehearsal afterwards.
In the latter, we are learning what I am finding to be very difficult music. It's all historic American music of many different genres. I never thought that Stephen Foster would be so challenging to sing. But difficulty is what I am here for. If it were easy, it wouldn't be so stimulating.
When I get home, I start working on my Jazz Festival dining guide. I will have it ready for the day before the big event begins Friday.
Making up this list is nostalgic for me. For a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my typesetting shop produced the Jazz Festival program--a thick magazine. I also wrote parts of it, including the food guide I still write for my own publication. Accomplishing all that was much more complicated than it would be today. We were still in the cut-and-paste era--and I don't mean with a Control-V command. The tools were adhesive wax, X-acto knives, border tape, T-squares and triangles. It took weeks, and kept me up nights until two or three in the morning.
La Carreta. Covington: 812 Hyw 190. 985-400-5202.
