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Tuesday, April 29, 2014. The Inevitable Twenty-Four-Hour Homebound.
I'll do this in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time). When we walked off the Eurodam, it was 7:30 UTC. The first of our three flights (Rome to Amsterdam; how the latter became involved is unknown) lifted off at noon. The transatlantic crossing to Atlanta left late from Amsterdam at 16:28 UTC. It featured a screen that was unusable for me, a pretty good dinner (!) of chicken with beans in a cream sauce, with cheesecake for dessert. A few hours later, an unnecessary snack of pizza, pasta salad, and fruit salad arrived. It was punctuated by forty-five minutes of turbulence just south of Hudson Bay in Canada. We were there because a massive storm system--spawning tornadoes with death tolls in northern Alabama and Mississippi--made the usual route uncomfortable.
After a few goofy misdirections involving security in Atlanta, we boarded our final flight at to Atlanta. Rough air from gate to gate. No drinks or pretzels were possible. Lightning flashed in the distance. It almost kept me awake. We arrived at Louis Armstrong at around 11:30 p.m. New Orleans time--04:30 UTC. The drive to Abita Springs and our lonely, gleeful pets took another hour. We turned the key to enter our home at 05:30 UTC, for a total of 22 hours. That is pretty good time. Only once before had a return from the continent taken less than a full twenty-four hours of constant travel.
It's moments like this when I wonder whether it's all worth it. But everybody has that feeling at the end of a longish vacation. I am happy to be back, but dread the onset of tomorrow.
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Wednesday, April 30, 2014. Back In The Saddle.
Dave Cohen, the news director of WWL Radio, stopped me in the hallway. He said that the brief article on the WWL website that explains who I am and when I'm on the air had lately spent a suspicious amount of time in the top ten most visited articles on the WWL website. That site contains too much news, sports, weather, and other dynamic data for my static bio page to attract much attention. Dave's theory: I was gone so long on vacation that a lot of people wondered whether a) I were still alive or 2) I'd been fired. Or maybe they just missed me. Naah. My newsletter readers must be wondering the same things. Today made two consecutive days with no full newsletter from my website. Writing was impossible on the twenty-two-hour return trip from Rome, let alone building out the pages involved. I had to sleep a little late today to make up for not sleeping at all yesterday. After the show, I stretched out on the floor in my office and slept again for almost two hours. Only then could I write and record the four commercials waiting for me. During the show, nobody said that I was sounding incoherent, but I would advise any listener to today's program to take anything they heard me say with a grain of salt. [caption id="attachment_36626" align="alignleft" width="360"]
Chef Greg Picolo, who co-hosted the radio show in my absence.[/caption]To dinner at Redemption. Their chef Greg Picolo guest-hosted the show one of the days I was away. He's a good talker, but he had never led a radio show. He told his boss Maria DeLaune that he could hardly sleep for worrying about how he would fill three hours. I don't think it helped for me to tell him that I go through that every day.
Giving forth three hours a day of listenable talk is harder than most guest hosts realize. But it still isn't nearly the job that cheffing, waiting, and managing in a restaurant is. That's real work.
My family has a long-standing tradition of having a meal of either oysters, red beans and rice, or both once we return from a trip. Sometimes we get it on the way home from the airport, so eager are we to plug back into our sacred culinary traditions. Couldn't do that at midnight last night. We did, however, look to see whether anyplace were open. Mary Ann was the hungry one.
Redemption is not the place for red beans and rice. I don't think they're even open on Monday. But Maria was bragging on the oysters they picked up this morning, big and meaty and delicious. What's more, today is the last day that lacks an "R" in the month column. So I had eight big, cornmeal coated, fried oysters with a light ravigote sauce on the side. Just right!
By the way, I ignore the whole "R" matter. Oysters are running late because of the cooler-than-normal weather. Even when they don't, I eat them through the whole summer.
After that, the waiter strongly advised me to try the soup du jour. One of the most offbeat such items I've ever encountered, this was made with slow-smoked duck and sun-dried cherries, among other things. Although it had a little rox, it was far from being a gumbo. The cherry flavor was deep in the background, intriguing without being puzzling. I thought it would have been better lightened up a touch, but that was not a big enough issue to even mention to the chef--lest I interrupt his usual fun banter.
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Maria DeLaune, the proprietor of Redemption.[/caption]
The entree was a nice slab of grouper, coated (but not bloated) with a cream sauce studded with tobiko. That's the reddish caviar you get in or on sushi rolls. "I like the way it adds color, a little bit of salt, and a little bit of fish flavor," Chef Greg said. So did I. This would be hard to improve upon, but they did it, with a risotto with crabmeat underneath the fish. I disdain the layering of fish over other soft food items (rice, in this scase), but the flavors and the richness were so fine that one would have to be looking for things to complain about to take this argument any farther.
Maria had an unusual sweet Spanish wine that came across like a late-harvest, but was oxidized like a sherry. A new one on me. What I most remember about it is that it was perfect with the pistachio cheesecake Greg thought I should have for dessert. It was perfect in more ways than one. It reminded me a lot of the desserts we ate during the past ten days in Italy. The evening, then, was a lovely meeting of the barely past with the now.
Redemption. Mid-City: 3835 Iberville St. 504-309-3570.
[title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]