[title type="h5"]Friday, May 9, 2014.
Four Concurrent Celebrations.[/title]
It's Mary Leigh's twenty-second birthday. Her eternal lot is to share that celebration with Mother's Day. This time around, The Boy's college graduation is also in the mix.
On top of that, ML is engaged in building another of her monumental, original cakes for one of her best customers, and fighting the clock to get it done. She is sharing the kitchen with Mary Ann, who is beginning her preparations for the big party we will have at the Cool Water Ranch tomorrow.
[caption id="attachment_42339" align="alignleft" width="320"]
A merrily-made cake.[/caption]So it was that, at around eight this morning, Mary Ann suddenly burst out with an embarrassed birthday wish to our daughter. It had slipped her mind? Incredible! I did no better. When I came in to give her a birthday hug, she said, "Don't worry about it. I forgot it myself."
A large contingent of The Boy's family is in town, from Boston and Baltimore. They gather with us for dinner at Impastato's, The Boy's favorite New Orleans restaurant. His dad picks up the tab. I make the arrangements and dispense advice.
The visitors are welcomed to town by a frog-strangling rainstorm, which at its peak set off storm warning alerts on everybody's smart phone. (Now there's something new: a chorus of tornado warnings.) Impastato's is pretty busy, but not quite enough for Joe Impastato, who complained about the rain. On the other hand, he had soft-shell crabs for us. People who live in the Northeast are familiar with soft-shells, which are rare and very expensive there. It amazes a few people that they can get two of them on a single plate, at the price of almost any other entree. How lucky we are to be able to eat this delicacy routinely!
The fourth quadrant of the party is ruled by Jude and his girlfriend Suzanne. She is now wearing an engagement ring. It's the first time they've been in town since that announcement.
So there is much to discuss at this table. But I heard nothing to top what the guy next to me told me. He and his wife lived for many years next door to The Boy's family. They were the kind of neighbors who would take the kids in if the parents were running a little late or had an appointment. They were almost like family.
From this elderly gentleman I learned that one must have a special driver's license to drive a racecar. How did he know? Because he himself is (not was) a fully licensed Formula One driver. "He drives like one, too," his wife said.
[divider type=""]
[title type="h5"]Saturday, May 10, 2014.
Thanksgiving In May.[/title]
The quadripartite conviviality of birthday, graduation, engagement and Mother's Day brings twenty-five people to the Cool Water Ranch this afternoon. Mary Ann, who in her capacity as Honored Mother decrees that this will be a loose, informal affair. That will not keep it from including far too much food. Multiple pans of jambalaya, a pot of smoked chicken gumbo, stuffed artichokes and muffulettas lead the bill.
Jude, Suzanne and I are left alone at home while the Marys and The Boy attend his baccalaureate ceremonies in town. Nothing could have made me happier. Instead of taking constant orders from MA while I'm trying to do my share of the heavy cooking, all of her disdain for my work will come at one time, as the guests arrive.
I send Jude and Suzanne off to pick up tables and chairs, and I get to work on the roux phase of the gumbo. (MA was nice enough to make the stock and bone the chicken meat last night.) Also on my gumbo list is grilling boudin and andouille. I need that to happen faster than it did, because I also have a whole beef tenderloin to roast out there.
Is it too much to ask that my proudest man-cooking gadget--the Big Green Egg--should be left exclusively to me? Mary Ann thinks she knows how to make it work, but she doesn't. After watching first the sausages and then the tenderloin grill at half normal speed, I realize it's because whoever used it last (I know who, but it's Mother's Day) failed to stir up the ashes so they wouldn't block the air from getting into the firebox.
So the tenderloin took an hour and a half rather than about forty-five minutes. But when it is served--on slices of poor-boy bread spread with a horseradish mayonnaise I whomped up--everybody loves it. Including Mary Ann. Who yesterday engaged me in argument as to whether I should wet-roast a round or a chuck for roast beef poor boys instead. My thinking is that with the dense, dark-roux gumbo, that flavor and texture is already taken care of.
Her acceptance of my thoughts on the beef left me wide open for a criticism I knew was inevitable. Mary Ann loves stuffed artichokes. I don't. Why she would leave this job to me, I don't know. But t was utterly unsatisfactory to her, and she did the whole job that Jude and Suzanne and I had done, so it would be the way her mother made it. (And did I mention it's Mother's Day?)
The store was out of White Lily self-rising flour, the best for making biscuits. That's sort of what I am up to with the off-brand flour (the bag says all kinds of stuff about being Southern, but I'll never buy it again). Mary Ann ordered strawberry shortcakes, which in its most authetic form are biscuits (a shortbread) with a bit of sugar in the dough.
I had another problem. No Louisiana strawberries. Seems I saw them at the fruit stand last week, but none were there (or anywhere else) today. California, here I come. Added a little extra sugar to the whipped cream to make up for the dryness of the berries. All these measure worked. The shortcakes were much liked.
We had a nice bunch of guests, most of whom hit it off well. Jude and Suzanne are lively conversationalists, and so are his godparents Oliver and Carolyn Kluna. It's a tradition in our family that we don't outgrow our marraines and parrains. The party went on until well after dark. And even by then, hardly anyone touched the stuffed artichokes.
