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Friday, June 12, 2015.
Rained In. Welcome Back Home At Acme.[/title]
Last night, a dashboard light in my car began to glow, alerting me to some problem with my ABS system. It was accompanied by a strange feeling when I hit the brake pedal. I pull off the road, turn the car off, turn it back on, and the problem is gone. It's really amazing how many machines respond to being rebooted.
I don't ignore brake issues. When I get home I go on line to find that the problem is probably not disastrous. (The warning light is yellow, not red.) Still, this is the brakes we're talking about. And it's raining too hard for me to do the Causeway in a potentially iffy car.
So I do the radio from home. Lord knows I have enough work to catch up with. (It would be a week before the Dining Diary for the cruise is fully edited and online, for instance. As you read this, the Cruise Diary is finished, and can be found here.)
Perhaps I can create a macro for this department--two or three keystrokes that will spit out this:
"After the radio show ends, the Marys and I go to dinner at the Acme Oyster House. Dozen grilled oysters, wedge salad with blue cheese for ML, house salad for me. MA ate nothing."
I would use it right now, and then add that having done so, we are now officially back in our day-to-day life after the sixteen days abroad.
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[title type="h5"]Saturday, June 13, 2015.
Welcome Back, Mexican Style.[/title]
And then I could compile another macro (see previous Dining Diary entry) that would automatically type these words:
"Its being the weekend, the Marys plan to sneak out to La Carreta in Mandeville, where they go through a bushel of tortilla chips with a pitcher of the restaurant's great salsa and a tub of choriqueso. [Option A:] They sneak out to go there without telling me. Sometimes I wonder whether they even like my company anymore. [Option B:] I get an inkling of this plan and ask whether I may be permitted to come along. They look at each other with a shadow of guilt in their eyes, and half-heartedly extend the invitation. [End Options.] After the choriqueso, ML eats steak tacos and the great bean soup to which I turned her on at La Carreta. Mary Ann eats nothing, which almost makes up for the immense amount of chocolate she will eat at home sub rosa."
Today would have exercised Option B, to which I add only that, since La Carreta seems to have given up on serving molé sauce, I order a shredded pork dish with a sort of creamy sauce that I do not like at all.
What I've never mentioned here is that La Carreta makes excellent flan. One must ask for it without the whipped cream and cherry on top. Those are an American touch added by the chains. Some additions are subtractions. A nice flan with a puddle of caramel sauce and a noticeable flavor of vanilla cannot be improved upon.
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[title type="h5"]Sunday, June 14, 2015.
In Good Voice. Brunch @ Oxlot 9.[/title]
Every singer and speaker knows that he or she has good voice days and bad voice days. We always overestimate this, as can be proven by comparing recordings made on both kinds of days. I suspect it's more about how the Adam's apple feels, not what's coming out of it. Whatever the explanation, I am in very good voice singing at Mass this morning, and wish I could sound/feel like that all the time.
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Dining room at Ox Lot 9.[/caption]A couple of days ago Mary Ann told me that, five days after returning from two and a half weeks in Europe with the Eat Club and, a month before that, a week and a half in Germany, she is leaving for yet another vacation tomorrow. This one is to Los Angeles, where she plans to hang with our son Jude while staying in the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, her favorite hotel.
As always happens two or three days before she escapes the hellhole we call home, she is in a very cheerful mood today. That makes one of us. She suggests that we have Sunday brunch at Ox Lot 9, the restaurant of the very cool Southern Hotel in old Covington. It's our first brunch there, and after enjoying it I hope we can do this with at least a third of the regularity we accord Mattina Bella, the Acme, and La Carreta.
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Oysters and sausage at Ox Lot 9.[/caption]
The brunch is lavish and local. We begin with crisp fried oysters atop a kind of tartar sauce-remoulade hybrid, on the warm side. These are better than the crawfish hush puppies, which are a shade dry.
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Crawfish hush puppies.[/caption]
The main for me is classic poached eggs with hollandaise atop boudin cakes, with a sauce similar to the one we found under the oysters. And fingering potatoes. I am just about convinced that fingerling potatoes are only good for their looks.
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Crispy boudin and eggs.[/caption]
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Huevos rancheros.[/caption]
Mary Ann has huevos rancheros, two flour tortillas with fried eggs on top. The beans part of the plate is the best part, but everything gets to running together after a few bites.
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Cinnamon beignets and blueberry preserves.[/caption]
The dessert beignets come in an octet, certainly too many for one person. I get about three of them down (that's the magic number for beignets anyway, right?). A ramekin of blueberry preserves is in the middle for dipping, but more sweetness is the last thing beignets need. Now if they squirted the stuff into the center of the beignets, they might have something.
The waiter is conscientious enough to fetch coffee for me from the hotel's bar. It's the same coffee that, in the restaurant, is brewed in a French press--a method of making coffee that I despise. (Too much bitter particulate matter.) This was a bit of extra trouble for the server, but that's the kind of restaurant this is trying to be.
Ox Lot 9, except for its name and a few too many implementations of trends, is a fine new addition to the North Shore fine dining market. Every time we go, Mary Ann and I talk about planning a weekend of dining, wine, and cooking demos in this fine, revived hotel.
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Ox Lot 9. Covington: 428 E Boston St . 985-400-5663. [/title]
