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Thursday, July 16, 2015.
Jude 26. Wild Catfish.
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The fact that he was born twenty-six years ago today slips into secondary notability for our son Jude. Even Mary Ann--who usually reminisces intensely about the birth of her first child on this date--seems to have her mind on other things. Our boy is busy remodeling the Studio City home where he and his wife Suzanne live. The permits just came in! And in California, that is a major occasion to celebrate. He and she and their friends will go to dinner tonight in a Los Angeles restaurant that features, for $120, a bistecca fiorentina--the monstrously large porterhouse steak cut in the Tuscan style. But, really, from now on, only the birthdays with fives or zeros in the rightmost position will kick off much of a brouhaha.
I celebrate more anniversaries--many of them trivial--than the average person does. But I also slide into the torpor of the day. Must be the weather. For dinner, MA and I go to Zea, which for us is a fallback, routine, normal, effortless, unexceptional, and strife-free venue.
MA eats ribs, her favorite. I order the fried catfish, as much for research purposes as for enjoyment. After years of serving Asian near-catfish, the Taste Buds have shifted not only to domestic catfish at Zea, but wild-caught Des Allemands cats from nearby bayous and lakes. Even though I have been needling them editorially about this all along, I won't take credit for this great improvement. I'll bet Harlon Pearce--a fish wholesaler and friend who lately has developed a distribution of wild catfish--was a bigger force.
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Wild-caught catfish @ Zea.[/caption]
The platter of catfish is alarmingly large, or appears to be. It's cut down into strips, coated with cornmeal, and sent out hot, greaseless, and crisp. The hush puppies could use some work--they're a little heavy in texture. But I welcome another dish to Zea's repertoire, which has been improving quite a lot in the last year or so.
I spend the rest of the day recalling Jude's magnificent birthday parties when his age was in single digits. Letting one slide by would be unthinkable. But adulthood changes everything, doesn't it?
