[title type="h5"]Saturday, July 25, 2014.
Soft-Shell In A Steak House.
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The radio show has a new mechanism. Well, new to me--the weekday hosts on WWL have used it for at least a couple of years. Instead of calling into the show and going on the air, listeners can now send text messages to the host, who then reads them and responds. This solves one of the most vexing problems for talk-show hosts: the small percentage of listeners who will ever call.
When the engineers rejiggered the website for my station a few months ago, they plugged in a text messaging port. I've come to rely on it to fill the gaps between callers. It's not a good as a live phone call, but it's better than nothing.
Whether because of that or an increasing audience, the show is going more smoothly lately. Momentum is important for a show that's long in the tooth as mine is. If I were paranoid I'd say this means that the management is about to move my time again.
Mary Ann and I have dinner at Keith Young's Steak House in Madisonville. It's my idea, even though I'm not in a steak mood today. Most of the time I'm very reluctant to pass up the beef. But today I sample the restaurant's substantial seafood side.
What triggered this was a text message during the show last week. The sender wanted to know who on the North Shore has the best oysters Bienville. My faltering memory could cough up only a couple of places that make Bienvilles at all--until Mary Ann rushed into my room and reminded me of ones at Keith Young's, which are exemplary. But Keith told me that his recipe came more or less from my cookbook. My humility gene must have blocked the thought.
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Keith Young's oysters Bienville.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_43264" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Stuffed mushrooms.[/caption]
Just to make sure the dish can stand on its own, we began this meal with four oversize (the only size they make here) Bienvilles. And yes, they're as good as they get, if I say so myself. But so are the crabmeat-stuffed mushrooms, which I have nothing to do with.
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Soft-shell crabs.[/caption]
How are the soft-shell crabs? It's the peak of the season, I know, and Keith has a good connection with a producer. "They're great even for us!" says the waiter. I ask for the one-crab plate (two crabs is the standard, but I didn't spend the day plowing the back forty).
I ask to have the bechamel-rich shrimp sauce left off, to be replaced by the crab-and-mushroom steak garnish. I am willing to pay the seven-dollar upcharge. The waiter is unsure about this. Not because Keith would deny his customers whatever they want. It just seems to strike him as a weird idea.
It isn't. The sauce is buttery and toasty, and its addition to the soft-shell crab make an already wonderful dish into a masterpiece. I can't remember ever having had better. Mary Ann dines conventionally and happily on a small filet mignons and creamed spinach.
Things are going well at Keith Young's. The place now opens around 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, and if all goes well (it was a pretty day today), the place will turn its tables twice. The only thing I can't figure out is how, in these days of rocketing beef prices, Keith avoids raising his.
And then I learn. The salad doesn't come free anymore. It's still a great bargain for one of the two or three best premium steakhouses in the entire area.
Mary Ann and I talk about Keith, his charming wife Lynda (she runs the dining room), and their restaurant all the way home. We would dine in once a week if we could.
[title type="h5"]
Keith Young's Steak House. Madisonville: 165 LA 21. 985-845-9940.
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Sunday, July 27, 2014.
Excavating. Keith Young's Other Restaurant.
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Tomorrow, the plumber is coming to burrow through the dam inside the kitchen sink drainpipe. The Army Corps of Engineers ought to find out what it's made of, and build levees out if it.
Access to that pipe is blocked even more convincingly by the piles of debris in the crawl space. Every time someone comes over here--notably our kids, returning from their homes away from home with their beaus--Mary Ann "cleans" the carport by throwing everything either under the house or into my already-crammed tool shed.
It seems to me that the tool-shed route will be the easier. The blocked pipe is on the other side of the back wall of the shed, which desperately needs an overhaul anyway.
Eight hours of excavation later, the shed is empty, and I have cut a two-by-two hole into the crawl space. I get my reward: The blocked pipe is framed exactly by the hole.
The plumber will be able to do his job easily. I have eight trash bags full of junk to drag to the road (about two French Quarter blocks away) Monday morning. And my to-do list for the next two weekends is now full.
I take a cold shower (it's in the nineties today, with matching humidity) and a nap. Then it's suppertime. I suggest we go to Keith Young's other restaurant, Crabby's Shack. I am still thinking about the cold oysters I had there a couple of weeks ago.
In contrast to yesterday's main meal--in which I ate seafood in a steak house--today I plan to eat a roast beef poor boy in this seafood restaurant.
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Roast beef poor boy at Crabby's Shack.[/caption]
Crabby's roast beef is pot-roasted from scratch. This is the second one we've tried. (One is easily enough for two people our size.) It is consistent with the first time in that it's good, but not good enough to tear us away from the fried and boiled seafood that are Crabby's real specialties.
This roast beef breaks Lee's Law. That's named for Mary Ann's late father, who made excellent roast beef poor boys at home. He could get great roast beef out of eye of round--a cut notable for its unremitting toughness.
Lee's Law is simple and clearly true. When you slice the roast beef, you must cut perpendicular to the orientation of the meat's muscle tissue. (This is known as "cutting across the grain.") That makes it much tenderer, and releases more flavor.
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Thin fried onion rings.[/caption]
We depart very full, with an important datum in mind. Crabby's is the only restaurant on the North Shore that slices very thin onion rings for frying. They're in a league with those of Charlie's Steak House. We both love our onion rings that way, and we devoured the eight-inch pile in nothing flat.
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Crabby's Seafood Shack. Madisonville: 305 Covington. 985-845-2348. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris August 04, 2014 12:01 in
