[title type="h5"]Saturday, August 9, 2014.
Mary Ann Attacked. A Bag Of Barbecue.[/title]
Mary Ann thinks it would be fun to have breakfast at the new Ox Lot 9 in the just-reopened Southern Hotel in Covington. The restaurant is open for a week or so, but to MA the newness of the place is as alluring as if it were serving five-star food for free.
But Ox Lot 9 will not be doing breakfast anytime soon--perhaps because the North Shore has a good supply of other breakfast places, including the hard-to-top Mattina Bella two blocks away.
We relocate to a place we have not been in years: Toad Hollow. It's a cute, somewhat New Age café that opens for breakfast on weekends. It's not vegetarian, but the menu does include many dishes amenable to that diet. And some breakfast standards are toned down. Chicken sausage and turkey bacon instead of their standard pork equivalents.
We are the first customers today, and the place fills up quickly. Mary Ann remembers why we haven't been here lately. She doesn't like the aroma of liberalism she believes she smells.
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Tofu breakfast at Toad Hollow[/caption]
I find the place pretty good, and go with the program by ordering a plate of tofu with broccoli, tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers and onions, all in a Thai curry sauce. Not a typical breakfast, and not as good as the migas and the huevos ranchers I've had here in the past.
After breakfast, something happens that MA likes much less. She is outside trimming her boxes of ferns around the house when she starts screaming for help. A cluster of bees, hornets or wasps attack her en masse, stinging her all over her body.
I couldn't see or feel the stingers that would have been there had these been bees. I remember that when Jude was a Cub Scout he was looking around some weeds on the side of the Tammany Trace when four or five angry apians blasted out of a small hole in the ground and went after him. The cadre that got MA were more numerous but otherwise similar. Welts began to swell over her from head to foot, while the feeling of electric shocks identified each small Skin Zero. She says there are at least eight stings, maybe ten.
We called our doctor friends, both of whom said that if anything horrible were going to happen, it would have already done so. We didn't have any Adolph's Meat Tenderizer (which appears to neutralize the venom), but we did have Benedril and Allegro. The docs advised she should take both of them.
It is hard telling MA this, but the stings don't look all that bad. I remember being stung by a wasp on the lip at Ronnie Kole's chateau some years ago, and watching it balloon to the size of a slice of cantaloupe. Her swellings are nowhere near as large. But they are red and painful, and that's bad enough.
She parks herself on the sofa with chilled wet towels to alleviate the dozen stings. She says they're not getting any better. The doctors say this is normal.
Later, I go to Dickey's for barbecue. Eating a rack of ribs seems to soothe her a little. And she keeps popping the antihistamines on schedule.
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[title type="h5"]Sunday, August 10, 2014.
Old Friend Departs. Cuban Sandwich. Thai Pepper.[/title]
Mary Ann awakens with as much swelling and pain from the fifteen wasp stings she took yesterday. is still swollen all over, although the sting marks from the wasp attack yesterday are much less obvious. But I know better than to suggest that she will get better before she knows it.
At least she's back on her feet. She and Mary Leigh are talking about cooking up something or other. One of them mentions the need for a new food processor.
[caption id="attachment_43445" align="alignright" width="307"]
Exploded diagram of my late food processor.[/caption]I bolt into the room. "What's wrong with the old one?" I ask. They look at one another. The glances tell me that they have done something bad to the machine I acquired years before we were married. It's a medium-small unit I won in a contest in 1986, during a food writers conference in New York City. (The meeting took place in the Vista International Hotel, adjacent to the World Trade Center, fifteen years before the hotel was destroyed in the 9/11 disaster.)
Black & Decker was rolling out a line of kitchen appliances then, and this food processor was one of them. Food processors were so new in those days that recipes I wrote for them always had to include the most basic instructions. (Like turning the machine on and off in pulses.)
My Black and Decker served me perfectly for nearly three decades. We never even broke the safety tab without which the thing won't run. We never lost any of the blades, discs, or adapters. I even have the instruction manual.
But now the Marys have to tell me that it seems to be broken. With my usual confidence in long-serving entities, I assemble it, plug it in, and hit the button. I hear the hum of a motor that isn't turning. Turned it off, unplugged it. The shaft would not move even a little. I disassemble the whole gizmo at the screwdriver level, and quickly come to the conclusion that my faithful servant has suffered a deadly stroke.
I feel mild guilt. Should I have oiled or cleaned the appliance more often? No--it's clearly not built to be serviced.
I throw it into the trash. These words are its last rites.
Mary Ann made Cuban sandwiches from the leftover pulled pork I picked up at Dickey's yesterday, plus ham, cheese, and the usual soft bread that looks like New Orleans French bread, but isn't.
At the store, I see that Rex is now marketing chow chow--a product that has been missing from supermarket shelves since Zatarain's stopped making it after Katrina. It's mustard mixed with pickle relish and a few other pickled vegetables. It was what we used at home when I was in my single-digit years instead of yellow mustard. It was perfect on the Cubano.
Mary Leigh and The Boy want to have a Thai dinner. After one meal at Thai Spice a few weeks ago, I have convinced them of the cuisine's goodness. Thai Spice is closed on Sunday, but Thai Pepper in Mandeville is wide open.
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Panang curry at Thai Pepper.[/caption]
This time, The Boy decides that he will go all the way to Thai Hot in his pad thai. Mary Leigh asks for the same dish, but just plain "hot." I get panang curry with chicken, extra hot (but not Thai hot).
All of this is delicious. The only off-key note is that the kids believe their plates of food were switched, and it's ML who got the Thai-hot plate. Oh--and ML tastes the curry, and says she hates a certain taste in there. It's probably the thing I like about the dish. It's a hard-to-describe musky flavor, from some variation of ginger. I think. I love it. And it's hot enough to make me look like someone dumped a half-cup of water over my head.
[title type="h5"]Thai Pepper. Mandeville: 1625 US 190. 985-624-3057. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris August 18, 2014 12:01 in
