Diary 9|16, 17|2014: Killing Time At Galatoire's. Cakes.

[title type="h5"]Tuesday, September 16, 2014. I Talk My Wife Into Galatoire's.[/title] Jude says that when he and his soon-to-be bride move in together, they will have a tremendous surplus of kitchenware and place settings. He wants us to take some of this off his hands. We actually do need a new food processor, and he has an extra. What we will do with all the rest of it is a mystery. Jude is in the habit of shippping bulky items across country on Amtrak. Train Number 2, The Sunset Limited, left late Sunday evening with two boxes of cargo for us in its baggage car. It arrives tonight at Union Passenger Terminal. Mary Ann came into town to collect it all and to have a few meetings. After the radio show, I check the train's progress on my smart phone. It is expected at eight-thirty--a ninety-minute early arrival. That gives us time to go somewhere for dinner that would take a good bit of time. In fact, we had to do that. It was raining off and on, and we certainly didn't want to hang around the train station. I say that we should go to Galatoire's. If we sit around there for three hours or longer, we wouldn't get any flak for it. And we haven't been there together in a long time. The idea appeals to her, so there we went. Even after the parking disaster yesterday, she conducts a search for a nearby open space on the street, to avoid having to park in a garage. You just don't know where those parking valets have been, she says. I don't know, but I don't care, either. The Parking Witch finds a perfectly legal gap on Canal Street between Bourbon and Dauphine. A block and a half from Galatoire's. Not far enough for us to get wet from the rain, even though we have only one small umbrella. [caption id="attachment_43893" align="alignnone" width="480"] A slow night at Galatoire's. [/caption] Galatoire's has many vacancies. Early September business is always terrible. What convention would be dumb enough to meet in New Orleans at the peak of hurricane season? The best-known waiters take the night off when it's like this. Only a few of those working are familiar to me. I tell maitre d' Arnold Chabaud that it didn't matter who serves our table. A young woman takes the assignment. She has me sized up as a tourist. That has not happened to me here in decades. But my anonymity helps me pull off my birthday scam. I claim that it's my birthday every time I dine at Galatoire's. The management and all the first-string servers are onto me. Nobody cares much. I get away with a free caramel custard (food cost: about seven cents). Genuine birthday celebrants also get a nice-looking Galatoire's pen. I only write with fountain pens, however, so I let them keep theirs. But our server went through the whole routine, and had nearly everybody in the restaurant singing the song. [caption id="attachment_43892" align="alignnone" width="480"] Galatoire's goute: crabmeat maison on the left, shrimp remoulade on the right.[/caption] We start dinner with a combo shrimp remoulade and crabmeat maison, as superb as always and served very generously. While we picked at that, I checked on the running of the Sundet Limit. Uh-oh. It had lost a half-hour since last time I checked. Still an hour early, thought. We would have to remain here at Galatoire's a little longer. [caption id="attachment_43891" align="alignnone" width="480"] Crabmeat Yvonne.[/caption] We should have had a soup-and-salad course, but we head right into the entrees. Mary Ann is pleased with crabmeat Yvonne, a tremendous amount of the namesake ingredient sauteed with butter, garlic, mushrooms, artichokes and a few other things. I remember when this dish--named for Yvonne Wynne, the long-time manager of the restaurant--was brand-new, in a restaurant that didn't change much on those days. [caption id="attachment_43890" align="alignnone" width="480"] Grilled pompano with brown butter.[/caption] My entree is a big, pretty fillet of pompano with brown butter. I have called this the best seafood dish on town, the best dish at Galatoire's, and a few other chart-toppers. I still feel good about all of that. I get my caramel custard, candle and my song. The Sunset Limited doesn't get any closer. We hear that it's caught behind a freight train--a common problem. It will come in at about ten, but that's too late to pick up our parcels. We (more likely, I) will have to pick it up tomorrow. I will hear about this for the rest of my life, every time I ship something on Amtrak. At least it's stopped raining. [title type="h5"]Galatoire's. French Quarter: 209 Bourbon. 504-525-2021. [/title] [divider type=""] [title type="h5"]Wednesday, September 17, 2014. Where's The Railway Express? Eating At The Bridal Show.[/title] Right after the radio show ends, I drive over to Union Passenger Terminal to pick up the packages Jude sent us by rail. But while the Amtrak agent knows about the parcels' existence, he had no idea where they were. We know that they made it aboard the baggage car in Los Angeles, but they seem to have disappeared somewhere between there to here. The leading theory is that it went to Chicago. From L.A. to San Antonio, the Sunset Limited carries several cars that branch off at that point to become the Texas Eagle. Maybe our goods wound up in one of those cars. Why are we shipping this on the train in the first place? I turned Jude onto the idea when he needed to send some bulky props and equipment for one of his movies to the shooting location. It worked perfectly, and was a bargain. But in just the way that a dog knows when you don't like or or afraid of him, the train must know that it is not trusted by Mary Ann, who indeed hates trains. So it screwed up the assignment. In more delectable news, Mary Leigh had a booth in a bridal show tonight in Covington. She decorated two of her magnificent cakes to show her design sense, and baked several layer cakes with many different fillings to show off her abilities to deliver taste as well as display. Whether she made any sales or not is unknown. But other exhibitors came by for samples and were raving about her works. Even a major baker from Hammond was impressed. She indicated that she'd like it if I dropped in to see her display. It would require figuring out a way to get supper late in the evening, but I am more proud of her work than I am hungry. It turned out that some vendors were caterers who had food to be sampled. Shirley Deluzain of Benedict's Plantation was griddling up some nice crab cakes and napping them with remoulade sauce. While I enjoy my second crab cake, Shirley asks me to be honorary chairman of a fund-raising event for St. Tammany Hospice. That organization comforts terminally ill people in their last days, for free. Happy to lend what I can to that program. Miss Betty--the lady who lived across the field from us when we first moved to the Cool Water Ranch--was a volunteer at Hospice. A decade later, she was a patient there. I'll bet they gave her extra-good care. Another vendor cooked up a good pasta dish with shrimp and pepper jack cheese. So much for needing anything to eat. Years ago, I used to lull myself to sleep with the comforting thought that I would never die of hunger, because if things really got bad for me, I could always go to wedding receptions and graze. Nobody would throw me out. "You intimidate the caterers into doing a better job," a friend whose daughter was getting married once told me. Maybe I could rent myself out.