Sunday, September 6, 2015.
The Best Hummus. The Worst Pita.
One of my goals for the weekend is cleaning my office. But not one errant piece of paper moves by the end of the day. Instead, I make up web pages inviting potential Eat Clubbers to join me for dinner at three September events. They are
Café Giovanni on September 17,
Richard Fiske's Martini Bar & Restaurant on September 23, and
Broussard's on September 30. In the process, a piece of the reservation software gets goobered up, and I spend hours fixing it. That's where the time goes. Isn't there any computer-savvy person out there interested in a very flexible job working on a big, delicious page?
[caption id="attachment_18924" align="alignnone" width="400"]
Sweet roasted garlic hummus at Zea, before the pita bread goes back for a second toasting. [/caption]
Mary Leigh works all day, first at La Provence, then at Sucre. She gets home around six, and we have dinner at Zea. We begin with an order of the sweet roasted garlic hummus, the only Middle Eastern dish on the menu. Despite that, Zea's hummus--the basic version, not the variations--is a contender for Best Hummus In Town. The only thing wrong with it is the spongy pita bread, but we get past that by asking to have the pita toasted twice. That is, they toast it to their spec once, then do it again. We only have to ask for this once, and some of the servers know this before we even ask. It's good to be a regular customer in a restaurant.
[caption id="attachment_48329" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Wild-caught catfish @ Zea.[/caption]
We both have house salads, and I get the platter of wild-caught Des Allemands catfish, cut into fingers and fried with a coating of cornmeal that could have been a little heavier and with more seasoning. Mary Leigh, who doesn't eat seafood, actually has two pieces of this. It's an enormous improvement in recent months at Zea, which had been serving the Southeast Asian catfish cousin for a couple of years. I like to think that my badgering the Taste Buds about this helped make that change happen.
During my afternoon walk, I find that another tree has fallen across Popcorn's Trail through the woods adjacent to the Cool Water Ranch. (Popcorn was our second Golden Retriever, and never was there a sweeter family dog for our kids to grow up with.) The fallen tree is only about seven inches in diameter and is very rotten. I fetch a hand saw and have the trail open in about ten minutes. It's the third tree blockage on the trail this year. I wish the big one at the edge of the property would fall. And in the right direction.
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Monday, September 7, 2015.
Labor Day.
The reason most of us get off from work on Labor Day is self-generative. We're off because we don't have to go to work. Kind of like the stock market lately. It plummets because it's tanking, shoots skyward because it's rising.
I follow suit, and refrain from publishing a Menu Daily. As I usually do. There is no radio show, because I've been given the day off, just like every year. NPAS does not meet this evening for rehearsal, because everybody is on holiday. I can't remember a day in which I had less to do. Except, possibly, the days I spent riding on trains recently. And, of course, there's the infinite amount of work I have to do on the bottomless pit that is a website.
Most restaurants are closed today, too. It's the one day of the year Chef Andrea doesn't open for any meal. And if he doesn't open, nobody does.
Mary Leigh and I agree that the thing to do about eating today is to make cheeseburgers and fries--the most American of all cuisine. I go to the store and pick up ground round. After many experiments over the years, ground round proves itself to offer the best combination of flavor and low fat. Sirloin tastes a little better, but it's tough. Chuck is better-tasting still, but it's much higher in fat, and it shrinks a lot. The generic ground beef is something I don't trust. What is it?
[caption id="attachment_48791" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Cool Water Ranch Labor Day burger and fries. [/caption]
I also bought a package of onion rolls (anything to avoid the dreaded, soft, tasteless standard hamburger bun, and a pretty good thing at that), two big russet potatoes, and a bag of assorted salad greens and not-so-greens.
ML takes out MA's sacred Kitchen Magician and cuts a pile of fresh potato curls to fry. I preheat the griddle on high for fifteen minutes before dropping inch-thick, well-seasoned patties onto the black surface. As the burgers get crusty, the exhaust fan sucks the ample smoke down and out. The dogs Susie and Barry stand around the exhaust outlet outside, taking in the aroma. I make small burgers for them and the cats Twinnery and Tumbler, as much to use up the whole package of beef than to pamper our already over-loved pooches.
ML and I sit at the counter with all this delicious stuff (best reason to avoid fast-food hamburgers: you can make them so much better yourself), and we talk about her work and what she will do when she moves to the Northeast, as she plans to do rather soon. She says that while she likes baking and decorating cakes, she wants to get back to her other design ambitions. She will be an artist trying to make a living. Somehow, I feel all but certain that she will pull it off, and may even make it look easy.
We're still packing away these juicy burgers and golden, fresh-cut fries when she says something unexpected. She has some advice for me. She hesitates, then decides that this is the perfect moment to come forward. Afterwards, I agree that it was indeed the right time for her to tell me that I should make a big change in my life.
Sweet roasted garlic hummus at Zea, before the pita bread goes back for a second toasting. [/caption]
Mary Leigh works all day, first at La Provence, then at Sucre. She gets home around six, and we have dinner at Zea. We begin with an order of the sweet roasted garlic hummus, the only Middle Eastern dish on the menu. Despite that, Zea's hummus--the basic version, not the variations--is a contender for Best Hummus In Town. The only thing wrong with it is the spongy pita bread, but we get past that by asking to have the pita toasted twice. That is, they toast it to their spec once, then do it again. We only have to ask for this once, and some of the servers know this before we even ask. It's good to be a regular customer in a restaurant.
[caption id="attachment_48329" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Wild-caught catfish @ Zea.[/caption]
We both have house salads, and I get the platter of wild-caught Des Allemands catfish, cut into fingers and fried with a coating of cornmeal that could have been a little heavier and with more seasoning. Mary Leigh, who doesn't eat seafood, actually has two pieces of this. It's an enormous improvement in recent months at Zea, which had been serving the Southeast Asian catfish cousin for a couple of years. I like to think that my badgering the Taste Buds about this helped make that change happen.
During my afternoon walk, I find that another tree has fallen across Popcorn's Trail through the woods adjacent to the Cool Water Ranch. (Popcorn was our second Golden Retriever, and never was there a sweeter family dog for our kids to grow up with.) The fallen tree is only about seven inches in diameter and is very rotten. I fetch a hand saw and have the trail open in about ten minutes. It's the third tree blockage on the trail this year. I wish the big one at the edge of the property would fall. And in the right direction.
[divider type=""]
Cool Water Ranch Labor Day burger and fries. [/caption]
I also bought a package of onion rolls (anything to avoid the dreaded, soft, tasteless standard hamburger bun, and a pretty good thing at that), two big russet potatoes, and a bag of assorted salad greens and not-so-greens.
ML takes out MA's sacred Kitchen Magician and cuts a pile of fresh potato curls to fry. I preheat the griddle on high for fifteen minutes before dropping inch-thick, well-seasoned patties onto the black surface. As the burgers get crusty, the exhaust fan sucks the ample smoke down and out. The dogs Susie and Barry stand around the exhaust outlet outside, taking in the aroma. I make small burgers for them and the cats Twinnery and Tumbler, as much to use up the whole package of beef than to pamper our already over-loved pooches.
ML and I sit at the counter with all this delicious stuff (best reason to avoid fast-food hamburgers: you can make them so much better yourself), and we talk about her work and what she will do when she moves to the Northeast, as she plans to do rather soon. She says that while she likes baking and decorating cakes, she wants to get back to her other design ambitions. She will be an artist trying to make a living. Somehow, I feel all but certain that she will pull it off, and may even make it look easy.
We're still packing away these juicy burgers and golden, fresh-cut fries when she says something unexpected. She has some advice for me. She hesitates, then decides that this is the perfect moment to come forward. Afterwards, I agree that it was indeed the right time for her to tell me that I should make a big change in my life.
