Friday, December 23, 2011.
Jude, Zea, A Flat Tire, And Christmas Carols.
Jude arrived from Los Angeles around midnight last night. As always, Mary Ann insisted on picking him up. The tremendous inconvenience of making that trip at that hour or several times outweight by the joy she has of basking in the presence of her boy. She will cherish every moment with him until he heads back ten days from now. Now that's a mother.
Everybody but me slept until ten or eleven. Then everyone was hungry, and we went to our default venue for family dining--Zea. I have been trying to establish a line of reasoning I call The Zea Principle with Mary Ann, and then to apply it to our vacation choices. The Principle is that Zea works so well for us because everybody in the family likes a lot of the food there--albeit different favorites from person to person. Just as important, none of us deeply dislike anything about Zea. (Except when we get sick of going there too often, in which case we are still in general agreement.)
I say we ought to look for vacation opportunities that display The Zea Principle. In practice, almost all our vacations lately have been decreed by Mary Ann, who then tries to talk us into them. I keep saying she'd get more cooperation if she consulted with the other three members of the family first. The idea of going to Prague, for example, has no appeal to anyone but her. She says the Zea Principle doesn't apply. And that is that.
The summer menu is finally gone from Zea. The entree for me, then, reverted to the superb freshwater trout, coated with a pesto coating that gets crusty in the pan. The other entrees--each the favorite of the person who ordered it--included the burger, the grilled chicken, and the Caesar. We all left happy, as predicted by The Principle.
I didn't stay happy long. I had the feeling that one of my tires was going flat. I was already late on my way into town for the radio show. But I couldn't head out on the Causeway with a bad tire. It's the same one that's been leaking slowly for months, evading all efforts of the guys at Goodyear to find and plug it. I pumped it up, crossed my fingers, and made it across and back losing further pressure.
Today's was the final regular radio show before Christmas, the day we have our annual Christmas carol sing-along. Anyone who does gets his pick of all the cookbooks that came my way during the year. We had avid participation this year, interspersed with normal food calls: a perfect mix.
For the first time since we started this tradition in 1995, a caller wanted to sing a Hanukkah song. He insisted that I join him. I don't know "The Dreidel Song" well, although when I was in the New Orleans Barbershop Chorus, we sang it and other Jewish tunes in season. I pulled up the lyrics on the internet and managed to get through it. I thought the caller should have given me a cookbook for that.
