Monday, April 4, 2011.
Panang Curry. Sluggish Server.
Mary Ann keeps offering to fetch food for me from restaurants, to save me from the repetitive, tasteless stuff she eats. She thinks I must be depressed by not being able to dine out much. I think I am proving otherwise, but--as always--she sticks with her theory. Since she was going to a restaurant herself with one of her friends, I felt no compunctions about asking her to pick up a dinner from Thai Spice.
I didn't get around to eating it until after the show. The Panang curry with chicken reheated reasonably well, but certainly wasn't as good as it was when it came out of the restaurant's kitchen. I don't understand why someone with other options would choose to eat like a shut-in.
Even in its revived state, my mind is set: Panang curry has surpassed green curry as my favorite classic Thai dish. The pale orange sauce, made with coconut milk and a unique blend of spices, is just great.
Now that she has all (I hope) of the reviews I wrote for Lost Restaurants, Peggy tells me that we'll have 122 restaurants included, with well over 200 photos and bits of memorabilia, plus 40 recipes. I have very high hopes for this book. I hope that Peggy's image as one of the Really Nice People (it's accurate) allows the Times-Picayune to review the book. They've never reviewed any of my previous works.
I've written three books in the last five years. A possible new one is on the horizon. Tommy Cvitanovich wants me to think about writing a combination Drago's cookbook and history of the Croatian seafood culture in Southeast Louisiana. I'm thinking it would be a terrific book. He wants to do it immediately. The timing might be perfect, since I won't be doing any traveling anytime soon.
Meanwhile, just to keep the boredom away, I am in a battle with the web hosting service I use to run NOMenu.com. For months I've had problems with sluggish servers. In the past week or so it's become intolerable, with complete failures to show pages as frequent as getting through. My subscribers are mad, and I don't blame them.
Step One: get on hold for a half-hour. Good thing that the gizmo I use to broadcast radio from home can double as an overly sophisticated speaker phone. Bad thing: nobody at Network Solutions seems to have any, you know, like, solutions.
