Monday, March 19, 2012.
St. Joseph. Turtle Soup.
What with my father's name and my own confirmation name being Joseph, and my having been named an Honorary Italian twice, I guess I should have gone to a St. Joseph's altar for a penitential supper. But of the Italian restaurants likely to have altars, all are closed on Mondays except Bosco's. But we were there two days ago.
So. . . Mary Ann and I went to Zea again. I had a purpose in this: to try a new dish on this year's seafood menu. The Southwestern salmon stack (yeah, I know there are no salmon in the Southwest) is a variation on their mellow tuna stack in the summer. The salmon is marinated as if for ceviche, then--after everything is diced--mixed with mirlitons and avocado. They drizzle a zippy chili sauce over it all, and some kind of creamy vinaigrette holds it together in a low-to-the-ground cylinder. More than enough for lunch at $10.
Had a cup of that turtle soup they gave me at Brennan's a few days ago. It's certainly the best of its kind, and a contender for best soup in town. Mary Ann doesn't even want to try it. I told her that it was permissible under Lenten fasting and abstinence rules. Turtle meat has been declared a seafood by the Archdiocese. I wonder how many places in the world this comes up.
From out of the blue, Mary Ann said she wanted to work on our marriage. She got a book on how to do that from Reader's Digest. But she hasn't read it yet, and I only saw it today for the first time. We didn't know what to do, so it came down to the usual back-and-forth hinting that maybe it's you, dear, who causes the problems. I offered a bit of wisdom gleaned from a terrible novel I just finished, in which a linguistics professor is engaged to live with a married couple with problems to determine what is The Horror in their marriage. His answer: it's the man. Always.
