Monday, March 8. Still Cold. My Novel. Zea With The Girls. Thirty-six this morning when I awakened. I saw in the newspaper that this was the third-coldest February we've had in New Orleans in the last one hundred years. Uh-oh. Cold winters often presage active hurricane years.
I wish I could take three months off everything so I could write a novel that I've been thinking about for months. I've wanted to undertake a big fiction project for a long time, but for the first time I see the storyline from start to finish. And it has a nice stress in it, one I don't believe anyone has employed lately, if ever. But the only way I can give it the attention it deserves is to put off work on everything else I'm writing, and that's not going to happen soon. If I live to be ninety-five (when my birthday will fall on Mardi Gras!), I'll never run out of projects to fill my time. How can anyone be bored, ever? Or, for that matter, sit around watching television?
When the radio show ended the Marys were up for dinner. We pulled another card from our scant deck of restaurants acceptable to all of us (you couldn't deal two hands of poker with it), and it said Zea. I need to taste more of their Lenten menu, which they've asked me to emphasize in the commercials I ad-lib on the air. Fortunately, this is easy to do. The sesame oysters of all past Lents is back again. They're fried and then deposited on a little salad of cabbage and carrots and a sweet-heat sauce with an Asian flavor. It's the best dish at Zea, but it's only around when the oysters are consistently meaty. With the cold weather, those may last until June.
Also on the table was a bowl of red bean soup with andouille, the Monday soup, always good and today exceptionally so. Mary Leigh and I split the surf 'n' turf right down the middle of the "n," with the petite filet mignon (it's under the shrimp in the photo) going to her. (This is on the Lenten menu?) The surf half included a crab cake (with a "Z" squirted on it in sweet chili sauce) and some enormous fried shrimp. The crab cakes here are encrusted with masa, and are really more like what the old West End restaurants used to call a crab chop than a crab cake. Fried shrimp don't do much for me. Mary Ann took one of those, and that was the beginning and end of her dinner tonight. That's not a diet. That's punishment. It's her choice, of course, but the stress has to come out somewhere, and I know only too well where.
Zea. Covington: 110 Lake Dr 985-327-0520.
