Saturday, August 7. On Vacation. Revealing Dinner At N'Tini's. I am officially on vacation from the radio show. I won't be back on the air until the sixteenth. This appears to be a real vacation. No cruise to coordinate, no television cooking demos to do. The full Fitz family will goof off for a whole week. (Although Mary Ann will think of enough "leisure" activities to make me need a drink at the end of each day.)
The Menu Daily newsletter is a vacation monkey wrench. I almost never take off even a few days of publication. Two weeks ago--when I missed three days' worth of issues while we were in Texas--my subscribers very much noticed my absence, and said so. I will try going into reruns this week. After writing the online daily Menu for twelve years, I have lots of archived articles that few current readers have seen. I'll update and publish them, and see if anyone notices.
It's a sad state of affairs when I find it relaxing to spend two hours cutting grass. But it gets me away from my desk. And must be done before we leave. We've had so much rain in the past few weeks that it's looking as if the place is abandoned.
Dinner with Mary Leigh at N'Tini's. We like the food there, although I don't think either of us would say it's in the top ranks. And we always have a fun evening. Tonight, the conversation took an unexpected turn. Something reminded me of a scatological joke, one of a trilogy I've told for many years. I have never told jokes like that to my kids--although I've heard them tell a few. Mary Leigh wanted to hear this one. Food goodness sake, she's eighteen. When I was fifteen I'd heard much worse than this.
I told the joke. She went into uncontrollable laughter, then wanted to know more about the joke's protagonist: Lord Smedley, a crusty old British nonagenarian. So then came another in the Lord Smedley Trilogy, and finally the third. She laughed more than I've ever seen her do for my jokes. I was very pleased. The Trilogy is absolutely my funniest material, performed with dialects and a variety of voices. But I need the right audience at the right time in the right mood.
We started with a half-dozen of N'Tini's char-broiled oysters, which are much more like a cross between oysters Mosca and oysters Bienville than like Drago's. Three of these would have done it for me; they brought six. ML had her usual wedge salad with blue cheese, followed by her usual filet mignon. Last time we were here, the chef cut some fries from fresh potatoes, and tossed them with some garlic butter and parmesan cheese. He will live to regret doing that, because now ML must have them every time we eat here from now on. (I like them too.)
The restaurant had a special of scallops in a rich cream sauce with crawfish and fried eggplant underneath. Very good, but twice as much as I could finish. I couldn't think about dessert.
As we drove home, we talked about how we have moved into a new phase. Our father-daughter relationship has been a joy for us, save perhaps for the past few years, when by the Law Of The Spheres she must reject everything I say or do while constructing her own world. Now, two weeks from the day when she will move into the dormitory at Tulane, she's starting to openly like me again.
I wish I knew what it was that Mary Ann and I did to wind up with such marvelous offspring. I'd write a book about it. But our success has been as great a mystery to us as how apparently fine kids from good parents suddenly go off the rails.
N'Tini's. Mandeville: 2891 US 190. 985-626-5566. Contemporary Creole.
