Saturday, February 5, 2011.
VooDoo. Making Bread.
I awakened late, of course, still breathless from last night's astonishing birthday surprise. Mary Ann continued giving me the kind of birthday festival she likes to get--as long as I didn't push it too far.
I spent the morning reorganizing my wine collection. Less damage was done to it than I thought. My thirty guests at Antoine's consumed less than a bottle per person, and we brought home about four cases. And some people gave me nice bottles as gifts. My cellar was more modernized than depleted.
Mary Ann is in high spirits, with both son and daughter in the house. Her only darkness (and I think she needs a certain amount of it) comes from her continuing search for flaws in last night's magnificent party. I told her I couldn't think of one. Perfection is the sum of imperfections. Happiness should never be inspected though a microscope.
Lunch at VooDoo BBQ. The Marys love the place, particularly the location in Mandeville. I think it's less than brilliant but more than acceptable. Barbecue is one of the few cuisines that stands up to pre-fabrication, commissary cooking, and other practices of chain restaurants. Mary Ann says that VooDoo's side dishes are the best imaginable. I think she's right. Mary Leigh has a particular passion for VooDoo's cheese and bacon fries. Sometimes I wonder why she eats stuff like that.
A second birthday party for me will happen at the Cool Water Ranch tomorrow, with the people who weren't at Antoine's. This is a big source of MA's angst. Again, I didn't see the problem. The crowd at Antoine's were people from my pre-marriage days. The gourmets and the oenophiles. The people at Party II will be those I know from my second career as a dad. They are much more down to earth. We will open all the wine we need and cook a few hundred dollars' worth of food. But few of these folks care much about food or wine. Many of them don't drink at all. They're coming as much for the Super Bowl as anything.
I will bake pizzas tomorrow. This means I must make all my dough today. And I made a dough for a muffuletta king cake. Yes, that's what I said. A braided, oval-ring-shaped yeast bread without sweet ingredients, made into a muffuletta sandwich. It was a different dough from the one for pizza (it had eggs and butter in it). I did them both at the same time and had dough rising all over the place.
While I worked on that, the Marys worked on their own projects, filling the counters with the detritus. The young one feels that if she's going to take time out of her life to bake me a birthday cake, she should be off the hook for cleaning up after herself. I asked whether the birthday boy should be the garbageman, but this line of discourse is beneath her consideration, and she retired from the fray.
What hungers we had were sated by picking away at the salads and dips Mary Ann was making. Then we watched another movie in which a dopey guy fails to find happiness in love because the girl is too smart to fall for such a boob.
VooDoo BBQ. Mandeville: 2999 Highway 190. 985-629-2021.
