Saturday, July 28, 2012.
Gomer? Salad And Pizza-Like Garlic Bread.
I awoke feeling funny. Couldn't put my finger on just what it was, but it was enough to fire off one of my occasional, rare bouts with paranoia.
I didn't feel so bad that Mary Ann and I couldn't go out to breakfast. Mattina Bella turned out its typically perfect poached eggs with crabmeat, mushrooms and hollandaise. Great. Ate every bite. Mary Ann had her favorite, too: the Country Boy omelette, which contains all the meat in the house.
I was happy to see that owner Vincent Riccobono--one of the truly fine gentlemen in the business--has left his pirate period behind. For the past several months, as a result of a rare malady that cost him his right eye, he wore a patch. With his artificial eye, he hasn't quite got his moves down yet. He bumps into things now and then. But he's smiling and very much back on the job.
No radio show today. Football has taken over again, and it will be a long time before the Saturday Food Show is back. Having nothing to do was a bad thing for me, and the worry about--what was it, anyway?--escalated.
I finally asked MA to take me to the emergency room. They checked me out thoroughly, including a CAT scan, EKG, and blood tests--all normal, except for one index: my blood pressure was astronomically high. No doubt panic was causing a lot of that, but even discounting that it was alarming. I inherited this from my mother. But I've kept it under control with two drugs. The ER doctor (a radio listener!) reassured me that it was normal for remedies to ratchet up as one gets older. In fact, he himself was on four blood-pressure medications.
I must have seemed like a gomer ("Get Out of My Emergency Room!") to them. But this is only my fourth visit to an ER. The other three were decidedly real--two broken bones and one burst appendix. So I don't feel too bad about it.
They sent me home with a new prescription. Mary Ann was miffed, with good reason: this had wasted six hours of her day.
We were both hungry, having had nothing to eat since nine hours ago. Pursuant to a laudatory call from a listener a couple of weeks ago, we went to Isabella's Pizzeria. It has been a long time since I was last there. The man who started it is Fikret Kazan, native of Istanbul, who operated a couple of excellent Middle Eastern restaurants, then a Mexican place. None of that did the business of a mediocre pizza place, however, and so now there are four Isabella's on the North Shore.
The salads were decent, and had I known that they came with a slice of sauceless pizza (they call this their garlic cheese bread, but it's pizza to me) I wouldn't have ordered the cheese pizza for the second course. One slice of that was enough for me. Ordinary crust, sub-ordinary sauce, and indifferent cheese. Who comes here? I wondered. Then came the answer. A baseball team of about twenty kids came in with their coaches. They had a great time eating kid pizza and watching the Olympics.
Isabella's Pizzeria. Covington: 1331 N Highway 190. 985-809-1900.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
