Saturday, June 25, 2011.
Radio Matinee. Wine Dinner At Carmelo.
WWL is taking a new approach to scheduling my Saturday radio show. Instead of bumping it entirely for the remotes they sell now and then, they just move my whole show later. Today's was on from two until five. There was no detectable difference in the volume of calls, except at the beginning. I don't know which is tougher to follow: The Cajun Cannon or Tommy Tucker. It's one or the other every Saturday.
Except for my spartan, mostly-liquid breakfast (orange juice, café au lait, some small bread), the only meal today was a wine dinner at Carmelo. Mary Ann and I felt we needed to be there, again to support our friends Carmelo and Karen, who lost their daughter Lucia a week ago. They were both back on the job, hosting the forty-person dinner as usual, if in a lower key. Carmelo seems to have returned to his usual ebullience, but all night people offered their sympathies.
The dinner was up to Carmelo's standards, but the wines were much better. One of them--the Rocco Di Monte Sassabruno, a super-Tuscan Chianti-style wine--was so good that I ordered three bottles of it to go. I thought it was a good deal at $23.
We started with a brilliant carpaccio of swordfish, served cool and translucent, with a topping of cold lentils, bell peppers, and lemon. Mary Ann doesn't go for raw fish, so I got hers, too.
A salad came with scatterings of walnuts, goat cheese, and a very good and offbeat orange vinaigrette. The orange juice was emulsified into the olive oil, and looked almost creamy. We both loved this. And we also agreed on the spaghetti alla Norma, a Sicilian dish with a rustic red sauce, cubes of eggplant sitting on leaves of fresh basil, and slices of ricotta salata over all.
The fish option for the entree was grouper. Mary Ann got that, and restated her position on grouper. She doesn't like it, and neither do I, usually. That's one reason why I went with the prime rib option. Third time in two weeks--and I don't really even like prime rib. My motivation was that MA loves the stuff, and so I was doing it for her. But she's feeling guilty about all this eating and what it's doing to her waistline.
Boy! It was so much easier when I was single and just pleased myself. But who said life was about finding ease?
Well, at least the prime rib was a good match with the Sassabruno. Apparently everybody else liked it as much as I did, because we drained the entire supply, and had to revert to the Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. Which was not the end of the world.
I liked the dessert: a mascarpone mousse with various berries. That wine was nice, too, if frivolous: Zonin Baccarosa, a slightly sweet Italian blush wine.
