Saturday, November 26, 2011.
Trey Yuen Upgrades. Tree.
I let the Christmas tree shake itself out last night, to get rid of a large number of brown needles caught in it, mostly from other trees. It started raining, but not before we could hustle the tree inside.
When I was a kid, the most dreaded part of Christmas was my mother's tirades about my father's inability to set the tree in the stand straight. She wanted perfection. That is unattainable, and my dad didn't have a lot of patience with such things to begin with. I am very thankful that none of our family's twenty-two Christmas trees have been crooked or tilted enough for Mary Ann to so much as mention it.
Until this year.
First, she insisted that I remove the tree stand that came with the tree--a loaner, really, that had to be replaced by our old one from last year. She wanted us to use the same stand we've always had.
We couldn't seem to get the tree to stand up straight in either stand, even though both Jude and I were working at the task. For a few tense minutes, memories of my mom's screeching at my dad replayed. Then we achieved good enough, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I had to leave then for a pair of book signings on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The first was at Bay Books, a fine little store in Bay St. Louis. Every visit there in the past has resulted in an astonishing number of sales, and so did this one. About thirty Lost Restaurants and ten Hungry Town's. Many radio listeners showed up, as did other writers. The Mississippi Gulf Coast has, I think, more writers per capita than anywhere else in the area.
The weather was gray and windy as I rolled east on US 90 along the beach. WROA--a Gulfport AM radio station at 1390--was playing my kind of music, a mix of standards and Christmas tunes sung by singers of standards. It was perfect for the mood.
The second signing session was at the Barnes and Noble in Gulfport. That's another store where I always sign a lot more books than seems logical. The rain coming from the west slowed that down a little, but not for Becke Collins. She holds the record for traveling on more Eat Club cruises than anyone but me and my family. She's always welcome, one of those people who starts a party just by showing up. She bought three books, to boot.
The rain was pretty bad for the drive home in the dark. It was one of those rare times when I wished I had a bigger car.
Jude called to begin making dinner plans. He and the Marys agreed on Bosco's--another on Jude's list of must-go restaurants on his rare visits home. I was still on the road when he reported that Bosco's had taken Thanksgiving weekend off. His next idea was Trey Yuen. The Marys have had issues lately with the big Chinese restaurant, and we don't go there nearly as much as we once did. But it is no easy matter to change Jude's mind.
It was a better dinner than we've had there in awhile. Frank Wong came out of the kitchen with his usual news and opinions. "My brother James retired," he said. James has been the main guy in the kitchen for a long time. "He's only working one day a week. To keep everything straight."
Frank said we had to have Chinese gumbo. Any description I could give would add nothing: it's Chinese gumbo, exactly. Then pot stickers, of course. When he was in single-digits, Jude would eat two or three and occasionally for orders of these fried dumplings. He doesn't anymore--he's watching his weight like everybody else. But he ate his share.
The dish of the night was what Frank said was a new approach to steak kew. It always was good here--made with ribeye steak, instead of the anonymous cuts most Chinese places employ. But he's taken it another step up, with filet mignon. This was wonderful, with pieces of steak at the outer limits of bite-size. I wonder if Chinese people have statistically stronger jaws for masticating the big pieces they fetch up with chopsticks.
Jude's entree was Presidential chicken--stir-fried, not deep-fried. Fried won tons and pork fried rice for ML, of course. Mary Ann picked off everyone else's plates under the guise of not eating.
Chinese restaurants have not historically done much with dessert. But the Wongs have a new one. Wontons stuffed with cream cheese and pineapple get fried, then sprinkled with powdered sugar. Kind of a Chinese beignet.
It's so long since we were last at Trey Yuen that the evening was nostalgic. The perfect mood for Christmas activities, to which we returned after dinner. Mary Ann pulled down the boxes of lights and ornaments from the shelf way in the back of the closet. That's her job, for some reason. Mine is to wind the strings of lights around the tree, plug them in, and replace bad bulbs. Jude pitched in and we got it done quickly.
We are running low on bulbs. At Walgreens a few days ago I wasn't surprised by the absence of bubble lights. I haven't found any of those for about five years now. But I was creeped out by not being able to buy standard Christmas bulbs. Everything is either LEDs or those maddening tiny bulbs now. My decades-old collection of lights is becoming antique.
I turned on some Christmas music. Later, the kids watched Elf while doing a jigsaw puzzle with MA, to her delight.
Tonight, for the first time, the possibility crossed my mind that this could be the last tree the four of us will decorate together. I don't think it will be, but that eventuality is coming. I don't even want to guess at the iterations that will follow that one.
Trey Yuen. Mandeville: 600 Causeway Blvd. 985-626-4476.
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.
