We had originally planned to go somewhere for Mother’s Day, but the young lady who participated in making it my day was very busy making other mothers happy with beautiful cakes. I had a rather blissful day of near nothingness, until we had to start working.
My day started with the pleasure of watching my girl craft her masterpieces, buttercream flowers of every iteration and color for placement atop cupcakes and cakes. I am an unapologetic proud mama who takes great pleasure in the accomplishments of my chilluns.
I had to leave before it was done to get in the line at Mandeville Seafood. This place deserves a line like this, which literally snakes through the parking lot. With the best quality everything, including employees, their excellence is clearly recognized. A strategy is required here. After passing twice on the line last week, my Mother’s Day plans hinged on products from there, so I had to brave the line. Doors opened at 10am, so 9:40 seemed adequate, right?
Wrong. There were already 15 people in the line, half of them with open ice chests for live crawfish, who would order then take a green number and wait at their car for a staff member to deliver the sacks. A very nice young man coordinates this madness as the door attendee. There is a traffic jam in the parking lot, so people walk from across the highway.
When I got to the front of the line by stopping on each blue” X” on the floor, I ordered salmon fillets, some snapper, boiled shrimp, raw shrimp, crabmeat and raw oysters. I stopped at the store on the way home for parsley and french bread.
In the refrigerator was a container of BBQ shrimp compound butter from GW Fins that we got when we picked up the scallops. We also have the caper butter from the scallops. The caper butter will be used for the snapper, but today we dumped the cold compound butter on the raw shrimp and set it in the oven. No butter, no measuring pepper. I had complete confidence this would be fabulous, and it was. We used 3 pounds of raw shrimp and a dusting of salt. We will definitely get this again.
I made some Commander’s Palace-style garlic bread which I regretted, because the Fins sauce needed no accompaniment. This could not have been a more pleasing meal to me for Mother’s Day. I will never use my own recipe again.
From there it was back to work, with much production to do for the new show (weekdays live 2-4pm WGSO 990 AM) punctuated by a wonderful break with some little ones on the west coast.
