Sunday, August 14, 2011.
Fajitas And Churros.
We met up with Mary Leigh (who spent the night at her cousin's house) for lunch at her favorite Mexican place, La Carreta. This Hammond-based establishment seems to have revised its menu every time I go there, with more changes than usual in the current edition. I keep waiting for them to make the really big improvement that would come from more interesting sauces. The full line of moles, for example. But not this time around.
The best they showed me today was an excellent upgrade of their fajitas. They gave the city of Monterrey the credit for it, and bragged about its use of Certified Angus Beef and genuine skirt steak. All fajitas were once made with that cut, but the dish's popularity jacked the price up. Now fajitas is only occasionally made with its namesake beef cut, so this one stood out. The marinade/sauce was delicious with herbs, pepper, and garlic. The whole thing reminded me of the first carne asada I ever ate, back in the 1970s at an extinct little Honduran place on Magazine Street called Lempira. That meal left such an impression that I've looked for its like ever since. Today, I found it.
La Carreta had a couple of new desserts, too. Churros are the tubular beignets best known in Cuba but found widely in Latin America. The batter is extruded directly into the fryer--in this case, in six-inch lengths--and served with powdered sugar, some kind of syrup, or (as they did here) both. I'd say they overfried these to not only a crisp but a crunch, but that kept me from eating all of them. Which in a weird way is a favor.
The rest of the day went into a long list of miscellaneous jobs I must complete before Mary Leigh and I depart town Tuesday on our Chicago trip. One of these was executing a decision I've considered for a few weeks: to end the food forum I've edited on the web for the past fifteen years. It kicked up a lot of sand over the years. At some point in the early years of the World Wide Web, the conventions of posting anonymously and using invective as a conversational element became not only acceptable but common.
I used the skills I learned as a magazine editor and a radio talk show host to keep a lid on this. All the major (and best minor) forums on every subject excise crude, off-topic, and personal-attack forum posts. So did I. There were a few days when I had to delete more posts than I allowed. Enough people got janked off by my doing this that at least four other forums formed to object to my style. But no matter what these wannabes did, Talk Food With Tom Fitzmorris always led the leagues in posters, posts, topics, usefulness of information, and every other measurable index of excellence.
However, keeping high standards requires a lot of time. Every post had to be read. Some days this ran to fifty posts. Most of the time, we had around twenty active topics. Unfortunately, some of the most frequent posters were out-and-out cranks with agendas not particularly connected with the enterprise of finding good food and drink. Since everybody was anonymous, nobody was responsible for anything he or she said. Attacks on me and other posters always flowed, and had to be watched for and cut off. It was a terrible distraction from my other writing.
Well, I've had enough of it. I turned the board off yesterday. I am already getting a lot of e-mails--most, I'm happy to see, from people who are sorry to see it go but who understand the problem. The cranks will move to the boards des refusees, where there will be a momentary spike in activity as they inventory all my shortcomings. (An easy thing to do, because of the way I admit to them all in great detail in these diaries). Then they will settle back down into a dull background noise.
I will revive the messageboard down the line, but in a different form. I like the way that publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times attach forums to individual articles, so that posters respond to something specific, instead of whatever is rattling around in the minds of people with too much time on their hands.
La Carreta. Mandeville: 1200 W Causeway Approach. 985-624-2990.
It has been over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
