Sunday, January 9, 2011. Biscuits And Bacon. The Snow Passes Overhead. La Provence By Firelight. After three weeks portraying our little girl here at the Cool Water Ranch, Mary Leigh returned to her dorm at Tulane to begin her second semester. But not until I delivered on her request for a breakfast of freshly-baked biscuits and bacon.
While all that was cooking, the cat Twinnery demanded his share of whatever that was he was smelling in the kitchen. Mary Ann has spoiled my cat with leftovers--most notably scraps of ham from Thanksgiving. For years Twinnery was quite happy with dry cat food. No more. It's either bacon or fresh kill from the woods. And the mice and lizards and birds he likes are out of pocket this time of year.
The weather deteriorated as the day wore on. When it started raining and getting colder I checked the radar to see what was coming. It was an enormous band of precipitation across the our area and hundreds of miles to the north and east. Just over the Mississippi state line, the radar showed freezing rain. North of that, snow. This system would shut down much of the Southeast in the next day or two.
The threat of sleet had slowed business at La Provence. That's what they told me when I called for a reservation for dinner at five. Not that I expected to be shut out, but these days you never know. Just before calling them, I called Dan and Kathy Scott to see whether they might want to join us. They accepted happily. This was shaping up to be a fun evening.
They were in the bar when we arrived, and Just Joyce had already served them a round. Joyce was also busy loading chunks of wood into the fireplace, creating a very agreeable contrast with the cold rain outside. None of us were in any hurry to get anywhere.
Nor was the restaurant going to let us get hungry. The restaurant's signature chicken liver pate came out. I used to wonder about the sense of serving this. It's easy to stuff oneself so well with the pate that one isn't hungry for the real food. But I think I see what it's about. You eat the pate, and you drink a cocktail or a glass of wine. The two things are perfect together, and you want another round.
In the second round, Joyce brought over something she'd dreamed up. "It's a Provence 75," she said. Obviously a takeoff on the French 75 cocktail, named for a gun used to good effect against the Germans in World War I. "It's Cognac, lemon juice, Champagne, and homemade lavender liqueur," she explained. Indeed, a sprig of dried lavender stuck out of the goblet. It was very good.
Good enough that we didn't move. And here came a half-dozen grilled oysters on the shells, topped with something like the garlic butter you'd put on snails. Marvelous. A little plate of big shrimp awash in a creamy pink sauce that tasted like remoulade. And pissaladiere--a caramelized onion tart on thin pizza-like crust. I have had wonderful onion tarts before, but this is the third time I've learned that La Provence's version is not one of them. Needs to go back to the drawing board.
I think we sat around the cocktail table for an hour. We didn't have to go far for dinner: Joyce had a table set up for right there in the bar, close enough to the fireplace that I wondered whether Mary Ann might get overheated there. "Are you kidding?" she said. "This is perfect. I still have a lot of cold in my bones."
We had soup. La Provence's soupe de pistou is so heartwarming I get it almost every time I come. It's a vegetable soup with a little ham and a film of pesto across the top. I love this stuff, but I think MA liked it even better.
I returned to the bouillabaisse for the third or fourth time, and was reminded that this version is not the big, soupy bowlful of a tremendous amount of seafood, but a more modest serving (still plenty enough, of course) in a more intense if scarcer broth. I liked it better than last time. The ladies both went after a slightly-smoky pork loin with an intense, slightly-sweet sauce and vegetables. They both loved that. But Dan had what I thought was the dish of the night: a pair of duck roulades, with a mahogany duck reduction with potatoes, squash, and some other vegetables. Chris Kerageorgiou would have been proud.
We weren't thinking about dessert, but that didn't matter: they came anyway. A pear tart with caramel ice cream; the restaurant's great little round beignets with sauce anglaise; and a small but powerful chocolate torte with a raspberry sorbet.
The entire time, Joyce had been watching over us, chucking more wood into the fire, and writing a poem especially for us:
If I brought a tear
Or maybe a smile
If I made you stop for a moment
Or pause for awhile,
If my words in their mission
Succeeded at best
Then the poems that I penned
Has completed their quest.
As many times as I've dined at La Provence and been served by Joyce, this evening's visit will remain with me particularly. If it had been my first visit here, I'd remember it in vivid detail for as long as I lived. It's moments like this that make me glad I took up this pursuit.
La Provence. Lacombe: 25020 US 190. 985-626-7662.
