Sunday, March 4, 2012.
Chicken On The Grill.
Cold last night, down into the thirties. That's a fifty-degree change in forty-eight hours. But the day became beautiful under a brilliant clear sky. It is March, after all.
Mary Leigh came home for an afternoon visit (they seem to get shorter and shorter). Her first idea was lunch at her usual: La Carreta in Mandeville. But Mary Ann declared that it was too nice a day for us not to cook outdoors at home.
"Tell me how to make smoked chili pepper salad dressing," MA asked me, as she sliced open and deseeded a bunch of peppers, the sharp fumes burning her nostrils.
I had no idea what she had in mind. I'd never heard of such a thing. She hadn't, either. Not in a magazine, a restaurant, or a cookbook.
"Aren't we supposed to be creative?" she asked. Yes, I said, but first you have to be able to conjure a mental flavor that sounds good. I let her take it. The first batch was painfully hot--and in the sneaky way, the pungency appearing fifteen seconds after you'd sampled the stuff and thought it was safe.
"You'll have to add at least a quart of salad dressing to that to make it edible," I told her. There was about half a cup in the food processor.
I left that to her, and got to work firing up the Big Green Egg and coating the chicken with seasoning. Mary Leigh arrived with a new grill top for the Egg--something we've needed for some time. Today, the rust on the old one had become intolerable.
Mary Ann suggested we try some of the barbecue sauces given to her by Neil McClure, who has opened a pop-up barbecue restaurant at Dante's Kitchen. I liked the Memphis-style sauce best of the three, but "NOLA East" sauce was the most memorable. It was in an Asian style, with a fruity sweetness and a major blast of red pepper heat. Not quite as hot as MA's salad dressing, but close.
We ate on the deck, which was now in shadow and getting chilly. Mary Leigh grumbled about the usual things, the primary one being that the boys at school are not coming on to her according to the exact script she needs to hear in order to respond in any way. I tried to reassure her by telling her that this has been the case for every generation, but that was the predictable waste of breath.
After our daughter left to return to Tulane, MA returned to the project that's eating all her time: putting the finishing touches on her book. She says it will be out by Mother's Day. Her designer has given the book a terrific look, and Mary Leigh has added a lot of drawings. Now all that's left to be done is to find the money to print it (she insists that we must do it ourselves) and to sell them. But I now know to keep my nose out of this endeavor.
I spent most of the day on a new introduction to the website. It has a chart which, when filled in, purports to identify what the person doing the filling expects from the restaurants he or she dines in. The chart can be found from the home page (www.nomenu.com) by clicking Home, then About.
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.
