Thursday, April 12, 2012.
Orange Blues. Monster Poor Boy. Pinkberry.
The good half of the year for us orange-lovers is decidedly past. The Louisiana oranges had a short season and are long gone. We saw Florida fruit for the first time in nine years, but that didn't last long, either. Now it's all California, with their beautiful but thick, pithy skins. Carving one of them this morning was like trimming an extra-fatty brisket. The white stuff on the inside of the peel even looks like fat.
Mary Ann says I should quit whining and just eat the stuff, because of its fiber content. Fiber is necessary, of course. But nobody ever enjoyed the flavor of fiber.
The question on the radio show today was whether there was some commonly-consumed food out there that the listeners disliked intensely. The most hated food, according to our unscientific sample, is liver. That would have been my guess, even though I am a liver lover myself. Other much-disdained edibles included olives, tripe, beets, coconut and raw oysters. Nothing surprising there. But what is it about watermelon that caused so many of my listeners to say they don't like it? And a surprising number of correspondents said they don't like fish--period.
This show came from my home office. Tomorrow, I have a speaking engagement in front of a bunch of dentists at noon. That doesn't give me enough time to write a NOMenu newsletter in the morning, so I'll use today's freed-up commute time to get a jump on it.
A couple of weeks ago we were invited to the grand opening of a new Pinkberry frozen yogurt shop in mandeville. I ignore most such invitations, but our family's Los Angeles connection has caused everyone but me to not only get hooked on fro-yo, but to have a loyalty to particular brands. Pinkberry has been the holy grail for the Marys for the past couple of years, although lately they've been talking a lot about Yogurt Land on Prytania in the Upperline neighborhood.
The opening merged well with our supper plans, so we went. The main party was in a tent with wine, bubbly wine, beer, light beer, a disk jockey playing awful music way too loud, and samples of Pinkberry. I had three of them: pomegranate, mango, and coconut. It's good stuff, and even though it's made with minimal sugar and skim milk (Brown's Velvet, the owner told me), it addresses the appetite usually served by the likes of ice cream sandwiches. (My Pavlovian reaction to gassing up a car is to have an ice-cream-truck-style treat from inside to convenience store. I fight it off most of the time, but like the doughnut urge after church, it's always there.)
Mary Ann and I had our pictures taken inside a booth, and rolled a wheel of fortune to win a T-shirt. Meanwhile, the people without invitations to the gala in the tent were in line to get their first fixes of Pinkberry. I counted about thirty people waiting.
Before that, we shared a roast beef poor boy from Monster Po-Boys, a shop that's operated consistently in its nearly-invisible space for over twenty years. In fact, it's in its second generation. We sort of know the owners, because our kids and theirs were in school at Our Lady of the Lake at the same time. For no reason other than out-of-sight-out-of-mind, we haven't been there in ages. Mary Ann suggested it, probably because she's thinking of selling them an ad on the website. (We won't take ads from restaurant we don't think are good.)
The roast beef was clearly made in house, with a lot of debris in an excellent gravy, on fresh and toasted French bread. If I were looking for something to complain about, it would be that they don't put pickles on a dressed sandwich unless you ask. (But then they bring them right away.) The onion rings are thin-sliced and generously served, just the way we like them. One large poor boy fed the two of us generously. Big selection. I'll have to try some of their other varieties.
Pinkberry. Mandeville: 3460 Highway 190.
Monster Po-Boys. Mandeville: 1814 N Causeway Blvd. 504-626-9183.
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.
