Thursday, August 12, 2010. Unexpected Game, Forgettable Burger. The cat Twinnery doesn't always eat the animals he catches, but he apparently has a taste for rabbit. Only the inedible parts of the one he caught and killed last night were outside the door this morning. And the dog Suzie was inside all night, so I know it wasn't her.
I was supposed to spend some time with the production crew of the Today Show. They're threatening to put me on the air during a visit to New Orleans for the Katrina anniversary. But our meeting and all sorts of things was canceled yesterday because another tropical storm was projected to move through New Orleans today. It looked almost exactly like the storm that came through a few weeks ago. And, like that one, it fizzled out in the Gulf before it got here.
The winds did, anyway. The rain was more convincing. Six inches poured down in some spots, mostly on the south shore of the lake. It was all reason enough to scrap the plan Mary Ann was hatching for me to fly out to Los Angeles tonight. Tomorrow our entire family of four would travel to Las Vegas, eat at Emeril's Delmonico Steakhouse, spend two nights, and dig the town. Nobody in our family has been to Las Vegas except Mary Ann, who acquired a taste for the place in the early 1980s, when she worked for a couple of years at the Grand Canyon.
But the storm here took that off the table. I won't be going to the West Coast at all, but just stay here in the rain while the rest of the gang roams around California shopping and eating. As disappointing as I'm making that sound, in fact I am enjoying my loosened-up days without the radio show.
And I'm getting a lot done on a project I didn't have time for. NOMenu.com currently operates in an outmoded paradigm that requires me to do everything manually. My attempts to make the move to database-served operation--complete with search capability all over the place, which my readers have been asking me for for years--has been stymied.
But I've had a breakthrough. I love when that happens. And I know too well how frustrating it is when it doesn't. I started school early--I was five through most of first grade--and for the first month or two I was flunking arithmetic badly. Sister Eugenia was about to move me to primer (that's what they called kindergarten at St. Augustine School in Treme), when I had some kind of leap of insight. Suddenly, I got it. And from then on my papers always had Excellent checked at the bottom.
Well, it's happened again. I see the logic of what has puzzled me all this time. Puzzle is the perfect word. One of the crossword puzzles I work every week is so difficult that it sometimes takes days for me to get through it. I never look anything up, and I don't have the answer key. But sooner or later, I always get it. One just has to stick with it.
I didn't know where I'd have dinner when I headed out to eat. I wound up at the Times Grill. I haven't been there in a long time, and with good reason: I've never had a good meal there. But they were due for another hopeful look.
The rain was really pouring down, and I couldn't get a nearby parking spot. When it slacked off, I found the restaurant packed. The hostess said that the only table she had was near the kitchen, and I wouldn't be able to see the television screens well from that vantage point.
"No problem," I told her. "I need the light to read, and I don't watch television anyway."
She looked at me as if I'd just said, "Let me ask the stuffed monkey in my pocket if that's okay with him." But she cheerfully led me to the table. And then I saw why there were so many people here, and why a view of the television was an issue. The Saints were playing their first game of the season. Already? It seems like only yesterday that they won their third Super Bowl.
The Times Grill has a few platters on the menu, but the main specialty is hamburgers. They're the big ones with the gourmet cachet (for everyone except gourmets, of course), with prices in the near neighborhood of ten bucks. The one that looked most interesting was the All Jacked Up model, which is dressed with grilled onions and pepper jack cheese. The meat pattie was perfectly round and squared off at the top and bottom. It was topped by two slices of supermarket-grade pepper jack cheese. The onions were in big slices, innocent of even a hint of browning. Shredded lettuce, tomato, pickles. The soft bun couldn't support the load it bore. I had to cut it in half to keep it from falling apart. Every part of this sandwich was in need of tremendous improvement. I remember its being better than this.
The Saints lost, the paper said the next day. But while I was there a lot of cheering was going on. I meant to check the score before leaving, but I didn't.
Times Bar & Grill. Mandeville: 1896 N. Causeway Blvd. 504-626-1161. Sandwiches. Hamburgers.
