Thursday, May 20. Seared Scallops. Audis. Pizza. The third of our series of broadcasts from the showroom of New Orleans Audi. We're putting on the full court press to persuade people to take a look at the cars today. We have another major chef cooking and serving food: Michelle McRaney, the longtime (longer than anyone else) top kitchen authority at Mr. B's. She brought sea scallops the size of petit filets mignon. Amazing. She seared them in butter in a pan and plopped them into cheese grits. Both parts were the delicious, but more people talked about the grits. That's probably because you know sea scallops of this size will be wonderful, but grits is so quotidian a dish that it amazes when it's excellent. Mary Ann gave me the scallop and ate a double order of the grits.
A funny thought crossed my mind, but I kept it to myself. Instead of using drilling mud to stop up the BP oil well, how about cheese grits? You have to think outside of the box.
We had a second attraction: pairs of $85 tickets to the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience Grand Tasting next Friday. Take a test drive, and get 'em. We had fifteen sets. I thought they'd go in the first hour. But we had some left over at the end of the broadcast. I apparently am not as good at drumming up interest in cars as I am in food. I can understand this. I am happy with modest cars, and have owned nothing else. (Other than the cars driven by the Marys, who don't let me drive them.) I think people can pick up on my lack of ardor. I cannot hide what's on my mind. I would be a terrible poker player. This is also why I will never write a recipe for shrimp Creole (unless someday I have a revelation as to how to make the dish edible).
The two scallops and one plate of grits really had me full enough that I could have gone home with no supper. But I couldn't bring myself to do that, since this was the perfect day to make a stop at Parran's Po-Boys. They keep buying more and more commercials on my radio show (even the expensive Saturday edition). I can sell poor boys. But to keep the live commercials interesting, I have to get a new impression of the place now and then.
I didn't have a poor boy. I'm sold on those. I came for the newly-added pizza. I ordered my standard test pizza: basic cheese. It was misshapen, more an oval than round. This is a good thing. Show me a perfectly round pizza, and I'll show you a really bad pizza punched out, pre-baked, and frozen in a factory.
I took a seat in the spartan dining room. It looked better than I remembered, actually. Looks like some pain and some furnishings have been added. The tables and chars were better than I remember, too. But a neighborhood café shouldn't be too fancy.
Al Hornbrook, the owner, came to the table. He said he knew I was there because he recognized my voice when I placed the order. I hear that often, but don't understand it. To me, I have a normal male voice.
Whaffo' da pizza? "We used to have it," Al said, "But the guy who was making them left to do something else, and we stopped. But he came back, so we have them again."
He told me that the dough and the sauce are made from scratch. No surprise, because that's how everything is there. The pizzas are baked in a standard convection oven. "I'd like to have a pizza oven, but we don't have the room in the kitchen."
The pizza was good, and proved again that those screen-bottomed pizza pans don't work as well as baking the pizza right on top of a really hot pizza stone in a 500-degree oven, with no pan at all. The bottom of the crust could have used a more crispness. But it tasted like a good yeasty pizza dough should, and the sauce had all the pepper and garlic I like to find.
Parran's Po-Boys. Metairie: 3939 Veterans Blvd. 504-885-3416. Sandwiches. Platters.
