MARDI GRAS DAY!!!
Updated 11/27/07
If it's true that you are what you eat -
Then, today, I am still a big ol' turkey thing - on a French roll sammy this time;
with the dressing and the turkey, and my cran-jalepeno-peach -chutney kinda -relish and Trader Joe's Organic Mayo.
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On a Mardi Gras Day.
(Listening to a mix that includes everyNOLAthing from Lee Dorsey to Galactic, by way of the Dixie Cups, Satchmo, and Fess. God Bless New Orleans forever and ever.)

My most memorable Mardi Gras Day was spent in New Orleans - proper like.

I was living in Houston and working as a horse shoer. I had taken to making regular trips over to New Orleans- staying longer and longer as I went, and finding it harder and harder to return to Texas with each and every visit. Chickory coffee and Beignets, muffuletta sandies, shrimp po-boys and gombo, I was getting it and getting it good.

In the French Quarter (Dumaine St. specifically) on a lazy day the time before, I was taken by the most festooned and ornate wrought iron balcony I had ever seen. Resplendant and tightly wound with bead and shiny remnant, it was on exactly that balcony where I foist laid eyes on former circus star, personal friend of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and gentleman deluxe Robert "Buck" Steele". Robert and his lovely wife, who worked for the city's Convention Board as a French translator, were still living in the Quarter then. They have since moved out to Metarie, and I have lost track of them. I'm sad for that.
But they were in it then y'all, yes they were. And on that day, Robert - who wasn't shy in his 70's, especially with his wife who was in her 40's - spied my spying on his life and called out to me. "What are you looking at so hard down there?!" "Your beads. There's so many of them. You've lived here quite a long while huh." "That's true." he said, "and you have designs on these beads?" "Uh huh...I do."

("look at my king all dressed in red. I bet you five dollars he'll kill you dead")

That conversation lead to an upwards invite, a few cold beers (tea for him), and a long sit spell spent chatting about horses (he had ridden them - two-at-a-time and bareback, white hair flowing down his back, in the circus, in the 30's), about dogs, about big cats and about bears. The lions and bears part was mostly speaking about his children, who worked with them professionally somewhere else. We also talked about life and love, and we also talked about New Orleans, and we also talked about the old folks I had in MO., and about food, and it may have been in that order, but it might not have been. And it was real talk, between interested new friends, and it was with the first REAL friend I had in New Orleans. And it was the first of many.

("The bugle was playing a bugle call.....The bugle player was full of alchohol.....all on a Mardi Gras Day.")

My most memorable Mardi Gras Day was spent in New Orleans - with Robert and and his friends and family, at their invitation; all day long, all in the ' Quarter, breakfast mostly in bed w/soft-boiled eggs and toast and perfect coffee, brunch at a friend of theirs' place w everything and hollandaise over all of it, and a late lunch over there way later than lunch is usually, with perfect everything and more and more and more, and trips out to see the revellers, and trips back in to smoke and to rest for a minute before heading out again - into the very last of the Carnival Season, and dinner and a ball and an after-party...and then there was a long long sleep....and then a six hour drive back to nothing much....and a car wreck later that day worthy of it's own li'l story thing.

("everything I do gone be f-funky, from now on....yeah")

It would be a little later on that I discovered the food ways and means of Nathaniel Burton, Leah Chase and Chef Paul. I almost set a house on fire once, properly blackening flown-in redfish- indoors. My many geographical and spirit-social moves would and will be forever Kong with the shlep of cookbook and cast iron.

And I will never, ever, forget the magnificent man I knew - Robert "Buck" Steele; his wonderful companionship, his wisdom, and his desire to bring me into his family like a son. All in New Orleans, and all because this is a wonderful world we're living in.

Emory

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And as always with your cooking,
Do what you can in advance,
and re-season and/or re-medicate as much and as often as needed.

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