This Is The Stuff, A Tale of Two Restaurants

Every now and then, it becomes necessary to head over to Louisiana and visit my old pal Mr. LeJeune for some of his superb meat products, most notably garlic sausage and tasso. In the 40 or so years I've been making this trip, a lot has changed. There are, for instance, more and better places to stay. There's been a resurgence of pride in the local culture. And these two things have resulted in a lot more tourism. Which is a good thing (for the locals making money off of it) and a bad thing. Which we'll get to in a minute.

Now, last week it became essential for me to get out of town before I lost my mind. You know, mostly the same thing that's been oppressing all of us Americans, but also the fact that I just wanted to be somewhere else, even for a short time. I had a short visit to San Francisco in January that was pretty unsatisfactory for the most part (some day I'll realize that that place and I just don't get along, plan the trip so as to get what I wanted done, see who I wanted to see, and leave before my blood pressure gets too much of a workout), but nothing since then. With little money, but my flexible work schedule (I'd just finished the next-to-last chapter of The History of Rock & Roll, Vol. 2) it boiled down to a quick drive to Lafayette, overnight in a hotel, visit Mr. Le Jeune the next morning, and come back here.

It's a long trip, but my friend K said she'd like to join me, to keep me from nodding off or becoming too tired along the way. The only downside is that, as in San Francisco, my sense of taste and smell is still intermittent. I'm probably going to have to go see the only doctor who's actually treated me for it successfully, and he's in France. (American doctors, motivated by greed, want to do an operation that works briefly, then shuts off the sense for the rest of your life. I don't want that, thanks. And a flight to France would be way cheaper than the operation, as would be the price of the medications.) These days, though, it's been clearing up in the mornings most days, so that was a plus.

The drive out was hellish, mostly due to a stretch east of Houston, where we sat while three lanes folded into two somewhere around Bay City. We got in to Lafayette about 5 and checked in to a place I'd stayed at before, the Hilton, a giant high-rise and probably the tallest building in town. The last time was in the late '80s, when it was the only decent hotel in town, and I spent most of a day fighting food poisoning I'd gotten at Mulate's, which had once been a decent place to eat before they started courting the still-rare tour-bus crowd.

The hotel's now a Doubletree By Hilton with modernized decor, and it was filled with pre-teen baseball players and their parents, but that didn't matter: I passed out for a half-hour nap as soon as the bed was within striking range. I woke, refreshed, and then the next decision was where to eat. Weirdly, in the middle of a place famous for its food, there weren't many choices. I didn't want to drive too far from Lafayette, like to Breaux Bridge, and crawfish season has been over for a while, so it was a problem. Both of us were dressed fairly casually, which left out Café Vermillionville, which was getting kind of long in the tooth anyway. What remained wasn't very inspiring to say the least: there was a chain called the Blue Dog Café, an annoying reminder of the late George Rodrigue, who made an empire out of a cutsey cur (he was an okay painter before the dog took over his life, but not nearly as good as Francis Pavy). The only remaining choice seemed to be something called the Bon Temps Grill, which Tripadvisor rated #1 in the city and which happened to be real near the hotel. So the Bon Temps it was.

Now, from a cursory glance at the website, I knew this wasn't going to be traditional Cajun food, but food -- described as "swamp edge cuisine" -- that took from Cajun traditions and worked with them. Fine with me. My taste buds had shut down, but that was nothing new. The place was hopping when we got there, so it was evidently popular, and the waitress was top-notch. The only warning of what was to come was a basket of cold, dry garlic bread slapped onto the table first thing. K wasn't very hungry, so she ordered the seafood stuffed mushrooms as a main and a side-salad. I saw remoulade shrimp, which is a traditional dish, albeit from New Orleans, and since I'd only made it myself years ago (and, I should add, made it well), I ordered that, along with a stuffed pork chop, something I'd discovered at the long-gone Stop & Shop supermarket in Lake Charles ages ago. The butcher there was a genius, and his boudin, beef tasso smoked on mahogany, and stuffed pork chops were sublime.

Well, the food came quickly, my shrimp and her mushrooms, followed too quickly by the salads, which caused the waitress to come apologize for that lapse. I assured her that it wasn't as if they'd get cold. My shrimp seemed to taste okay, though, although I could only barely discern the taste, but K was irate: here were these mushroom caps with, well, basically a lump of bread on them, surrounded by supposed tasso-and-pepper gravy that was indistinguishable from the stuff you get on a chicken-fried steak. I soon found out, too, that the shrimp were done like guacamole in a bad Mexican joint: piled on a mountain of shredded lettuce. Then came my pork chop. It was a pork chop. It was thick. Instead of being sliced lengthwise and filled with stuffing, there was a hole a little bigger than a quarter with a tiny plug of stuffing wedged into it. The pork chop was pretty good, but hey, I grill pork chops at home all the time. Annoyingly, they also provided a knife to cut it with that was like a cutlass.

It was while I was sawing away at the chop that K noticed something. "This music is fake," she said. "I don't recognize any of it." What she meant was that the Muzak, which was blues, wasn't the original recordings. And she was right: just then some song I did recognize played, and it was...off. The whole thing left me puzzled. We paid our bill and left, full but unsatisfied.

The next morning the idea was to get to Eunice to see LeJeune before noon and head back, but as usual that's not the way it happened. But there was another restaurant I'd seen on my last trip over that interested me and from what I could tell, it was breakfast and lunch only. The name, though, worried me a bit: T-Coon's. I remember being shocked 35 years earlier by discovering a guy named T-Neg in the Cecilia, Louisiana phone book (slightly smaller than a monthly issue of Reader's Digest). But then I remembered the word "coonass" referring to Cajuns. A lot of them don't like it; some claim it's derived from a regional French word, conasse, meaning a stupid woman, or silly bitch, according to my French dictionary. But the front of the restaurant shows a coon stirring a black pot. And anyway, a decent breakfast is the hardest thing to find in these parts, so we went. Again, the place was packed. Unlike the night before, though, my nose was playing nice, and the smell was excellent. So was the Mellow Gold coffee, a coffee/chicory blend, light on the chicory, that's the house java.

K still wasn't hungry, but she ordered a sausage-and-biscuit combo. The waitress asked her if she wanted pork sausage or a link and I urged the link: that's what we were here for. I was intrigued by the courtbouillon omelet. To me, courbouillon was always (in Cajun cooking: it's a whole different thing in French) a fish stew with a roux-based tomato sauce served over rice. The waitress said it was mixed seafood with a sauce in an omelet. Okay, I'll take it, with a biscuit and grits, which I wasn't going to eat much of. While we waited, I picked up a box of seasoning from the table. It was T-Coon's The Stuff. Okay, I'd seen and used Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning for years, and on one of my recent visits I'd stopped at the Slap Ya Mama! store in Ville Platte on a Cajun friend's recommendation and bought a box of their seasoning, which was a bit better.

The breakfast came, and I noticed a nice touch: both biscuits were wrapped in some paper: old timey! But...where was the butter? K surfaced out of hers long enough to say "It doesn't need any." I took a bite. She was right. And, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I very lightly dusted the grits with The Stuff. Quite different from the others. But enough carbs: this omelet was sending my nose a message that my mouth needed to investigate. The courtbouillon turned out to be much thicker than I was used to, but the mixture of catfish, crawish, and shrimp, not to mention the seasoning, was exquisite.

As we were enjoying the meal, a guy with a T-Coon's shirt that said David on it came over to ask how we were doing. Then he asked where we were from  and K said "Austin." "Well," said David "I'll try to keep from makin' any librul jokes." A chorus of grunts came from behind me, and a couple of ominous chuckles. (I later saw that it was a quartet of gentlemen in camo, either Army or National Guard). I told him that his coutbouillon was different than what I'd encountered before and he was off, talking with passion about how he was about to raise his prices 12 ½ percent because he refused to stint on quality. "That's a quarter pound of crawish goes into each omelet. I have those links made by a friend over in Abbeville to my own recipe. The catfish comes from over in Mississippi and it's fresh, not frozen." It was a nice little conversation.

"I'm gonna change your life," he told me. "I'ma give her a box of The Stuff, and when she starts adding it to your food, well, look out: things are gonna get a lot better for both of you." And he told the waitress to make sure she gave K a box of it.

There it is: The Stuff

By avoiding politics and other minefields, I was rather liking David, because without mentioning tradition, he was still passionate about it. (You can see more of this passion on the front page of his website). As I waited in the car for K to finish smoking -- she only takes a few puffs, but puff she must, and she does it outside, not in the car -- I saw the list of daily lunch specials painted on the front of the restaurant: smothered rabbit, short-rib fricassée, smothered chicken and okra, and that courtbouillon on Fridays. But it was getting on, and we still had to vacate the hotel and get to Eunice.

We did, and now I have 20 lbs of sausage and tasso in the fridge waiting to be packed into freezer bags and frozen, except what I'll use to make red beans and rice (without rice) for dinner tonight. But before I press "publish" on this, I've been thinking about Cajun culture, tradition, and Americans.

My takeaway is this: As I've long realized, Americans are so alienated from their own country by this point that they usually don't know where they are. Oh, sure, they can check their phones and use Google Maps, but that's not where they are. The thousands of people who've moved to Austin since I last lived here, they don't know where they are, either. They've bought into the marketing slogan of keeping Austin weird, mouthed the slogan about the live music capital of America, but they don't know how it got that way in the first place, nor why it actually isn't either of these things any more.

And Americans who go to Cajun country don't know where they are, either. They come to Lafayette and stay there, possibly because they're attending a Ragin' Cajuns football game or doing oil business (not much of that left), or whatever. Few of them have even a superficial knowledge of where they are: the imagery in their heads are of alligators, crawfish, Blue Dogs, and swamps dripping with Spanish moss. There are accordions and fiddles involved somehow, probably to play blues, because the often-subtle distinctions between Cajun and Creole music is of no interest. They probably think Dr. John, Mac Rebbenack, is a Cajun. They don't understand the distinction between New Orleans and Lafayette, let alone New Orleans and Grand Mouton, Eunice, or Ville Platte. And ultimately, this is sad, especially if they spend more time there than we did this time. So they go to the Bon Ton and get their buttons pushed, no matter that it's a mediocre joint just a bit above a fast-casual restaurant. They hear piped-in blues, no matter that that's not the local indigenous music (hey, shaddup, Eddie Shuler), no matter that it's 21st century remakes by the Muzak Corporation or that ilk. They go away happy.

In no way will they want to engage with David Billeaud and T-Coon's, unless they happen in by mistake, in which case they'll be wary and a bit conservative about what they order and then be surprised that it's as good as it is. They're not going to get his cultural conservatism (not to mention his background music, which is mostly zydeco: I recognized two versions of "Hip et Tai-yo," both, I think, by Clifton Chenier), or understand why he'd rather raise his prices than compromise his quality. And if they got to talking politics, well, who knows?

Mr. LeJeune up in Eunice is just as culturally conservative as Billeaud is. He even makes ponce, a rarity which is sausage meat stuffed into a pig's stomach and smoked. I bought one last time I was there but couldn't find anyone to eat it with me. It was, unsurprisingly, excellent. I have no idea what his politics are, and after 35 years, I don't give a damn. Some things are above that, and these men have that figured out. They're members of their community, they practice their faith (which is Catholic: another ominous thing is the incursion of evangelical fundamentalism in Cajun culture, which could erase it before you know it), they interact with their neighbors, like the soldiers and the table of teachers who were finishing up when we walked in. And when I interact with them and their kind, I know where I am, know I'm a visitor who's treated with respect because I treat them with respect, as I would if they were visiting me. This is what's increasingly being lost in this country, as we tribalize and march towards one-party rule and fascism. It's an emergency, like so many other things happening at the moment, and an emergency that's so small it risks getting lost. I feel it because I don't feel at home in Austin, and haven't since returning almost five years ago, so it's a personal emergency for me.

Anyway, that's my takeaway. That and a box of The Stuff.

Thanks, Henry!

Monday morning, I got up, ate breakfast, and started the coffee, after which I headed into my office to see what disasters had befallen the world since last night. I also checked the e-mail and, as usual, one of the mails was my daily news digest from the New York Times. And there, in the obits, was the headline:

Henry Chung, Who Helped Bring Hunan’s Flavors to America, Dies at 98

I looked at the coffee cup I'd grabbed. 

One side

The other side

After I got over the shock of the coincidence, I had one of those "I had no idea he was still alive" moments, but I knew the Hunan Restaurant still existed because I'd attempted to go there with a couple of friends a year or so back. It being Easter weekend, it was closed. My friends were a bit skeptical: they'd heard it wasn't as good as it had been. But that just made me want to go more: in the novelty-obsessed world of San Francisco (and elsewhere) foodie-ism, there's always a rush to find the newest, the latest, and the most authentic. The Hunan fulfilled only one of those slots in the 21st century. 

I read the obit with interest. I'd known Henry, but not known a lot about him. Of course, it was impossible to go to the restaurant without knowing Henry: he was as friendly and garrulous a man as ever walked the earth, and it was clear that the restaurant was a mission. I know, because I was an early convert. 

When the Hunan first opened, I was working at City, a magazine where a bunch of ex-Rolling Stoners were working, which was, I surmise from looking at the map, on Pacific just off of Columbus in the bit of San Francisco where Chinatown blends into North Beach. Of course, Broadway is the official boundary, but even back then it was getting blurrier, and the stretch of Kearny between Portsmouth Square and where Columbus crossed it was a bunch of nondescript businesses, as well as a couple of bars and restaurants nobody in their right mind would enter at any time of day. In other words, rent was cheap, just the thing for an ambitious Chinese restaurant startup. I think the only reason Michael Goodwin stopped in there was because it was a new place, not as obviously trashy as its neighbors. Michael was from New York, and he was Jewish, so the soul-food element may have figured in. Or maybe he was just on his way to a deli and passed the exhaust fan. 

In any event, he came into the office, raving. "Hey, check this out!" He had one of those classic cardboard takeout containers with the wire handle. And, when he opened it, an amazing odor came from within. "What is it?" "Smoked ham and vegetables from this new Chinese place." "Wow, where is it?" "That's the best part; it's just around the corner!" And so it was. 

I don't want to pretend that City's patronage at lunch established the Hunan as a hip place to eat, but I do think that the money we spent there was part of what made Henry able to make the rent at first. But only at first: Within a year, it became the first restaurant I'd ever seen that had a line in the street. It didn't hold many people: there were a number of tables ingeniously squidged into the irregular space and a much coveted counter where you could watch Henry and his family prepare the dishes. What you couldn't do was find out what some of the stuff he was using was. Michael innocently asked him one time what kind of wood he used to smoke his ham (and duck) and Henry threw back his head and laughed. "I'm not gonna tell you that!" he said. (Probably this was because he was doing it himself, illegally, if the tale he tells in his cookbook -- that he steamed American bacon or used Canadian bacon -- is to be credited: I know what those things taste like, and, well, no. And, of course, there was the duck.)

My friends and I were frequent enough visitors that he stopped warning us "That's hot" or "Lotta garlic in that one." We'd just say "GOOD" and he'd chuckle and get to work. I can't even remember all of the stuff I enjoyed there over the years. Scallion pancakes, for one. Wow, they were a revelation, although they're common enough these days. Dungeness crab, in season, treated far less politely than the garlic-butter-and-parsley treatment it got at Fisherman's Wharf, and spectacular for what Henry'd done to it. We had a protocol for dining there: if the line hadn't reached Washington by the time we arrived, we'd stand. Two people around the corner and it was too late. Four years after he opened, he'd acquired another property on Sansome, a cavernous place where there was never a problem getting a seat, which is not to say it was often very empty. Same good food, just a long line of woks to prepare it in. 

Shortly after opening the new joint, Henry, with the help of Tony Hiss, a journalist who specialized in China, put out a cookbook. 

My copy

I went down there right away and bought one. 

He got the tall part right

But, with California at my feet and Chinese markets just across the bridge from where I lived, I never made anything out of it. Why should I? Henry and his team did it better than I ever could. In fact, I never attempted any Chinese cooking when I lived in California. Again, why should I?

The reason came to me about a year later, when I packed up everything I owned (including Henry's cookbook) and moved to Austin, a true Chinese food desert. (It pretty much still is.) I may have tried my hand at Chinese, but I never really got it. I did, however, return to San Francisco in 1980 on a visit and I must've eaten at the Hunan, because I got the coffee cup. Somewhere in its peregrinations, it got chipped, as you can see, but the damage wasn't enough to toss it. Anyway, it brought back good memories. 

Another thing I may have picked up on that trip -- or a subsequent one -- was a jar of Henry's Hunanese chile paste. I still wasn't cooking Chinese food because Austin had only one store, on Airport Boulevard, that stocked the necessities and because none of the Chinese cookbooks I had seemed do-able. But I brought it back as a memory aid or something. At any rate, it was in my possession when the Austin Chronicle, to which I was contributing a food column as Petaluma Pete, ran an issue on picnics. I was asked to come up with a couple of recipes and wound up making one of the most inspired mistakes of my career when I made a potato salad out of The Vegetarian Epicure book and accidentally started one recipe and finished it with the recipe on the facing page, all made better by my using green New Mexican chiles. Boy, that was good! And, inspired, I then invented Chinese cole slaw, by taking Henry's "rich salad dressing" recipe and dumping it into the slaw mixture. Wow. 

I finally learned Chinese cooking in Berlin, driven by necessity and using a five-euro Ikea wok. They're not bad learners, although you burn through them soon enough. Eventually I acquired a spun-steel wok like you're supposed to use and got good with the help of cookbooks by Fuchsia Dunlop and the folks at the Big Bowl, a chain I've never even seen, but whose book wound up in my hands. Poor Henry, relegated to the never-used category. 

Nowadays, I almost never eat Chinese food at home: my diabetes flares up with rice and rice products  in a way it doesn't with wheat, although I don't eat much of that, either. Most East and Southeast Asian cuisines also use a lot of sugar. I tend to save my breaking of the diet with Chinese food for the incredible Cuisine Szechuan in Montreal. But Henry's passing sent me to the bookshelf for his book, and I see that a lot of the recipes in it don't call for sugar at all. Hmmm...

And I realize now that Henry Chung is one of my heroes. He was almost 60 that day he signed my cookbook, and he lived to be 98, making people happy and building a little empire of Henry's Hunans with his sons. Hell, he was in his late 50s before he even got started! If that's not something to aspire to I don't know what is. So I raise a glass (but, forgive me, not of one of those awful Chinese spirits) to Henry, and thank him for his life. And for you, I'll tell you how to make Chinese cole slaw:

Henry's Rich Hot & Sour Dressing 

2 Tablespoons sesame seed paste (or crunchy peanut butter)

2 Tablespoons soy sauce

4 Tablespoons vinegar (I'd use rice vinegar here)

1 Tablespoon hot red pepper oil

1 teaspoon hot red pepper powder (you could also use Hunanese chile paste if you can find it to    substitute for these two ingredients)

½ teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon sugar (optional)

1 Tablespoon sesame oil

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1 Tablespoon finely minced fresh ginger

1 Tablespoon finely minced garlic

1 Tablespoon finely minced scallions

1 Tablespoon white wine (the book was written before Shao Shing became widely available, and I'd suggest that instead)

1 teaspoon hot mustard (optional)

½ teaspoon salt

1-2 cups chicken broth

Combine. Dump over slaw vegetables and let it sit a couple of hours, then mix before serving. 

Cajun Taco, Or, A Quick Weekend

A friend who's had a hard year deserved a birthday present, and I had a need to go back to Louisiana and finish the food-buying trip I started in October on my way back from the Ponderosa Stomp. So on Friday morning I picked up a car from Hertz and we blasted off for Lafayette. I expected some great Cajun food -- and I wasn't disappointed -- and what I emphatically did not expect was great Mexican food. But I got some.

I always have trouble with lunch when driving to or from Louisiana, and have never had a decent solution to it. Once, I stopped at Al T's in Winnie, which advertises itself as a Cajun restaurant but is instead a mediocre something kind of restaurant, an insult to Cajuns. Other times I've stopped in Houston at non-memorable joints, or just taken along a bag of nuts and stopped for a soft drink to wash them down.

And every time I've done this, just as Houston is fading in the rear-view mirror, I've seen this little clutch of Mexican seafood restaurants and thought "One day..." Well, one day came on Friday. We both decided this was the time I try one of them, and drove down I-10 until the next exit. Then we backtracked a couple of miles and pulled into the incredibly crowded parking lot of Ostioneria Arandas Seafood. The name was familiar, but the food sure was different from what the taquerias of the same name offer in Austin. There was only one choice for me as soon as I saw the menu: Cocktél Vuelva a la Vida. Many years ago, I briefly lived in Santa Monica, California, and frequently ate at a place called Lucy's Mariscos, on the second story of a building at a crossroads featuring a used tire place, a barbequed goat place (which for some reason I never tried) and a vacant lot. I always got the calamares rellenos, squid stuffed with rice and green peas, toothpicked back together, and smothered in a wonderful ranchero sauce. I've been searching for them ever since, as I've been searching for Vuelva a la Vida, which is a shrimp, oyster, squid, and octopus cocktail, the seafood swimming in a spicy tomato-based sauce, well-cilantroed, with bits of avocado mixed in, which I invariably ordered as an appetizer. Arandas' version of this was sweeter than Lucy's, with less avocado and cilantro, but all of the seafood was perfection, including the squid and octopus, which were perfectly prepared. My friend got one of the daily lunch specials, fried shrimp and stuffed crab, which came with one of the weird things this place offers: fried rice. Yup, like in a Chinese restaurant, with shrimp and mung bean sprouts. (There is also eggroll on the menu). I snagged a takeout menu on the way out, and noticed that this Arandas was indeed the same as the Taqueria Arandas joints in Austin, and there was a phone number on the back to get information on franchising. I think if Arandas opened an Ostioneria in Austin they'd be mobbed, and we'd finally have a first-rate Mexican seafood joint. We already have El Catedral de Mariscos next to a La Quinta on I-35 around Oltorf, but it's mainly fried stuff, and not very good at all. Okay, that's my free get-rich tip for today.

* * *

Louisiana was as wonderful as ever. First night's meal was gumbo and crawfish etouffée for me at Prejean's, and some kind of catfish with hollandaise and crab for her. Prejean's is an institution on I-45 just outside of Lafayette, although I'm sorry I never tried their main competition, Prudhomme's, run by Paul Prudhomme's sister, who died a couple of years ago and was acclaimed as a far better cook than her brother. 

The next day, we headed straight for LeJeune's Sausage Kitchen in Eunice, because last time I was there I hadn't bought enough tasso, and the small piece I had bought went bad in the refrigerator. They're closed on Saturday and Sunday, but I begged Mrs. LeJeune -- no, I'm lying: she told me that if I could get there by 10, she'd open up for me. And she did, saying "You should have bought a box," which I did. I promise, therefore, to show up on a weekday when I run out, which I will, because there is no better sausage anywhere in Acadiana, as far as I've been able to discern. 

We drifted into Eunice and looked around, checked out the Prairie Cajun museum (one of the six Jean Lafitte historical sites run by the National Parks Service) just behind the Liberty Theater, got a very good coffee at a small coffee shop, and then drove up to Mamou, where I took a sort of wrong turn -- the idea had been to go back to 190 and head east -- and saw that we'd stumbled on TBoy's, allegedly the home of the world's best boudin. Well, no longer allegedly: although my diabetes is the sort that goes nuts if I'm in the same room with a cooked grain of rice, I said to hell with it and bought a boudin ball, which is, to one way of thinking, a stupid idea when you could have a link, and, to my way of thinking, the only way I could check out TBoy's brag without causing a problem. Now that Johnson's Grocery in Eunice is extinct, this has to be the state of the art, and no MSG that I could detect -- and I detect it real good, I'm afraid, as I discovered when falling for the hype of the various places around Scott that people had recommended. 

We drove around trying to get back to 190, but with a whole afternoon to do it in and a glorious afternoon at that, getting lost in the back roads of the prairies, cruising past the flooded rice fields with the crawfish traps out, seeing beautiful old houses and the clouds floating above the fields, was hardly a hardship. And yes, we found 190, since we'd come almost to Opelousas, so I turned west and soon came upon a photo op I hadn't responded to last time. This place was apparently last known as the Southern Club, and that may have always been its name, but it's in poor shape and the last remaining big dance-hall around these parts that I know of. 

A real fixer-upper

But apparently they get their mail elsewhere

Further down the road Marc Savoy is still doing business (although a guy who wandered into the Jean Lafitte place was complaining that his hand-made accordions are now selling for $2300 -- and there's a waiting list -- which didn't seem too onerous to me), but he'd had his Saturday morning jam session and the place was locked up. There was a sign in typical grumpy Marc fashion saying that the jam session was for older musicians and youngsters were not welcome to jam, his way of saying that it was for traditional Cajun music only, and which, like a lot of what Marc says, could have been phrased in a, shall we say, kinder fashion. I'm not chastizing him, though, not for a second. He's been a bulwark while a culture rebuilt itself after the anti-French movement in the 1950s, and he's entitled. 

When we got to the outskirts of Eunice, I U-turned and we headed back towards Opelousas, as I searched for the location of the now-vanished Richard's Club near Lawtell, and in the process didn't stop to figure out a building which had a sign saying it was the Zydeco Hall of Fame, although I think it's probably a performance venue rather than a museum. Another one for next time. We did not stop in Opelousas for a fried chicken salad at the Palace, but headed straight for a hidden gem back towards Lafayette, Grand Couteau. I love this lost-in-time village, whose main street now has a bunch of tourist-oriented businesses, but running parallel to it is a short street lined with houses that mostly date to the 1840s, traditional architecture and Spanish moss-chinked walls intact (except for the one at the end of the street, which has an 1840 plaque on it and needs rescue tout de suite). We tried to top the afternoon off with a visit to Vermilionville, a collection of traditional Cajun structures from all over Acadiana, but it closes at 4, and as usual Google Maps was no help whatever, getting us there late, so we sat by the side of Vermilion Bayou and watched the costumed tour guides leave. 

Dinner that night was, of course, boiled crawfish at Hawk's, especially since my friend said she didn't see what was so great about boiled crawfish. Really? Oh, come with me, cher... My radar has really been good lately, and although I'd copied down instructions from their website, none of the route numbers matched. I did have their phone number, though, so I knew we could call if we got lost. But no, there were the hard-to-see signs directing us to the middle of nowhere (a more apt description for where the place is than "sorta near Rayne, but not really") and just as we pulled up, a departing gentleman offered us his parking spot. A short wait later, another Texan knew what was so great about boiled crawfish. That wasn't hard. 

* * *

We had to get back to Texas, though, so I pulled the car out of the parking lot and pointed us down I-10. And wouldn't you know it, just as we were both thinking it was time to get lunch, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Houston and saw the Bank of America building that was the signal to turn off for Arandas. However, we both agreed that finding one of the other seafood restaurants might be fun, so we drove past Arandas and pulled up at Tepatitlán, which also said they offered seafood. It was a much smaller offering, though, and the campechana, their version of Vuelva a la Vida, only featured shrimp and oysters, so we settled on the dish after which the restaurant is named, a plate of beef and chicken fajitas and three shrimp, also grilled. This was the right decision: I've rarely had beef fajitas that well prepared, the chicken was also fine, and only the shrimp -- which, let's face it, don't hold up well to this treatment -- was so-so. We'd accidentally asked for corn tortillas (flour are more traditional), and that was another discovery: thick, meaty, flavorful tortillas made in-house, some of the best I'd ever had. And two people splitting the order for one was perfect for lunch.  This strip in Houston is a very happy discovery. I'll gladly stop there next time. 

Ostioneria Arandas Seafoods, 10601 I-10 East Freeway, Houston, tel (713) 673-5522. 

Tepatitlán, 10337 I-10 East Freeway, Houston, tel (713) 676-0758. 

And Now What Happens Next...

I hit this blog so infrequently these days that I'm a bit ashamed. I do love to write, and here's my personal outlet, but as most of you know, I'm writing a book, and after a few concentrated hours doing that, well, I don't want to write anything.

However two weeks ago, I surprised myself by finishing the first draft. What that means, for those of you who don't have the exquisite joy of making the world's largest jigsaw puzzle out of the world's tiniest pieces (which is an apt way to describe the finding and stringing together all these facts) is that, to employ yet another metaphor, I've built the house, know where all the rooms went and built them there, the floors and ceilings are done, but now I need to do some decoration and landscaping so someone will want to live there. Ideally, this book will be both filled with facts and as readable as a novel. I have models for this but I'm loath to name them because I'm sure that I'll fall far short of them. But you will enjoy it.

It was an odd experience. There was a point when everything I was doing changed and I got a lot more into each chapter, and more entertainingly, than I had before. One of the things I have to do now is to go back to the beginning and start working with that mindset, as well as attending to this list of omissions and elisions: can you believe I neglected to mention Wanda Jackson? Neither can I. Please, nobody tell her; I'll make it good in the rewrite.

It also took nearly a year, a year of waking up, eating breakfast, drinking coffee while reading the news and the Well, and then attacking the stack of books, CD booklets, charts, and miscellanea, sometimes consulting three of them so I could write four words. I'd write for between 60 and 90 minutes most days, checking yesterday's work as a way of getting ready for today's, hoping that the opening I'd given myself to hint at the next bit of the narrative was sufficient to keep it going. At night, I'd read books related to the work, some excellent (Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric!), some dull, and at least one, an authorized biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, disgraceful. Once a week, if I could, I'd take a day off and take care of errands, swabbing the decks, changing the oil, or just plain doing nothing. The only other interruption to the routine was having to do a couple of Fresh Air pieces, both writing and recording them. The recording day would be a day off, since it was usually around noon and on the UT campus. But most of the rest of the time I was writing.

And, as such a routine usually does, it brought me to the end of the first bit of the labor. But I'm not quite ready to get to the second part because my brain's filled up with what went before. So tomorrow morning I'm going to get into my car and start driving. My goal is Clovis, New Mexico, best known as the headquarters of Nor-Va-Jak Studios, Norman Petty's recording operation, where a generation of Panhandle stars -- Buddy Holly most notably -- recorded. The next morning I'll drive a few more hours and be in Santa Fe, staying until I've checked out the Saturday morning farmers' market, and then turning around and arriving back here in Austin on Sunday. I will do nothing music-related, and try to wipe my brain clear so that when I look at what I've accomplished so far next Tuesday morning, I'll be able to get to work with the concentration and energy I've had over the last year. After that, I hope, I'll hand it in and pray that the publisher likes it. I think they will. You will, too.

* * *

Meanwhile, I seem to have lived through my second summer in the new Austin without killing anyone, although there were times I was sorely tempted, and times I was the one in danger: people who drive those behemoth truck/car monsters don't seem much interested in other drivers, and had I been T-boned by the Volvo SUV going 40 mph in the supermarket parking lot the other day, I wouldn't be typing this. Or I wouldn't be driving to Santa Fe because I wouldn't have a car. 

The worst fatalities of the summer here were all plants: that happy picture of green sprouts emerging from the potting soil on my deck didn't last long. More rain came and one day -- really: it all happened on one day -- they all wilted, turned brown, and died. The basil and oregano followed shortly thereafter. That relentless heat isn't so good for plants, nor is the huge amount of rain we experienced anything their DNA is programmed to respond to. I'll try again, although with the chiles or not I can't say, when I get back. The forecast is for cooler temperatures. 

But if the plant life suffered, the animal life did not. Most spectacularly, a very large toad began to guard my back door at night, positioning himself under the light so that handy snacks came his way without his having to exert much effort. 

The Guardian

It's hard to assess scale on a picture like this, but he's about the size of a softball. He enlists a couple of underlings in his dinner party, too: there's a very small gecko who hangs around and doubtless knocks bugs off the wall, and a fast brown anole who does likewise. When I find a tree roach in the house, I go all curling and start sweeping it towards one of the doors. The back door critters get the ones that I throw out from there, although I have no idea if toads eat tree roaches. 

Out the front door are more critters: another brown anole lives by the front door, sort of under the jamb, and I was shocked, surprised, and very happy to welcome a new critter I'd never seen before living on the tree out there: an arboreal Texas Spiny Lizard, a full foot long. 

Photo from Wikipedia. My guy won't stand sill long enough to photograph.

It's pretty wonderful knowing that these -- and, no doubt, other -- critters are out there in the yard, and I purposely didn't have the back yard mowed this summer, because I know that the low ground cover gives habitat not only to these lizards, but to a wide variety of insects that serve as food for them and the birds who visit the yard. Since what I do is sit at this desk and look out at them, it's ensuring myself the free entertainment that comes with the house. And something new I've noticed has been that every now and again a bright green feather falls from the sky. I've been told there are flocks of monk parrots in Austin but that they tend to be so high in the trees one rarely sees them. I'd like to have one of those rare moments because besides liking lizards, I'm a big psittacophile, and sort of like being dive-bombed by the parrot mobs in Barcelona. Those aren't as shy as these here are: they're very visible, and very in your face. 

* * *

In other news, I went to get my blood pressure medications renewed last week and was asked to submit to another blood test because my lipids were "high." I was actually glad to get in to see the doctor because she was leaving on vacation on Monday for a week, so she wasn't around when the chirpy receptionist called me on Monday and said I'd been "diagnosed with diabetes," that I'd have to make lifestyle and diet changes and I should "look up diabetes diet on the Internet." This, I suppose, is how medicine is done in the U.S., and a major reason why I'd rather be elsewhere for medical emergencies: my doctors in Berlin and Montpellier would be livid at such casual, off-hand treatment of a patient. 

So I got yet another pill to take twice daily, and I gather I should cut back on my carbohydrates, but I have so little data to go on that I have no idea if I'm pre-diabetic (as are many people my age) or in full-blown diabetes, where bread is death and so is pasta. I suspect the former, and I intend to get some straight facts and figures before I do anything too radical. And yes, I'd love to exercise, which really wasn't an issue in Europe, since one had to walk places to get things, and, in France, when I realized I'd reached the end of my working day, I'd often just go out and start walking around town. I also had two mile-long hikes per week when I went to the market, and walked to the supermarket every day. You take your life in your hands here, though, where there are no sidewalks and the automotive giants careen down small roads in defiance of the speed limit. Also, years ago, I was warned never to exercise when the temperature was over 91º F (just over 32º C) because it could cause heart damage. I suppose when it cools down a bit I'll drive myself over to the Greenbelt or other appropriate area and find a walking circuit I can take, but the absurdity of driving myself to and from exercise isn't lost on me. But I do like walking: going over the same walk day after day keeps your powers of observation sharp, and so it's good for my business. Among other things. 

* * *

I'm still ambivalent about having made this return to the U.S., and now that the media's ginned up the Presidential horserace again, even more so. There's a part of me that doesn't want to know that people like Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz and the like exist, let alone have people who follow them and believe what they believe. The plutocrats in the extractive industries are trying to buy the election (and may well succeed thanks to low-information voters and the general depressed intellectual level of the electorate), and what damage they aren't doing is being done by Our Digital Overlords and the so-called "sharing economy," which looks like serfdom to me. A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a review of a gallery show of political posters, and this was one of the featured images:

This is dated 1935, and, although it doesn't mention some of the of the issues of our moment (I think the 5-day week woman is meant to be black, so she sort of counts), like police militarization, women's heath care, and minorities being stripped of their voting rights, it's breathtaking to see how many of these issues have been nearly eroded away (right to organize, collective bargaining) or are under assault (Social Security) or whose abolition is seriously being discussed (child labor, higher wages, which at the moment means raising the minimum). 80 years, and the battles won and then the victory snatched away. 

Fortunately, the discussion of democratic socialism has entered the picture, and the media ignoring Bernie Sanders to the extent it does is helping that discussion spread. I don't expect to see it instituted in this country in my lifetime, or, really, ever, but if you'd like to get informed so you can contribute to the conversation I recommend the late Tony Judt's Ill Fares The Land, which my friend Nikki was handing out like candy at Halloween a couple of years ago, and which shows the positives and negatives of the American and European approaches. I realize that most Americans aren't interested in how they do things elsewhere, or else we'd have had functioning health care before I turned ten, but there are a few, and a lot of them read this blog. 

So happy Labor Day, even if the idiocracy is trying to tell us this is yet another military holiday or it should be abolished in favor of a holiday on 9/11 -- or even though the rest of the world celebrates it on May 1. Stay strong, I'll try to do the same, and maybe we'll have tiny victories to celebrate in the near future. 

Backyard Report

Okay, now I've done it. I've taken another step towards, um, suburbanity. A guy named Joe just deposited this on a concrete slab obviously designed to hold such a thing, just off of my deck in the back yard.

I know it's a good one, because I spent hours researching them on the Internet, particularly at an annoying site called Amazing Ribs.com. Everyone I trust in the world of grilling (as opposed to barbequing, a science I leave to ascended masters) says it's a great site. I say it's annoying because it takes a long time to navigate and after a couple of pages it starts hatching popups urging you to join their Pitmasters' Club, and they follow you around the site: "You've viewed 14 pages. Join the Pitmasters' Club!" Hey, buddy, I haven't even bought a grill yet. They're also annoying because their reviews sound positive even when they're not, a critical disease other sites (like the one I went to before buying the digital camera that just snapped these photos) seem to have. I read through the latest list of best grills and was all set to buy a specific one, but the Lowe's near my house didn't have one in stock, so they told me to go to one of their stores that did have one. It was late enough in the afternoon that I knew I'd be stuck in traffic forever if I went so I put it off for the next day, then went back and read the review again and realized that they may have given it an award, but between the lines were saying it was a cheap piece of shit that would have to have parts replaced in a year or so. So I got an entry-level Weber.

And yes, we'll have no theological debate about gas vs. charcoal here. I know charcoal can (key word) make the food taste better. I also know about fire dangers and disposing of ash, particularly the latter, after living in a coal-oven-heated apartment in Berlin. So gas it was.

Feeeed Meeee!

This grill has a feature I'm not sure I need: there's a round bit of the grate that comes out and can be filled with any number of goodies, including this griddle, which comes with it (and undoubtedly needs seasoning before use, although Weber claims not), and optional things like a wok (mmmm, wok hai!), a pizza stone (but it's kind of small and I could probably just lay a pizza stone on there and get it hotter than my oven gets, meaning excellent pizza), a Korean barbeque (no idea how this works), a poultry roaster (ditto), and of course an ebelskyver (ditto twice, although I think it's some kind of Swedish pancakes).

As the Germans would say, "Mit System!"

I haven't so much as turned it on yet, but I think I know what I'm going to cook first, and that needs an accessory Weber doesn't sell.

"The Secret Is..."

Some years ago, I was in Hawaii doing a story on Hawaiian music for a travel magazine and had to go out to a rather remote part of Oahu to interview the amazing Tau Moe, a steel guitarist who, with his wife Rose (one of the greatest Hawaiian singers ever), and, eventually, their family, was on tour for decades, all over the world. (He once performed for Hitler -- well, he could hardly say no -- and I asked him what that was like. "I was scared," he said with typical economy.) My friend Margaret, who was living in Honolulu with her tattoo artist husband and editing a million of those throwaway tourist magazines that litter hotel lobbies there, told me that if I went out that way I should stop for lunch at this burger joint. "It's the best hamburger you ever had," she said. I personally felt that I hadn't come to Hawaii to eat hamburgers, but once I got out there there wasn't much choice, so I did. And above the counter where you placed your order was a sign that said "The Secret is Vermouth." And, after tasting the burger, I knew I had to learn the application of that secret.

All was made clear, coincidentally enough, when I got back to Texas, and the food section of the daily paper had an interview with Mr. Weber, of Weber Grills, where they said they'd heard he was famous for his hamburgers and he gave the recipe which included...vermouth! Oh, and a couple of other things. But I've experimented with it enough that I think I've got it down as well as the place in Hawaii and tonight, perhaps, we'll find out if I have. I'll still have to buy some more stuff at the supermarket, but we'll see. And such a first meal is, when you consider the source, very appropriate.

Wish me luck.

* * *

Last year, a friend in New Mexico sent me a bunch of seeds. Some were for Sandia chiles, big, green, hot-but-not-insane chiles that can be used for rellenos, enchilada sauce, or salsas that I just love, and some were for their local jalapenos, which she claims aren't nearly as wimpy as the ones here in Texas (although a tip to buy at Mexican markets resulted in some with a bit more firepower). Anyway, I planted them and...nothing. Then someone sent me a webpage that said under no circumstances to plant them in peat pots, which is what I'd done, so I just gave up. 

This year, I had an inspiration, a voice within telling me to get off to a gardening store and score some MiracleGro Organic potting soil, which is what the anti-peat-pot site recommended, so I did, and threw some of my dwindling supply of Sandia seeds into two of them, using the other two to transplant some basil I picked up at the store. Well, as you can see, there are results. 

Modern agriculture: the triumph!

Those two pots on the left are just bursting with Sandia sprouts, and although the rains we've had have left the basil plants next to them a little ratty, I think they'll gain height and more foliage in the weeks to come and turn out all right. The other two plants are more basil plants, which I got for my birthday in November and seem only interested in having sex at this point (well, it's understandable: they were indoors all winter) and a bunch of oregano, which is just going nuts, and which I had a bit of in a spaghetti sauce of roasted cherry tomatoes, garlic, capers, pine nuts and black olives last night, which made me realize that it does, indeed, have its uses. I believe I have a chimichurri sauce recipe which uses it, too. 

Let's look at those Sandias again! The small pots are the future homes of the jalapenos, I hope.

Which is good, because this new machine opens a whole world I've been absent from for the past 20 years. There are some good reasons why grilling is illegal in Europe (can't do it on your balcony because of the neighbors and because of fire danger), and some bad ones (oppressive food-odor laws, which only get enforced on foreigners, and grilling illegal in parks despite low or no fire risk, but, rather, because in Germany it's a way of making Turks feel unwelcome), but the fact is, you can't do it and I didn't. Now I have to learn all over again, but with a much finer instrument than the funky little bullet-shaped smoker I could never get to work right or (even worse) the occasional hibachi. 

Now I have lots of stuff to learn: I have some remarkable Vietnamese, Middle Eastern, and, of course, American recipes to try out, and I'll be learning about marinades and sauces and salsas. Not, I emphasize, barbeque. There are too many places around here where I can just roll up and pay for that, and I will. But first, Mr. Weber's burgers. Tomorrow, the world!

On Returning

I'm usually pretty good about this: marking anniversaries of milestones in my life. August 12: I moved to Germany. Late October: I moved to France. October 23: I moved back to Texas. So why didn't I jump on this first anniversary of that last event to put up a blog post?

Several reasons. Mostly, I've been way too busy to do it. That's the good news. But in small part, because I'm ambivalent about having done it. Let's see if I can explain.

The daily vista

Shortly after I moved into this place, I set up a work area that hasn't changed noticeably since then. I bought and built a desk, which had a defective drawer, so I can't use that helpful aspect of it. And I set it up by a window, which is what I've pretty much always done, everywhere I've lived. The outdoors isn't a distraction so much as it's something to look at while I'm gathering my thoughts. More than once I've been absorbed in writing something, then gotten up to get a drink or just to stretch my legs and suddenly notice that it's rained. Didn't even notice.

But I'm under no illusion about how lucky I am. I arrived in the US minus a credit rating, due to the fact that for twenty years I'd lived in places where that information was between you and your bank (and the police, who have access to most, but not all, of your data), and that's all. "He's a ghost," one prospective landlord told my realtor during my search for a house. "It's like he doesn't exist." By a miracle, a friend of a friend (who was my realtor's husband) with whom I'd almost gone into business (said business proposed by the same realtor's husband) had outgrown his house and was renting it out. He was plenty sceptical, because of the no credit rating, but he took a chance.

Which made me scared. I'd been trying to sell a book that, it seemed to me, was a natural. I was sure my agent could do it, but I was hoping he could do it soon. It was the reason I'd moved back here, or one of them: I wanted access to UT's arts library, which I'd used before. There were other reasons, too. I tried, but couldn't seem to master Catalan, which I needed if I were going to move to Barcelona, which was Plan A. The hard disc was full. Oh, I might have been able to do it if I'd just moved there and taken a class, and I'd seen classes that encompassed both Catalan and Spanish. I might, just might, have been able to do it. I didn't actually know anyone there, but I could probably have made a few friends. And I did like the place. But...with no language, not a good idea.

The days passed, and the book didn't sell. Soon, I was in debt to my landlord. That was not a good thing. I was going to have to live like I could become homeless at any moment, because that's the reality in America, particularly in Texas. I still had no credit rating, and if I lost this place, I would have to live in my car. I wasn't much looking forward to that, and eked out day to day. Fortunately, my "broke, not poor" habits made it possible to feed myself fairly well, but they put a damper on having a social life. But I was living from day to day, and that's not what I'd hoped would happen.

My stuff arrived from France, and I started slapping it onto shelves. Unfortunately, there weren't enough shelves. There still aren't.

90º shot from the previous. More (but not much) in the garage.

It's the same way with the CDs: I desperately need to get them shelved and sorted. So far, though, I haven't gotten the shelves or advertised for help:

And there are many more on the facing wall. 

But, a year after I moved in here (Nov. 8, as it turns out, so this post is actually only a couple of weeks late), I have probably got enough money to make it through the coming year. The feeling of being able to pay my bills, to pay my rent, on time, is entirely new to me. And I like it.

Yes, I sold the book, finally, as I've mentioned here. And now I'm writing it. Another reason not to blog: when I sit down and start working, I eat up all my writing energy, although the results, I have to say, have been pretty nice for a first draft. But that was in August, and the money didn't reach me immediately. When it did, I took off on a vacation, sorely needed: after returning, I couldn't wait to tear into the book.

But really, what that means is that my new life didn't actually start until early October. when I got back from the vacation. Just this week, I replaced the transmission in my car, the last major expense of the change. Now, it's just write and write, picking up some extra money on the side from radio work and teaching the informal class at UT, and hoping nothing else goes wrong.

So now that I've been back a year, how does it feel? People keep asking me that. Well, I'm ambivalent, like I said. Turns out I didn't actually need the UT library -- or not yet, not for a couple of years if everything goes right -- but somehow, my psyche gave a sigh of relief at not being illegal any more. France and Germany (and possibly Spain) are no more eager to have undocumented immigrants than the U.S. is, but it does help to be a middle-aged white guy so the racist immigration authorities don't notice you. But Obama's executive order doesn't affect me personally in the least.

Austin, as anyone will tell you, isn't Austin any more. It's a generic American city made unusual by its weather (we had a very mild summer, for which thanks), its live music scene (to which I am profoundly indifferent), and its youth (I was told that the median age here is 28). It is perhaps a tiny bit more cognizant of the issues facing America, but mostly the people who haven't been squeezed out (and who did the squeezing, along with the real estate developers) are as solipsistic and entitled as they are in other hip capitals. The other night I went out to dinner with friends, one of whom has a leg in some kind of cast and crutches, and while we waited to be seated, two men sprawled across a seat made for four, oblivious of the fact that there was a guy on crutches standing right next to them who could have used the seat. (Later, inside the restaurant, they were at the next table and I overheard enough of their talk to realize that they were in the tech sector: no huge surprise). Although Austin voted pretty liberally in the midterms, it's still in a state with a Neanderthal for governor, another on the way, and represented in Washington largely by the kind of people who make people in other countries fear the United States. And I live in a nation that is preparing to sell off its national parks to extractive industries, further our endless war in the Mideast, make sure children aren't educated or taught critical thinking, and all but ban science. And I can't do anything about that because too many of my fellow citizens are too engaged with entertaining themselves to look up from their devices and see what's happening.

All things considered, I guess I'd rather not be here, "here" being both the U.S. and Austin. But I do have work to do, and this is where I am, doing it. I don't want to move again any time soon, either next door or across a continent, so for today, here I am. As for where I'd rather be, I can't answer that. There are days when I miss France fiercely, even knowing I'm not welcome to live there. There are days (admittedly rare) when I even miss Berlin. I miss being able to get on a train and (if I've planned right) for very little money going to somewhere quite different from where I started. I miss efficient public transportation, something Austin will never have, in part to the Koch Brothers "investing" in defeating proposals to build it. I miss the outdoor market at the Arceaux in Montpellier, and the seasonal changes in the produce -- and the fact that, unlike at Austin's "farmers markets," that produce is priced within reach of the average person. (This summer, tomatoes cost literally twice what they did in France). I miss affordable wine that actually tastes good, and I miss a good variety in things like juice and yogurt at breakfast. I miss being in a place with a deep sense of history.

Is there anything that's gotten better? Yes: besides the physical plant of my house with its gleaming and useful kitchen, which has enabled me to cook better than ever, there's Central Market, the enlightened grocery store where I buy the majority of what I do cook there. I don't have to wonder about meats and vegetables and what would be a good replacement: what you see is what you get, and last night, it being stormy, I cooked up my very first pot roast and it was amazing. I also have access to books in English when I need to buy them, in a browsable bricks-and-mortar bookstore with another browsable books-and-mortar record store right across the street. The Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants aren't "Asia" restaurants, and so I patronize them when I can and recognize what I get. There's the inestimable joy of getting bills and notices in a language I understand thoroughly, not just pretty well, so that, for instance, I can easily make out that the $20 hike in my monthly Internet bill is due to a decision to adopt a new deal from my provider that I supposedly made on Nov. 11, even though it was a holiday. And I can protest it in my own language, too, for all the good it'll do me. (Although I have to say the English help line at France Telecom Orange has some brilliant folks working for it). I'm a lot closer to a lot of my friends, even if I do have to fly (which I abhorred even before they shrunk the plane interiors so that I fear an embolism every time I get in one) to see them; it's too bad I'll probably not live long enough to see decent train service in this country. Of course, your grandkids may not, either.

I'm choosing to keep my hopes small and my energy high, and work hard at what's before me without the need to seek out anything more (while still being open to other things, just not with the aching sense of need I once had). Like the alcoholics, I'm taking it a day at a time in my new old place (and, unlike them, enjoying a craft beer after dinner), looking to make it newer with a modest screen to show movies on and maybe a couple more chairs for the dining table (I still only have two), and confident that change will come when it's supposed to. Meanwhile, I do give thanks that I've got work and a decent place to live. Tune in tomorrow, but with luck, it'll be the same, if not better.

Truckin' Around Austin

My friend Special K earns extra cash on weekends by working out at the Midway Food Park, which is where I met Steve Dean for our dance hall tour earlier this year. Her gig is schlepping the PA equipment for the bands that play there each weekend (Steve books them), and as a result she's gotten a bit of insight into the culture of the food trailer scene here. It also meant that she got early warning about Truck By Truck West, which sounded interesting: you bought a wristband, and for five days got unlimited samples at a whole bunch of food trucks that had signed up to participate. At the end, those who had week-long passes would vote on the best places they'd visited. This would be facilitated by an app for your smartphone called Byte, which seems to combine Google Maps with a Yelp-like rating system.

Since I'd been wanting to check out the whole Austin food trailer scene for some time, this seemed like a good excuse to do it, so I plunked down a $40 registration fee (K mysteriously found a free registration at the Midway), and we decided to be food detectives for a week.

Austin, in part because of its weather, has been in the forefront of this trend for some time. Several years ago, before things even got as crazy as they are now, I heard that there were 1800 trailers in Austin. No idea how many there are now, but one interesting trend was that trailers often had high-end dining and the more successful ones got brick-and-mortar locations. The great success story, of course, was Franklin's Barbeque, which went from a trailer to a huge operation for which people now stand in line for seven or eight hours. (It's good. It's very good. But nothing is worth standing in line for seven hours to get. This isn't a slam at Aaron Franklin, but, rather, on trendy people.)

I also have to say that restaurants like Barley Swine, Salty Sow, and East Side King are hard to imagine as trailers, and that they might have been better off there, but I have yet to really investigate them. What put me off from the whole high-end-trailer-to-restaurant thing was the worst meal I've ever paid that much money for at Foreign and Domestic, one of the first to make the jump. I don't want to go back over the experience, although it lingers in my mind, but engineering such a collision of horrid atmosphere, ill-thought-out-food, and arrogant, ignorant service would be hard to do on purpose.

Still, if there's one thing that TXTW didn't seem to have, it was high-end food. Which is a shame, but although there probably are nascent success stories that didn't sign up, the levelled playing field was probably more fair to the overall voting results. At any rate, K and I installed Byte on our phones, and then tried to figure out how to get our wristbands and how to make them work. This was TXTW's second year, and given the level of disorganization around it, I don't even want to contemplate what last year's was like. Just getting next to the wristbands was difficult: the organizer's perfervid style of communicating via e-mail forced the reader to dig in, looking for the information amidst the logorrhea. Eventually, we each went to the Squarerüt Kava Bar nearest us and asked if they'd been delivered any wristbands. They had, in both cases. She accepted the free cup of kava and liked it. I passed, although the folks were friendly.

For our first night of tasting, we decided to head up S. 1st St., where there were a number of places to try. Our first stop was a little trailer park at 504 W. Oltorf, hidden from the road by a building that was part of one of the vendors' operation. We decided to start with something familiar: tacos from Cheke's Takos. They were friendly enough, but refused to understand that we were two individuals with two registrations, so we only got two of the three samples. I don't even remember what they were, although the salsas were superb. One for another day. Next up was Flying Carpet: Moroccan Souk Food.  The guy who ran it, Abderrahim, was super friendly, and we wound up talking with him while his wife Maria dealt with the deluge of TXTW orders that had started arriving. Again, I didn't take notes, and the sample was small, but extremely tasty. The building that blocks the view of the court belongs to Flying Carpet, and is simply a dining area out of the weather. I bet I wind up at this place again, too, and if Abderrahim is able to expand to more complex dishes than the street food he's serving now, I'd enthusiastically try it. The evening closed when we left this place and headed a bit up the street to Regal Ravioli, a place I'd seen out of the corner of my eye while eating outdoors at Elizabeth Street (another fine place I've been saving for a restaurant wrapup here). This guy is ambitious, but the sample was a couple of ravioli in red sauce (but that's probably what Austinites expect), and I found the sauce to have an unpleasant citrus-y tang. I dunno; worth watching, but, as with so much Italian food in Austin, I can do better at home.

The idea of finding a food court and working our way around it was a good one, so Thursday (I teach a class on Wednesday night) we headed up to Hipster Central, E. 6th St. across the freeway. In the 20 years since I've been here, the Mexican-Americans have been rather aggressively removed from this long-time enclave, and people with ink, shaved heads and Smith Brothers beards have taken over. It's entirely too close to downtown to allow ethnics to live there, after all, and if the young people who've taken over are ignorant of the families they've displaced, they're not entirely to blame, because it was the real estate interests who led the charge. It's too late to do anything about it, in any event, but I'm still haunted by the ghosts of the residents of 35 years ago when I go there.

Our evening started at Baton Creole, presided over by a jolly young woman with whom I talked Cajun food, who also told me there was another branch near me on Stassney Lane inside a bar a friend of hers had taken over. I may check it out some time, but the sample, a mini sausage jambalaya on a stick, wasn't too great: basically a sausage was threaded onto the stick, then a rice mixture covered it, then it was breaded and fried. It was too hot when I bit into it, but it didn't seem to have a lot of flavor as it cooled, either. The Wholly Kebab place didn't impress me -- kebabs rarely do after 20 years in Europe, where I mostly avoided them, although they're the most universal street food on the continent -- and the portion was too small to figure out what it was supposed to taste like. Next up was Way South Philly, allegedly a cheese steak joint, but what we got was a small pile of shredded meat in a bun. K thought she detected some cheese, but I couldn't, and anyway, the meat in a cheese steak isn't shredded. There was supposed to be an Indian place in this court, but there wasn't, so we had pizza from Spartan Pizza for dessert. Two half-slices, nothing special. Better than most Austin pizza, which is damning with faint praise.

There was one more place on the street, but it was getting late. Hell, we had a parking space, it was only a block, so we trudged to Kyoten. And were amazed. The sample was excellent, but simple: a sheet of fried tofu split open to accommodate some rice. Both the tofu and the rice were subtly flavored, and I trusted these guys enough to order a small bite of sushi to try, the "Negihama," which consisted of a fish called kenpachi that I'd never heard of, and is, according to an expert I asked, the mature form of amberjack. Whatever it was, it was buttery and flavorful. I talked some to one of the guys running the stand and found him full of knowledge and enthusiasm. The grounds were beautiful at night, the raked gravel, the Zen garden, and the quiet (of all things) making the whole experience the opposite of what we'd just been to. I intend to stop by several more times before somebody hands them a wad of cash and the lease to a building to grow in. I suspect I'll have a superb meal next time I check in: I've only scratched the surface of the menu, and there are regular daily specials. Now, if I only knew something about sake...

Friday, K had to work at the Midway, and I stayed home and cooked some ravioli, some red sauce, and mixed them together, strewed mozzarella over the whole thing and threw it in the oven. Sorry, Austin, this is what it tastes like.

Saturday, K also had to work but it was a chance to use the wristband at the Midway, as well as to see Don Leady, an old pal, sit in with the band that was booked that night, which also featured Don's protege, a 13-year-old guitar whiz. The thing is, when I got up there I wasn't at all hungry: none of the trucks, either through their samples or their regular items, tempted me. K, between doing what she had to do (she also passes the hat for the bands twice during the evening), ordered first a "lobster roll" from Dock and Roll that sure didn't look like any lobster roll I've ever seen (like the "cheese steak": these people are defining regional food for Austin!), and then "sausage and peppers" from Gregorio's, which came with a few mostaccioli blanketed by a generic red sauce. There was also a slider joint (Hand Held's), a taco joint (One Taco), Widespread Dave's (he being the former caterer for the jam-band Widespread Panic), a cheesecake place (K's favorite), and a juice place. Frankly, after the Gregorio's sample K handed me, I lost all interest, and after she'd put the equipment away, we called it a day.

Turned out we were supposed to integrate the Byte app with Facebook each time we checked into a place (I don't do Facebook mobile for security reasons), and there's also the voting to go through by midnight today. Frankly, I'd rather write about it, but I'll dig out the e-mail with the voting link just to see that Kyoten gets its props, and Flying Carpet, too. I'm glad to have had this intro to the food trailer experience, and can't help feeling that there are a few interesting ones I've missed (and will be happy to hear about them before cold weather comes on). As for TXTW, it was chaotic, disorganized, and not quite worth the money for me. But since it gave me the excuse to get out and see these places, I'm glad to have done it.

Oh, and as you've no doubt noticed, I was one of the few people not photographing my food.

A Week (Almost) in India, New Jersey

Want to know how to stay in New York for four nights for less than the price of one night in a hotel? The answer is, stay in New Jersey. Specifically, stay in a crazy Indian-run hotel called the Haiban Inn on Newark Avenue in Jersey City, the heart of that town's Little India. And if you don't mind the room being shaken until all hours by drumming and singing and dancing, book your time in the middle of the nine-day annual religious festival known as Navratri. You won't get much sleep, but on the up-side, a lot of the restaurants are open til 5am.

And you'll want to eat at the restaurants, trust me.

I arrived on Thursday, after a chaotic series of events that made it so it took me almost as long to get from JFK to the hotel as it did for me to get from Austin to JFK. Some of it was my fault: at one point I was steps from the hotel, mis-read the street numbers, turned around, and walked a mile, with my computer bag and my suitcase. But here's the point: at least I got there.

The Haiban isn't going to make anybody's list of luxury hotels, even in Jersey City. In fact, it's barely a hotel. The current owners bought it ten months ago, rid the property of its bedbugs, and started renting out rooms with an eye towards long-stay Indian guests in town to do short gigs in the tech sector. For around a hundred bucks, I got a big room with a bed, another room with a sink, a fridge and a microwave, and a bathroom. No furniture except for a little chair that looked sad that the rest of the dinette set had walked off and left it, no glass to wash your mouth out after brushing your teeth, no desk at which to set up your computer (the wi-fi was great), and nothing much else. The walls are paper-thin and there's a chance the businessman in the next room is using Skype in the wee hours to make a deal. In the morning, basic breakfast is provided: tea, bread to toast, cereal. The people running the place are extremely friendly. And you can't beat the location:

These are just random grabs of the block of Newark Ave., a long street that starts downtown and winds its way until just past Little India. You will notice the huge number of restaurants. We will return to this, never fear. What's not a restaurant is probably a shop selling saris, a money-transfer operation, or a superette or meat market. I would have gone nuts in the superettes were it not for the fact that I have two well-stocked Indian markets right near my place in Austin. Not even they sell curry leaf (neem) plants, though. Gotta get me some of that.

Of course, my never-ending quest for great Indian food, and particularly south Indian food, would bring me to stay in a place like this, but there was another factor as well: PATH. This is a small subway system that connects places like Newark, Hoboken, and Jersey City with Manhattan. Really: in very little time at all, I was able to walk to the Journal Square PATH station and, with a regular New York City Metro Card, ride as far as a block from Penn Station. This proved to be amazingly convenient, and, in terms of getting where I needed to go, not much different than staying at a non-midtown hotel in Manhattan. Except for the price.

And Navratri. I got in about 10pm, thanks to the screwups, and heard the music coming from the parking lot across the street. The enthusiastic young man at the hotel desk told me it was the most important festival of the year, nine nights long, and many Hindus spent the entire nine nights praying, not bothering to sleep. I figured that was okay as long as they let me sleep. In fact, it appears to be a festival that's been celebrated since prehistoric times, as the excellent Wikipedia article hints. I was unaware of Navratri before this trip, but the whole world's currently aware of it as a result of the Indian Prime Minister's announcement that he's happy to have dinner at the White House with the Obamas, but he won't eat. It's also a fast, you see.

Well, I didn't want to fast, so I headed up the street to a promising-looking place called Deccan Spice with over-the-top encomia from the Village Voice food critic Robert Sietsma in the window. It was a very strange, but wonderful, experience. I was with a friend from Malaysia who'd, unfortunately, just eaten. (Well, you can't expect people to wait for you when they're starving and you're two hours late). Overwhelmed by the menu, I ordered something called Special Pakora to start. This was described as "paneer and cashew mixed with spices and gram flour and deep fried." We've all had pakoras: they're bits of vegetable coated in spiced chickpea (British: gram) flour (besan) and deep fried, so I figured this would be hunks of paneer, that amazing chewy Indian cheese, treated similarly. What I got was a big plate of crunchy tidbits, a bit like a bar snack for the beer they naturally don't serve here. (I had a Limca, an allegedly lime-flavored soft drink made by Coca Cola India which contains no juice at all, just some kind of unspecified "acid," and tastes sort of like lime-scented disinfectant. I have to order Limca once a decade to remind myself how little I like it). It was, its form notwithstanding, delicious, and I had to watch myself because I am all too aware how besan expands. Next up was the house specialty, Natu Kodi Vepudu, described as "spicy country chicken cooked with poppy seeds, coconut and curry leaves," which sounded astounding. It was. It was also not boneless. My Malaysian friend said there's a very similar-tasting dish back home, also not boneless. You're supposed to suck the marrow, crunch the cartilage, and, of course, eat the meat. The spice mixture was out of this world, and I'm going to go looking for it so I can treat some boneless chicken this way. As it was, my current dentition found it challenging, especially when a bone shard got under my denture and found its way to where my teeth had been extracted. I asked the waiter if I could have some rice on the side. He said, and I quote, "No."

Bizarrely enough, this didn't keep me from returning two nights later. I went with a Jersey Citizen of my acquaintance who'd never eaten in Little India, but who is somewhat spice-averse, which is okay because I suspect the Deccans are all too willing to blast you out if appropriate. For appetizers, she ordered samosas and I ordered chilli paneer. Her samosas were definitely southern Indian style (the restaurant advertises itself as Hyderabadi) and the filling, although it contained potatoes and peas, also contained other stuff that made it sublime. No sticky sweet chutney accompanied them, because really, nothing else was needed. For a main course, she got charminar ka murgh, "boneless chicken cooked in spinach gravy and spices," and I got a goat curry from a new state that had split off of Hyderabad and isn't listed either on the takeout menu I lifted or on line. The goat wasn't boneless, either, which was okay, because I'm used to Jamaican goat curry, which isn't boneless, either. It was pretty good, although, again, dentally challenging for me. My friend lucked out with her chicken: there was far more than spinach in that thick green sauce, including mint and fenugreek and cilantro. I do have one of those little Indian cookbooks back in Texas that claims to be Hyderabadi, and I'm going to look for it. Oh: how was my chilli paneer? No idea. It never came, despite two reminders to the waiter. Finally the manager showed up and my friend allowed as how the white rice she'd ordered hadn't come, either. That, at least, was produced post-haste.

In sum, I suspect that repeated visits to Deccan Spice would reveal a bunch of superb Indian cuisine of the sort I, and probably most gringos, have never had. There would be service problems, and if you order the "goat fry" you'd have to remember it's goat brains you're eating there. They're opening various new locations, and if they'd like a tip on a strip-mall property just down from an Indian grocery on William Cannon Boulevard in Austin, they should contact me. I promise to deliver customers if they promise to deliver the full order.

(Deccan Spice, 771 Newark Ave. Jersey City, NJ, 201-604-1772. www.deccan-spice.com. Open 11am-1am Mon-Thu, Sun, 11am-5am Fri & Sat. Other locations, check website).

* * *

The next day, not having had enough, I went to a place across the street and around the corner from the hotel for "pure vegetarian" food. Sapthagiri is another burgeoning empire that can have that space down from Man Prasand Grocery if Deccan Spice doesn't want it. It was lunchtime and I was, again, hungry, and this place's menu had a bewildering number of items on it. It also had a rabbinical certificate declaring the food Kosher. It serves both northern and southern Indian vegetarian stuff, but I was going to stick to the south, since that's less familiar and, if you make it at home, more labor-intensive. 

I started out with rasam idly, two little puffs of rice flour left to ferment and rise overnight and then steamed, then soaked in that deceptively fiery thin lentil soup called rasam (which I have made, and loved: it's not hard). I don't have an idly maker, though, so here it is:

Prepare to sweat, gringo

The coconut raita, the white stuff, was exquisite. And those little puffs kept puffing when they got inside. 

Which made my next choice a little prolematic: a dosa. Some day someone will teach me how to eat one of these mammoth pancakes, which are folded like a crepe over a filling that only makes a bit of a bump in the overall dish. Mine was a Mysore masala dosa, whose description on the menu says that it's "spread with spicy home made sauce and filled with mash of potato & onion and green peas and cashew nuts." I attacked this so fast I didn't have time to photograph it until I pulled up with the certain knowledge that a stomach ache awaited me if I ate another phenomenal forkful:

Coconut raita, amazing rasam, three killer chutneys and that filling...

I kind of ripped open the dosa to show off that filling. Man oh man. 

That did me for the day, despite a trip into Manhattan and back and very good intentions to visit one of the biryani joints that was open late. But I noticed that Sapthagiri offered a breakast buffet on Saturdays and Sundays. My Malaysian friend was all ears at that -- and stomach, too. Saturday morning we were there:

Umm, let's see, clockwise from noon, fried things that had gone cold, some farina dish with onions and I think kalunji (nigella) seeds and other stuff, a cup of rasam, some fried parathas, a cup of coconut chutney, a close relative of that dosa filling, a blob of chutney, a blob of ginger chutney, two idlys and in the center more chutney. No, not real helpful. Just go get some on the weekend. 

There was excellent masala tea and less excellent masala Nescafé. This is the way to start the day, boys and girls! 

(Sapthagari, 804 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, NJ, 201-533-8400, open seven days 11am to 10pm. Another location in Franklin Park, NJ).

* * *

There are many, many other restaurants on the block. I want to try one of the biryani joints, myself, specialists in what might be termed South Indian jambalayas, which can be fiendishly difficult to make at home, or not, depending on how complex the recipe you're making is. (I once made one with the rice in three layers, orange, white, and green, the colors of the Indian flag, each layer with different stuff in it. I almost died before I got it on the table, but, unbelievably, it was amazing. I'm not sure where the recipe is and am disinclined to go looking for it). Up the side-street from Sapthagari is an egg-based Indian restaurant, probably the only one in the US. I need to check that out; eggs aren't much eaten in India, from what I can tell. Another Jersey Citizen tells me that Dosa Hut is good, while another remembers going there -- or was it Dosa House down the street? -- and getting a dosa with a frozen center due to bad microwave technique. There are a couple of places obviously catering to a younger crowd with names like Chutney's that deserve a visit. Am I going to check back in to the Haiban when I get back on Monday so I can continue to investigate? Stay tuned. 

* * *

Of course, each night starting about 8 there was dancing in the streets, big ring dances with men and women and loud live music, although the shenai and santur and sitar and other instruments were all synth presets played by one guy. There were, however, several drum kits to keep people shaking. There was a shrine in the parking lot, one by the stage, and another down the street in the front of a travel agency. 

The main shrine

The travel agency shrine

People started dancing about 8, but things went on, with various vocalists, one of whom was a boy about 4 years old (who kept going flat, as kids do) singing pop-ghazal until about 1:30. 

Live music! Except for the presets. (Kid not shown: he came up later).

Only gives a hint of the chaos. Later: roman candles. 

Even on Thursday and Sunday, when there was no band, recorded music blared out. I was, amazingly, able to fall asleep to it, but unless you're going to celebrate, this might be a nine-day window to not stay in Little India. Of course, from Manhattan, it's the cost of one ride on your Metro Card, and the food won't break your budget at all. 

I'm writing this in a considerably different hotel in Montreal, and the second chapter of this adventure has started. I will not be eating Indian food here, although I understand it's on offer...