Mops, Socks, and Chardonnay: November 2008 Archives

Part Three of the Breakfast Travel Series

For a bit of a variant to the traditional Southern Breakfast, and as a means of giving a shout out to the city where most of my family lives, I did make a breakfast that conjures up fond memories of Sunday mornings in New Orleans. Now first, you have to stay out all night on Saturday, finally rolling home around dawn. This is typical N'Awlins behavior and if your neighbors complain about the loud carousing one should firmly castigate them about being so dismissive of others' cultures.

Ideally, you get someone who didn't spend all night out partying to make breakfast. This should result in fewer severed fingers and three-alarm house fires. The main item and a specialty of New Orleans is 'grillades and grits' (the first word, in the quasi-Brooklynese accent that marks a long time inhabitant of the Crescent City, should be pronounced gree-ahts). This is just the thing to sop up excess liquor sloshing around in one's tum.

At last, my opportunity to do the "I'm Right and You're Wrong Dance." It's been two years five months, seventeen days and three hours since the last time I got a chance to tango to that particular tune. In the interim, in her official capacity as the female (I was going to use the adjective 'sensible', but then realized that's just repetitive) in our relationship, Mary on the other hand, has had the opportunity to do the dance approximately eleventy hundred and six times. That, of course, does not count the times when Mary could and has used the devastatingly more powerful, "I'm Right and You're a Blithering Idiot Dance."

In any case the occasion for this happy event was the long delayed visit to the Texas de Brazil churrascaria in Orlando. For something like five or six years I have expressed a slight, nay trifling interest in trying a churrascaria, ever since I read about them in Men's Meat Eating Quarterly. The concept is simple. Sit down and eat lots and lots of meat. Expanding a little on this concept and using the handy little flier on how they arrived at the concept, the churrascaria is an outgrowth of those far ago times when men dressed up in cowboy outfits down on the pampas of South America and grilled various cuts of meat over open fires and served it to other cowboys on skewers. That's pretty much it. Simple, direct and allows you to get right to the chewing of the beef.