“Feast and Famine”
After a busy Thanksgiving weekend, this week was very quiet with our only real outing to downtown McKinney for coffee today. Diana took my picture with the Xmas display outside the coffee shop. Not quite a Christmas card since Diana and BP didn’t make it in.
Rewinding a fortnight (remember when we used to have to rewind VHS and audio cassettes?), we experienced a quite unexpected and very boisterous rain storm on Monday night:
Thanksgiving was a much more pleasant weather day. We passed on cooking a turkey feast for two at home and headed to Perry’s steakhouse for a late lunch/early dinner. Champagne and lobster tails make my McD very happy.
She said several times that the grilled lobsters were perfectly cooked. A nicely cooked sea bass makes me happy. So we were both very happy with our meals – and had plenty of leftovers for a late dinner. I laughed when we checked in on the chaos at Amy and Adamo’s home and heard that Adamo had said, “maybe we can go out for lobster on Thanksgiving twenty years from now.”
We drove to Austin for the weekend on Friday morning, checked into the Intercontinental downtown (changing names to a Royal Sonesta the following week), and got ready for an early dinner at Peche – why not start out at one of our favourite Austin eateries. We started with some very decadent escargots (no lack of butter or garlic) and then I had a delicious redfish on a bed of the barley risotto that I enjoy so much. Diana had an equally decadent foie gras on grits.
After Peche, we walked across the street to the Parker Jazz Club (capacity reduced from over 100 to 30) and enjoyed our first live music in 9 months with 12 other folks. Kris and the team are trying really hard to keep the place going with very limited seating weekend shows and live-streaming. The house band was excellent as always – although the new drummer over plays too much for my liking. Kris might have played almost all of his 8 or 9 instruments – going from bass flute to multiple saxophones and a flugelhorn.
Saturday was a rain day – light drizzle all day long. That meant we couldn’t do our walk/run along the river and had to settle for the ellipticals in the hotel gym – surprised to find it open and we had it to ourselves. We did walk down Congress Avenue for coffee and a TacoDeli treat before the workout.
Brunch was at the Odd Duck – one of my top three Austin brunch spots. The shrimp and grits with a perfectly cooked deep fried egg were fabulous, as was the ceviche with green curry sauce. It’s always so hard to choose from all the options – and the menu is new every time we go. Diana loved their take on the Paloma cocktail. I’m now expected to try and replicate that – oops, maybe she’d forgotten already and I just reminded her.
After lunch we made a visit to the office to drop off an old laptop that I’d been hanging on to for a while and then visited the Yeti flagship store next to our old apartment. Diana was determined to purchase one of the ludicrously priced coolers that keep ice solid for several days. Then a trip to Warby Parker to get our glasses adjusted. What a productive afternoon.
I hadn’t made any plans for Saturday night and we decided we should revisit the Parker jazz club and make another donation towards trying to keep the joint open. This time we had dinner as well, splitting a yummy burger. There was a slightly larger audience but still nowhere near the reduced capacity. Kris was in a New Orleans mood – which suited me just fine. I was interested to hear him share that he and Ryan Davis (piano) had been playing together for over 20 years, including 14 as the house band at Eddie V’s steakhouse.
Sunday was a dry day and so we were able to execute a 4 mile circuit around the river trail, culminating with another snack at TacoDeli. Then another excellent brunch at Suerte – my top ranked Mexican restaurant. The masa that they make all the corn tortillas and tostadas from is ridiculously good. Diana had a smoked salmon tostada and I tried the bacon and sweet potato tetela (like a corn based pie with bacon and sweet potato puree inside). They were both perfect – particularly the mornay sauce, which I learned is a classic béchamel sauce enriched with a blend of Gruyère and Parmesan cheeses. We have really missed the creative food that is so readily available in Austin. And the great live music.
Diana was still a bit hungry after her tostada and so we had an excuse to get an order of the best tacos ever – the suaderos, and a side of sweet kolache. Yum yum yum. My tummy is wishing it was living back in Austin after revisiting all these food pictures.
After brunch we met our friend Neffie at Fixe – a new place she introduced us to that specializes in southern comfort food – supposedly the best biscuits (scones) in Austin.
We passed this sign on the walk to Fixe – so nice to be able to walk everywhere again. My Mum had just been telling us the story of the Battle of Bannockburn where the English tried to sneak up on the Scots at night, taking their boots off for stealth, but were foiled by the thistles that made them yelp and awake the sleeping Scots. And like a responsible Scotsman who payed attention in History class, I do indeed remember that happened in 1314.
Neffie kept us laughing until it was time for our concert at the Austin City Limits Moody theater. It’s always fun to browse the pictures of the musical greats that have played there – from Edie Brickell to Ray Charles and everything in between.
Nicki Bluhm opened the show for the Band of Heathens (BoH) and had a much more impressive voice in person than we hear her on the Tuesday night livestreams. She was able to effectively fill the theater with just her voice and acoustic guitar. Here she is with her husband Jesse, the bass player for the BoH, performing the first song that Sonny and Cher ever did together:
This was the BoH 15th anniversary show in their hometown and they didn’t disappoint at all, with a great mixture of songs from their new album and classics. “Miss Ohio” was an early favourite:
“Call Me Gilded” is a highlight from the new album and the harmonies are on good display:
And I’ll finish the reprise of this outstanding show with “Hurricane” transitioning into “LA County Blues”:
Three nights of fantastic live music. What a long overdue treat.
We started Monday with another workout at the hotel and then made the drive back to boring old McKinney. The rest of this week was our normal work from home routine, culminating with the aforementioned trip for coffee. Our only other excitement was a trip to “Run-On” after coffee to get runner D fitted for some new shoes. She’s been complaining of cold and numb toes and we’re trying to fix that with some new shoes and socks. 45 minutes later and I think she’s all fixed up – it’s nice that the store encourage you to go outside and run in the shoes they recommend.
I’ve been enjoying “Utopia Avenue” by David Mitchell (best known for “Cloud Atlas”). The book is about a group of musicians who form a band in the late 60s and early 70s. It started really well and is dragging a bit in the middle. At almost 500 pages with 200 or so to go, I’m hoping it grabs my interest a bit more soon. Although a work of fiction, famous musicians and other characters from real life make appearances in the book – sometimes entertaining and other times feeling pretty contrived – particularly in their dialogue.
I’ve come across a decent amount of music that is new to me over the last couple of weeks and I’ll save some for the upcoming posts.
I’ve always loved the song “Gypsy Blood” by Mason Ruffner and was interested to sample a more laid back recent offering. Here’s what a review said: “If you were waiting for Mark Knopfler to score a Sundance entry set in Grand Isle, this is your lucky day.” That caught my interest as I love Knopfler’s scores and Grand Isle is an area where Denny and the crew go fishing annually.
Some more reading provided this update on Ruffner’s activities since “Gypsy Blood” in the 80s: “In the mid-’80s, after Sea-Saint and before The Big Easy, transplanted Fort Worth native Mason Ruffner was a welcome national focal point for the New Orleans scene, a guitar slinger equally adept at blues, country, Tex-Mex and jazz who fell in love with the Crescent City and, somewhat oddly, folded the town’s rich piano tradition into his music. He was a critic’s darling, but perhaps taking a cue from so many of his local heroes, he soon disappeared into the wilds south of Austin.”
The dobro sound on this one is perfect:
A Colin Lake song popped up on a playlist and I did some research on him also. We saw him at the Telluride Blues Festival but I didn’t know much about him. He’s spent the last few years sailing around Latin America. Interesting to read this piece about Antigua – a beautiful and artsy town surrounded by volcanoes in Guatemala, where I enjoyed an afternoon right before COVID arrived to shut down travel. “Once in Antigua, Guatemala, Colin found the change in atmosphere inspiring and picked up a few gigs around town. While dusting off his catalog, he gleaned new and deeper meaning in the lines and melodies of his own songs, rediscovering them as though they were not his own.”
Stay safe and kind.