My lack of posts are a direct result of being in a critical phase of working on the new non-fiction book combined with juggling other tasks I’ve postponed – like posting to the blog. Maybe it wasn’t a total coincidence that a post came in yesterday from another site I sometimes follow admonishing us to sometimes step back and not worry about being productive all the time. Yeah, sure, I’ll work on that. In the meantime in the real world, I’ll have another couple of 4:00 a.m. mornings to stay on track.

Setting all that aside, however, my trip to Louisiana was jam-packed and I was able to see a number of friends and relatives. Not everyone, of course, but quite a few. The only culinary goal I missed was catfish. Had I know the one place wasn’t open on Sundays, I would have done catfish for lunch Saturday, but so it goes. I did have an excellent tilapia dish as well as two wonderful fried green tomato appetizers. The regional take is to top them with crawfish tails in some type of sauce and it makes for a great appetizer to share or you can pair something else with it and have all appetizers for a meal. I do that fairly often, although I didn’t during this trip.

The simple truth is the small town where Daddy lives doesn’t have many sit-down restaurants and I’m not certain if they have any yet that serve alcohol. (The tiny town that adjoins them voted alcohol in quite a few years ago and the two restaurants out there are very popular.) We did, however, discover a new Mexican place that took over from the former Bonanza, I think it was. I’m a little surprised the steak place didn’t make it and don’t know what the story was. At any rate, El Jimador, was quite enjoyable. Daddy is not big on cooked pepper and onions and they were completely accommodating about cooking his dish without them. Their tortilla chips and salsa seemed to both be homemade and were delicious in either case.