epicurean notes from creeping into Mother’s Day, she takes control of the menu. She is busy early in the morning grilling vegetables and sausages, making countless varieties of appetizers and massive casseroles filled with macaroni and cheese and its ilk. I have my orders (not ideas, but commands) as to what I will be cooking. The famous root beer-glazed ham scores many points for me. (If I ever become famous for a recipe, it will be that one.) I also bake or grill some oysters, boil shrimp for a remoulade, toss some jumbo lump crabmeat with ravigote sauce and serve them on slices of plum tomatoes. MA loves dips, and we have many of them on Mother’s Day. She tells me I make the best guacamole she has ever eaten. She does not say such things unless it is a certainty in her mind. I, of course, follow through. How could I not? I also make hummus. The night before, I bake a cheesecake. MA is proud to present her pimiento cheese and her take on stuffed mushrooms (spinach and Italian sausage are the stuffings). At around eleven in the morning, there comes a dreaded announcement, one also heard on Thanksgiving and Christmas: “I don’t think we have enough food says MA. She starts in on another round of cooking, sometimes with a trip to the grocery store first. After having parties like this three or four times a year for 25 years, we have never ended the day without a truckload of leftovers. Likely reason for this: MA likes to eat leftovers even more than getting the food fresh off the grill. It’s as if she has somehow cheated the universe out of something valuable. The degree to which she pursues this is mindbending. But she gets great pleasure 72
Inside Northside