On Wednesday, like many, I was a useless, immobile, deflated bag of dread and torpor, unable to think about anything but the four-year shitstorm darkening the horizon.
On Thursday, I started moving again, the bag swelling with a mounting fury at roughly 73 million fellow Americans, but also with a warm gooey slab of bread pudding dropped off at my back door by a saint.
That’s literally a saint, in the sense of New Orleans transplant and gumbo backdoor man Scott Doland, who seems to have a gift for shining just a bit of light on the present darkness.
With the power of chicken and smoked sausage gumbo, he can do it for you too when Dolin’ Out returns to the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern.
On Tuesday, Doland and coconspirator Morgan Weiss doled out “comfort food for an uncomfortable election,” at Frank and Mary’s to a crowd he described as “half indifferent, half in a socially functioning state of anticipatory dread.”
That was also the inaugural “Fat Tuesday” of their new Tuesday residency at F&M’s, kicking back up on November 19 (with time off for holidays).
Holidays like the next Foodball, when they’ll be dishing out deep, soulful bowls of their emotional support gumbo with rice, potato salad, and sliced baguette.
It also marks the return of the “pra-quoi,” sea-salted butter toffee and toasted pecan graham crackers; plus, a “happy accident” in the form of a caramel cracker, a pra-quoi batch made with twice the butter.
And that’s not all. There are a limited number of first-come, first-serve orders of vegan red beans and rice with cornbread, and—oh yes—slices of that restorative bread pudding that got me back on my feet.
You too should not despair. Dolin’ Out has medicine to cure all y’alls ills starting at 5 PM until sellout this Monday, November 11, at 2905 N. Elston in Avondale.
Meanwhile, coming right up tomorrow: a brand-new November-December Foodball schedule.
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