[M'reen sent me this cartoon today in an email titled "Old is When...." I thought it fit real good with the whole lunch theme]
Some days, the only thing that works to get your face off the pavement is to head to Eastern Market Lunch on Capitol Hill and have a genyoowine Southren lunch: Fried flounder on a homemade roll (lettuce & tomato added free) or a fried fish platter with THREE HUGE fillets plus two sides and a homemade roll. The fish is the freshest I've ever tasted outside of my mother's kitchen at Lake Sallie, where she cooked the fish that my dad and I caught and cleaned about 10 minutes before. The tartar sauce is also homemade from the thickest, creamiest mayo you ever et plus some chopped pickle and onion. You dip it yourself out of the bucket into little plastic cups. Sides at EML include French fries, fresh collards (pronounced "cullyards" if you're from around Bal'mer), slaw, and potato salad. You wash it all down with sweet tea, which is how they drink tea in the South here. Yeah, D.C. is South. The Mason-Dixon line runs across the country up north of here. Iced tea is also on the menu, but you have to add your own sugar if you want it sweet.
The whole thing costs about 10 bucks, and there's usually enough to take a whole 'nother lunch back to work for somebody else who's still hungry. Life is beautiful....
sally:
ReplyDeleteplus, there's the whole dining experience in the market itself: sitting on padded metal stools at a big long, metal-topped table...eating next to and across from strangers...joking with the cooks and order takers and ignoring the stares from a whole display case full of dead fish behind you....
first, the cartoon. "look!" i said to spouse on his way to his laptop. we laughed much; it is second anniversary of his quadruple by-pass survival.
ReplyDeleteon to your delightful description of all the wrong food. m.e., you should work for the Big Mac folks. oh, maybe you do. now to scroll backwards to other posts. you've been cranking them out more often of late.
ndb:
ReplyDeletework for Big Mac folks? I do have standards, though I love Mickey D's apple slices with some kind of dip. The stuff I wrote about is all home made, not that we can't kill each other off in our own kitchens.
but anyway, it's lunchtime here, and we are trying to decide where to go to get soup (for me) and salad (for my coworker). i left a big kettle of pea soup on my stove, but that's for supper--if it's edible at all. i bought one of those cellophane packets with all kinds of lovely dried peas, herb packet, etc., and the peas, no matter how long i cooked them (3 hours last weekend, and an hour or two here and there throughout this week), are still hard as gravel. i know you can tenderize a tough old cut of beef by adding gin to the stock, but nothing much has dented those doggone peas!!