I have to be honest: I'm a little down these days. It's normally a great time to be in this wonderful city--festivals, sno-balls, seafood everywhere you look--and of course, that's the reason for the blues. The seafood. No fried oyster po-boys, no raw oysters in some spots. Fishing folk shuttling executives out to the rigs instead of pulling in hundreds of pounds of shrimp. It's a crying shame.
I haven't even felt much like cooking lately, though I've been desperate to eat something homey and comforting. I just couldn't think of what that was. So yesterday I started scribbling, doodling, trying to get down to the basics of what would make me feel better, and I came up with one of my favorite childhood meals: fish sticks, peas, and mac and cheese. Have you ever had this, or something like it? With a little ketchup on the plate, it looks beautiful, in a Crayola kind of way: crunchy golden fish sticks, a big splotch of red ketchup, bright green peas (cooked from frozen in nothing more than salted water), and orangy-yellow mac and cheese from the blue box. Every time my mom pulled the ingredients out for this feast, I got so excited. It was happiness in one of its purest forms: looking forward to something. Plus, I liked the challenge of getting one of those straight macaroni on each of my four fork tines before I took a bite.
