Doing It Cowgirl Style

It's 5:00 on a Saturday afternoon. Do you know what you're doing tonight?

I didn't. Hence the beauty of getting an e-mail at 5:05 from a friend.

"What's going on? What are you doing tonight? Dinner? If you are free, let me know."

Freer than free. Planless. Absolutely nothing on the books whatsoever.

And this is the friend who once told the world that, "Oh, Karen knows the rules. She just chooses not to play the game."

Needless to say, I find that kind of insight irresistible.

By 6:15, we were the sole occupants of the bar at Acacia. By 6:45 there was a wait for tables and bar space.

Gavi di Gavi Ru appealed to me and satisfied my friend's passion for white wine only, but our tastes diverged once we got to the food menu.

He asked me what sugar toads were and once I explained puffer fish, stuck his tongue out in disgust.

I asked him if he ate mortadella and he grimaced, shaking his head.

So I ordered both while he chose the tempura local softshell with shaved Napa cabbage, carrots, red onion and curry vinaigrette.

He raved about his salad (and Chef Dale is a master with softshells, I agree) but I was more than happy with my two tenpura sugar toads with honey soy sauce.

Insert in mouth, scrape flesh off bones, savor and swallow. Yum.

The housemade mortadella was an enormous portion of what is a large Italian sausage anyway and combined with the pickles of fiddleheads, ramps and cabbage and grainy mustard on toasted bread could have been a meal in itself.

Not to mention its $3 price tag.

It was a beautiful night to be at Acacia because the front of the restaurant was wide open to the temperate evening air.

Once we finished the wine, we decided to do the progressive dinner thing and move on to Arcadia.

They, too, had their front door open and a lively crowd was in place when we were welcomed to the bar by a bartender who didn't have any customers at that moment.

Poor thing, he had no idea what he was letting himself in for.

My friend had been at Arcadia just a few days ago and wanted the same wine he'd had then: Drouhin Pouilly Fuisse.

Light, with a long finish, it was a great choice as far as I was concerned.

Having just polished off sugartoads and mortadella, I wasn't especially hungry, but my friend insisted we soldier on with our eating.

Deferring to him, he chose a starter of petite crabcakes (full of jumbo lump crabmeat but a tad salty, I thought) followed by the obscene and decadent Braveheart beef 22-ounce bone-in cowboy cut for us to share.

Because no one, not a cowboy or even a cowgirl, needs 22 ounces of meat.

On the other hand, that Braveheart beef is disgustingly good, even if I felt my arteries clogging as I ate it.

After mortadella, no less.

I'm going to hell in a handbasket, as my Richmond grandmother used to say.

Midway through our meal the rain began suddenly, making for a lovely soundtrack and sending people scurrying in from the outside.

I felt the temperature of the air wafting in from outside drop almost at once.

The music was a great mix tonight, too; I heard everything from Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" to Missy Higgins' "Steer."

But the search ends here
Where the night is totally clear
And your heart is fierce
So now you finally know that you control where you go
You can steer

When you eat as much as we did tonight, you have plenty of time to cover all kinds of personal topics.

Friend asked why I am at Balliceaux so often (music), told me about his new love (and the unexpected first night kiss) and gave me major points for hair and lipstick upkeep.

It's funny; you never know what people notice about you unless they tell you.

In the interest of ensuring that we had to be rolled out of Arcadia, he insisted that we get dessert and I picked a flourless dark chocolate torte with chocolate gelato.

The fudge-like torte was sensational, barely semi-sweet and texturally like velvet in my mouth, but the gelato was even more exquisite, positively sticky with its high butterfat.

Even so, no self-respecting cow girl would have eaten it after that hunk o' meat we'd just shared.

There isn't enough riding on the range I could do to offset the amount of food I downed tonight.

But then a real cowgirl would have had plans by 5:00.

And maybe steered a little bit better.

Tails Were the Turnoff

I have a friend who is a decidedly un-adventurous eater. Last winter, when I ordered the wild boar meatballs at Bacchus, she was repulsed and gave me a hard time about eating them. After enough wine, I might add, she begrudgingly tasted them and reluctantly admitted that they were awfully good.


Fast forward to tonight and she suggested Bacchus again, even throwing out a tease that she might get the wild boar. This was something I needed to see. We set up camp at the bar, which was completely empty, although nearly every table and booth was full. We ordered wine and started looking at the menu.


Alas, the wild boar was gone, replaced by all kinds of other delectables. My friend went right from the exotic to the mundane and ordered the white pizza and the white beans with pesto. I'm not so easily led; I decide to start with the spinach salad with green apple vinaigrette, goat cheese and toasted almonds.


But what had immediately caught my eye was the sugar toad scampi. It's not every day that you find Chesapeake puffer fish on the menu, but when I do, I want some. And unlike probably the most frequent preparation, lightly fried, this was something different.


My salad was perfection with the sweet dressing well serving the spinach and goat cheese. I think I enjoyed it all the more for knowing what a rich delight was to follow. Because, quite honestly, those sugar toads were the thing.


Five little bodies in a bowl full of butter and garlic and a big piece of frisee on the side, this didn't look quite like anything else that readily came to mind. It was then that my friend glanced down and gasped, "Are those tails?" Why, yes, they were and that was the end of the possibility of her tasting sugar toads. Their fatal flaw was their end piece.


Not long after, a couple of guys became the third and fourth bar sitters. The first guy introduced himself as Persian (I love how much more romantic that sounds than Iranian), but an American citizen since 1971. He was effusive about his passion for his adopted home in that way that oly non-natives tend to be. His friend and former co-worker was originally from Mexico. We now had two delightful accents to share conversation with.


My friend can be direct. "Do you smoke?" she asked one of the guys, apparently based on his breath. It turned out that they both did, not surprisingly given that one works for Philip-Morris and the other is a retiree after 30+ years of service. They were charming, well-traveled and obviously long-time friends.


We started with health care reform, went on to the attitudes of the German people and finished with tales of intrigue from South American tobacco farms. My perception of P-M employees was blown out of the water with some of their more colorful stories about tobacco acquisition. Corporate intrigue! Radio interviews! Sacrificing a cow!


But the sugar toads were the thing tonight...tails and all.