June 2005 – Page 2 – Deep Fried Kudzu

June 24, 2005December 23, 2019

Boston Park Plaza Hotel, Boston (MA)

Room: This was our first stay at the Boston Park Plaza. Unfortunately, we didn’t like our room at all; of all the hotels we stay in every year, I can honestly say that over the last five or six years, I can only think of three other hotels that we have truly hated. This is a new one. The room had holey and threadbare towels, holey sheets, a window shade that was tattered, a hair in the shower that didn’t belong to us, an air conditioner that didn’t work sufficiently, gnats, etc. The commode was one of those industrial-type, the kind that were in use at rest areas years ago – obviously not replaced during renovation, which flushed at about 140 db. There was no daily newspaper service, internet was $10/day, and parking was $36/day. A convention we were attending was based here so we decided to try to make the best of our stay. Sadly, several others in our group expressed that their rooms were no better than ours – even before we relayed our experience. This is a historic hotel – so there are some things, like small closets, that you might expect. The general uncleanliness of this hotel, however, is not something that one might expect.

Lobby:The lobby here is overall nice, as is the ballroom. The floral arrangements are silk, but overall the hotel common areas are what one might expect from what was once an upper-end hotel.

Service: Valet service was slow. Overall, the valet and bell service seemed not to be motivated.

Food: We did not dine at the hotel; however others on our hallway ordered room service, and their trays were left out for hours and hours.

Extra: The best thing about this hotel is the location. It’s only a block from a T (subway) station and either in the building or on adjacent blocks are: Bonfire (a Todd English restaurant), Finale, Smith & Wollensky, Legal Seafood, and other restaurants.

Our experience is this: never again. This was my first time to Boston, and I really like the city, but this hotel was (I hate to say this, but….) the worst.

June 22, 2005December 23, 2019

Hershey Park in Hershey, PA

This was my and Av’s first time to the Hershey Amusement Park in Hershey, PA. We didn’t originally intend to go, but it was just twelve miles off the highway on our way to Boston, so we couldn’t resist!

One of the really nice things is that they had a kosher restaurant there, right at the entrance to the park!

The weather was really nice, and there was really hardly any waiting at all on the rides we went on. The park was very clean, but a little smaller than I expected. The tickets were also $40/ea which I thought was really high, but Av said that’s pretty average now.

After the park, we went to ‘Chocolate World’ and took a tour about how Hershey’s chocolate is made. Yum!

June 22, 2005December 23, 2019

Southern Kitchen, New Market (VA)

We stopped at the Southern Kitchen restaurant in New Market (VA) for lunch on our way to Boston. I tried the peanut soup (it was a little strange having a regional peanut dish like this outside of the Wiregrass in Alabama, where there are roadside stands everywhere selling boiled or roasted peanuts….Dothan even has a peanut festival…). It was a little like melted peanut butter, and it had tiny little pieces of onion inside, too. Av liked it more than I did.

Av had the fried chicken plate, and even the fried chicken was different! It looked and tasted as though the chicken had been battered like tempura rather than how we do it back home – soaked in a bath of buttermilk, then dredged in White Lily flour. This tempura-style chicken was good, though.

Oh – and sad to say, but apparently New Market, VA is past the sweet tea line. When I asked for sweet tea, they only had unsweet. And as for cokes, they only served Pepsi.

June 22, 2005December 23, 2019

Pics from UVA

Av went to UVA for his degree, and this was my first time to visit. I was *so surprised* at how amazingly pretty it is. There are lots of pictures below of the campus.

The picture above is of Edgar Allan Poe’s dorm room there. A good summary about his time there is here.

June 21, 2005December 23, 2019

Hampton Inn, Charlottesville (VA)

Room: This was our first time to stay at this particular Hampton Inn in Charlottesville (VA). There are two Hamptons in Charlottesville – one that is right downtown, very close to the school, and one that is a little closer to the highway. The difference in price was about $30, so we chose the one closer to the highway. The room was one of the smallest among the Hamptons we’ve stayed at. So was the bathroom.

Lobby: Regulation Hampton.

Service: Front desk staff was friendly.

Our experience is this: We would stay here again, especially with the difference in cost between the two in town. Even though this one is a little further out, we were still just three or four minutes from UVA.

June 17, 2005December 23, 2019

Peggy’s in Philadelphia (MS)

People waiting outside, ready to sit down in Peggy’s living room and have some fried chicken

When in Philadelphia, Mississippi, you must drive to the home of someone you don’t know and sit down to lunch. Peggy’s Restaurant, at Byrd Street and Bay Street, just a couple of blocks from the courthouse, serves lunch every day (I think she was doing supper for a while too). She doesn’t have a sign in the front yard, but everybody knows that Peggy’s is the way to go.

Av and I have eaten lunch here before. You walk in and help yourself to whatever’s been cooked up that day – fried chicken, speckled butter beans, greens, cornbread, ‘nana puddin, the works – and find a seat in either of the couple of rooms that are opened up as dining areas. When you’re ready to leave, there’s no check – you just leave your tip on the table and your $7/ea in the basket. Love it!

Nowadays, Peggy has a new house and one of her sons owns the business. It is still a great place for lunch anytime.

June 17, 2005December 23, 2019

Random Pic: Roma Royalty, Objects This Week

Objects on Kelly Mitchell’s stone today

As I’ve blogged about before, the royal Roma family Mitchell is buried in Meridian. When I was there this week, I took this pic of what was on Kelly’s stone. The objects change on a very frequent basis.

June 12, 2005March 17, 2021

Peanut Butter Pie

Shavuot begins tonight, so for the *something dairy*, I made this great peanut butter pie. It’s very similar to other peanut butter pies I’ve made in the past, but the crust is different and better. This isn’t a completely ‘from-scratch’ recipe like I usually like to do, but it was yummy and quick. Nobody always needs or wants or should be a food snob. And who doesn’t like Nutter Butters, right? This is summer…let’s take it easy.

I based this recipe from one called “Nutter Butter Frozen Peanut Butter Pie“.

For the crust:
Take 24 Nutter Butter cookies and place them in a freezer bag. Hit the freezer bag with a rolling pin (or whatever) to make the cookies into crumbles. Pour the crumbled NB’s into a good-size bowl and add 5-6 tbsp of melted butter. Mix well. Place this mixture into either a pie dish or other suitable-size dish. Once filled and even on the bottom, place in the refrigerator.

For the filling:
Cream together one 8-oz package cream cheese, one cup of peanut butter, 3/4 cup of sugar. The original recipe called for a splash of vanilla, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Once that’s all incorporated, stir in 8-oz Cool Whip or freshly whipped cream.

Finish:
Take the crust back out of the refrigerator, and spoon the filling over. Level it out on top. For a little something extra, you can melt a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips with a tablespoon of peanut butter, then drizzle that on top. Place in the freezer for a few hours or overnight.

Yummy!

June 12, 2005December 23, 2019

Jerry Brown Pottery and Turbodog Chicken

Turbodog Chicken

About two years ago, Av and I drove to Hamilton (AL) and stopped at Jerry Brown’s pottery shop. Jerry Brown is a well-known Alabama potter who uses a mule-powered mill to help him pull clay up out of the ground, and he was also the recipient in 1992 of a National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship Award. There is a film about his pottery here.

At the shop, we bought a pot to cook chicken with. As you can see in the picture above, the pot has a cylinder shape in the middle. The idea is that you fill the cylinder shape up with orange juice or beer, or whatever you think might flavor the meat right for the dish you’re going to be serving.

What’s pictured above is my Jerry Brown chicken pot, a chicken that I’ve prepared with a coating of olive oil (to make the skin crisp) and a variety of herbs (I have one of those wonderful filled spice racks from Dean and Deluca that looks like a test tube rack, and for this dish I used the tube labeled ‘herbs for meat’ since it really does have a nice combination of herbs that flavor chicken and beef well), and a bottle of Turbodog to fill the cylinder about 3/4 full with.

Once the chicken is prepared for cooking, you just set him in the chicken pot with the cylinder up inside where you would otherwise put a stuffing.

Whee! I’m ready to be cooked!

I preheated the oven to 450* and cooked him about 1-1/2 hours. I put the rack on the lowest part of the oven to make room for the dish since it’s pretty tall.

I have to say, this is the best whole chicken I’ve made! The beer makes the breast meat especially juicy and delicious. No part of the chicken was dry – at all. Yum!

Cooling off a bit from the oven. Yummy!

I should also mention that you can cook chicken this way on the grill. Just take a can of beer, put it up inside the chicken, and let it cook that way. I’ll post pics of doing it that way later this summer.

June 10, 2005December 4, 2017

Milk Glass for the Outdoors

Plastic Milk Glass!

A recent issue of Elle Decor had a story about a team at K-Mart that was branding their products as “Essential Home” or “Home Essential” (on Kmart’s website, it goes by both names), with a fresher style than most of the older stock stand-bys that they carry.

One of the products that the article featured was plastic cups for outdoor use that mimiced the look of milk glass. I’m not really a huge milk glass fan, but I thought that was such a fun idea!

I haven’t been to a KMart in a few years….I’ve tried to avoid big-box stores (not always successfully, but I do try) – not for any huge political or other really interesting reasons – I’m just not wild about them, and as someone who is married to a small-business owner, I can totally understand doing business with people who are more like me (is that corny?). Anyway.

KMart had the exact glasses I saw in Elle Decor. I bought four large glasses – perfect for tea or water, and four more glasses that would be perfect for ice cream. Nice!