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The August/September issue of Mary Engelbreit Home Companion has a feature on the artwork of Ann Wood and Dean Lucker. Dean sculpts and makes the mechanical pieces and Ann paints. They’re wonderful!
The first one from their website, called “For You” is made so that when the lever is pushed, the girl raises her hand and a snowglobe appears that says “for you.” How precious is that!?
Some of the other pieces on their site have video clips to show how they ‘work’.
Earlier this week, I bought a set of Alabama Art Cards designed by Nall – they are wonderful!
The face of each of the cards is this image, which is also the cover of the ‘Alabama Art’ book he edited, published in 2000.
In the spades suit, he features Frank Fleming, Kathryn Tucker Windham, and Martin Luther King Jr. (jokers are Bruce Larsen and Susan Starr):
Diamonds are Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Helen Keller, and Chip Cooper.
Clubs are Mose T, Betty Sue Matthews, and Booker T. Washington:
Hearts are Nall, Yvonne Wells, and Truman Capote:
…and each of the suits features a symbol of Alabama – the pecan, the dogwood berry, the cotton boll, and the camellia.
Enclosed with the cards is an insert where Nall writes about memories of growing up. He writes, “Before television, I spent many moments playing cards with family and friends, laughing and socializing around a front porch table or under the wisteria arbor. These memories are captured here in the portraits of many of Alabama’s best-known painters, photographers, writers, and sculptors.”
Tonight for supper, I made Pompano Meuniere Amandine. The recipe is in my Galatoire’s Cookbook, and it’s one of Galatoire’s best-known dishes. It turned out great!
I halved the recipe in the book to make two servings, and used the pompano we got at Joe Patti’s in Pensacola. The only way I made this different from the book was that I used olive oil rather than vegetable oil, and was a little more generous with the almonds since Av likes them so much.
Ingredients for two servings:
1/2 cup Meuniere Sauce, at most (ingredients: butter, red wine vinegar, lemon juice – recipe below). Even though 1/2 cup doesn’t sound like much, I used a fraction of that…
2 pompano fillets
a little olive oil, for brushing onto the fish
paprika
white pepper
3/4 cup toasted sliced almonds
parsley for the plate
lemon for the plate
Directions:
First I made the meuniere sauce. There are several different variations on meuniere, but the one for this dish is very, very simple. It takes one stick of butter, melted, stirring constantly, on a medium-low setting. Next was a splash of the red wine vinegar and same amount lemon juice whisked together, then added to the butter once the butter was browned. This makes the butter bubble, so you have to make sure to keep stirring well. When it was well incorporated and stopped foaming/bubbling, I strained the sauce through a sieve and set aside. Keep it warm.
Next, I started the almonds to toast. The oven was preheated to 350* and a baking pan was covered with parchment paper, then the almonds. After 15 minutes in the oven, they were a nice golden brown color.
For the fish, I preheated the oven on a low broil. Here are the pompano fillets on the foil-covered broiler pan:
…brushed them with olive oil, then sprinkled white pepper and paprika on each.
After 12 minutes under the broiler, they were cooked perfectly:
I put one fillet on each plate and covered with the toasted almonds and some meuniere sauce. The lemon and parsley were added also.
Av orders trout amandine pretty often when we go to certain restaurants for supper, and he loved the pompano done this way. It really was great!
The Ohr O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi was under construction when the hurricane struck, but they’re proceeding and doing programming – including summer camp for kids. The architect on the museum is Frank Gehry (I love the design he did for the Disney Hall, and the Stata Center, especially) so you know it’s going to turn out interesting and wonderful!
I’m really looking forward to the museum being completed and opening, because Ohr’s pottery is just so magnificent. He lived from 1857 to 1918, was involved with Newcomb College pottery for a while, and was a real character – he called himself the “mad potter of Biloxi” and was a huge self-promoter. A crazy handlebar mustache, too!
Today, a piece of Ohr pottery runs in the tens of thousands of dollars. I saw one piece on Antiques Roadshow (they have a pic of his work here), and they said that although there were once 10,000 pieces of his that were purchased, less than 500 are probably “still out there.” They’re so neat, too – thin-walled, pinched pieces that are really abstract. Beautiful.
I bought “The Mad Potter of Biloxi: The Art and Life of George E. Ohr” and just last month, “George Ohr, Art Potter: The Apostle of Individuality” was published. I haven’t gotten it yet, but I’m thinking about it!
Right now, the collection of George Ohr pottery from Biloxi is being exhibited at the Mobile Museum of Art, with Shearwater Pottery (their building was heavily, heavily damaged too). The Mobile Museum site says that the Ohr/Shearwater exhibit is showing until September 30 – and the Nall exhibit I really want to see is there until September 24th – so I’m going to get back there soon!
We drove over to Pensacola from Mobile to go to our favorite fish market in the whole wide world – Joe Patti’s. While Av was getting our order together…some grouper and pompano…I took a picture of these two lobsters being weighed for a customer:
It is crazy-busy there, but it’s really efficient and somehow fun and we love it!
They packed our fish (if you have a cooler, bring it in and they will fill it with ice and pack it perfectly – if not, they’ll pack it to go in one of their coolers) and we were all set.
This is the scene outside the market…every fish market should be this way! 🙂
This weekend, Av and I spent a little time at the largest National Historic Register Site east of the Mississippi (I didn’t realize it until we got there!) – Historic Blakeley State Park. There is a sign to take one of the exits off I-65 not far from Mobile to get to a Civil War battlefield…so Av and I drove out just to see what was there.
The park attendant gave us a little literature about it – Blakely used to be a thriving town back in the 1820s – bigger than Mobile, even – but today there’s not a single building left.
It’s also where the last major battle of the War was, on April 9, 1865, six hours after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. 26,000 soldiers fought there.
Part of the park is on the Tennsaw River. We walked around for a while by the water, and dragonflies were everywhere!
It’s really, really pretty there. Next time, I think it would be great to hike some of the trails out to the Indian mounds in the park. This site has some information about them.
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