Month: March 2007

I am sooo excited! One of my pics is on the cover of a cd!

This is *huge* for me because…well…I got paid real money (not a fortune, but it was pretty good!) and…it’s on a cd for goodness sakes! The cd is called Juke Joint Soul and it’s released by Fuel Records in Los Angeles.

Last year, I posted about how I was approached by the firm that handles marketing for Mastercard and signed a contract for them to use my pic of a poboy from Acme Oyster House. I kept looking for it (it was going to be on priceless.com in a Peyton Manning ad because that’s one of his favorite foods) but I emailed the person at the agency after a couple of months, and they wrote me back that “(they) used an image of oysters and Peyton did an interview for us.” Oh well!

Just this week, I got two requests for different pics – one is of an anti-immigration rally that I took a pic of (from the car – I just rolled down the window as we were going by and shot some pics!) when there was a rally in Cullman last year. We were driving to Huntsville or somewhere and decided to go through the middle of town, and there were all these people on the courthouse steps holding signs and waving, etc. That pic is here. It’s going to be in an upcoming edition of the Harvard College Economics Review.

The other pic – either this one or this one that I took in Montreal in the summer of 2005 – that’s going to be published is to go in a book called Food by editor John Knechtel. This is how Amazon describes the contents:

“In Food, an artist photographs everything he ate in 2006 (and some things he didn’t eat, including “Food I Left in the Fridge Too Long”) and finds the results both “seductive and repulsive”; a writer describes the global agro-assembly line that produces an organic bento box for Japanese commuters containing rice and vegetables from California, pork from Mexico, and salmon from Alaska; a short story writer offers an eight-page graphic novel, Eating in Cafeterias; a landscape architect compares a commercial orange with an organic apple using visualized data; an award-winning New York City food writer tells a postmodern tale about small-town Chinese-American cuisine (featuring chop suey, egg rolls, and flaming lava cocktails); an expert explains the principles of urban food sustainability. Other projects include a map of the free food from fruit trees on public land in a Los Angeles neighborhood, a visionary plan for farms in skyscrapers, and a surprising report on food security. The essays, artwork, and stories in Food offer readers a full menu of intellectual nourishment and aesthetic delight.”

My pic will be used in the section about (this is the way the author described it to me):

“the full energy equation (a.k.a. carbon footprint) required to produce and truck an plantation orange from California to Toronto, as compared to producing an organic apple in Colborne Ontario and delivering it to the Toronto market place. The piece opens with a photo of the Montreal Orange and a photo of the Colborne Big Apple.”

I can’t wait to see these once they’re printed! I would have never had the opportunity to do this if I hadn’t put my pics on Flickr. Soooo glad I did!

One of my friends is going to be so happy with me – she loves Dr. Pepper and usually has to live without it during Passover…but not this year!

Most drinks like Coke or Dr. Pepper, etc. are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), but the Dr. Pepper that’s made at the bottler in Dublin, Texas is made with cane sugar. That’s important during Passover, because corn and its derivatives are foods that we’re supposed to avoid during the holiday.

Some people who are really big on Coca-Cola (even if they don’t celebrate Passover) will go out and buy Coke in the 2-liter bottle with the yellow screw tops because that signifies that the bottler has switched over to the original cane sugar recipe. The cap will also have an OU-P stamp on it.

There’s a really good story that NPR did about the difference between Coke made with HFCS and cane sugar. If you have a Mexican grocery store in your area, they might carry Mexican Coke, which is *always* made with cane sugar.

I don’t think any bottler switches over from HFCS to cane sugar to make Dr. Pepper for Passover, but since I found the Dublin Dr. Pepper bottler and had them ship me some to give to Leslie, she will be so surprised and happy!

On our way back from Louisiana, we stopped for a little while in Natchez, and had lunch at the Carriage House restaurant at Stanton Hall (Stanton Hall is a huge antebellum home).

They were really busy because Natchez is having their Spring Pilgrimage right now, but we didn’t have to wait long to be seated.

Av is a connoisseur of the mint julep – he has julep cups in the bar at home and likes to see how other people make juleps. This one came in a large glass with a marachino cherry on top:

I had the “Queens’ Salad” which was chicken salad, potato salad, and tomato aspic. I love any place that makes a nice tomato aspic because it’s so old-fashioned and hardly anyone serves it anymore…
Av had the fried chicken with rice & gravy and green beans:

Everything was really nice.

We’re thinking about making plans to go back in the next week or so to see the Historic Natchez Pageant (it’s the musical where everyone’s dressed in period costumes) and Songs of the South. There are *so* many beautiful B&Bs there, the only trouble would be picking which one to stay!

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There’s a wonderful website called “Tea Map” that lists tearooms by state and has a feature where people can rate their experience at each place. Some of them seem *so* nice!

We skipped breakfast at the hotel and went to the Beacon Light Tea Room in Bon Aqua. We’ve done breakfast at the Loveless before and heard this place was even better.

Inside it’s a mishmash of Jesus paintings, fake plants, and someone’s obsession with the Home Interiors catalog. (Have you ever seen one? In college, I worked at a place where one of the women sold from that catalog – you could buy entire mantelpieces full of stuff altogether – from hurricane lamps to pictures, display plates to fake ivy. Now that I went to their website today, it looks a lot different…but I guess in the early 90s it was had a more ‘now this is what’s called decorated‘ vibe.)

Anyway, it is…um…very busy inside the restaurant. Not in a terrible-bad way, maybe like if you went to your somebody’s grandmother’s house and she was *really* into artificial floral arrangements and a bit of the kitsch. And there’s a “Shalom Y’all” plaque by the front door. And one more thing – after seeing all the religious images, going through the bible verses on the table (see below), etc. we walked to the cash register to pay, and the guy at the register was actually wearing one of these. I half imagined the owner shoo-ing him out with a broom for even thinking of killing the atmosphere like that, but anyway…

On each table is something called an “Our Daily Bread Promise Box” with Bible verses inside.

The breakfast was really, really good. I had biscuits with white gravy, and Av had steak biscuits. The biscuits are small but excellent, and they come with a yummy hashbrown casserole. Mmmm…..

Today is Pi Day – it’s 3.14 on the calendar, which someone decided would be perfect to celebrate π.

I love any kind of holiday, so when I found it last year on Wikipedia (you can type dates into Wikipedia and it will show holidays from all over the world that are being celebrated), I decided to do what other people do that day…make a pie (great excuse, right!?).

Last year, I made Pawley’s Island Pie – it’s one of Av’s favorites:

I’m not sure what I’ll make later today – there’s always lots of good inspiration on the ‘Pie Club’ Flickr group I’m in, though!

Marie: my MIL says that she got that plate from The Wireless Catalog – what a weird catalog!! – but I just looked and I don’t see it…you might want to give them a call (800.669.5225) and see if they still carry it – it’s their item # VC4603.