Month: April 2007

We had dinner one day at the Dillard House in Dillard, Georgia. The Dillard House is set up so that when you arrive, they automatically serve you everything that’s been prepared that day – everything! Here’s the menu board for when we went:

…and that’s really what we were served!

Isn’t that crazy?!

Friday, we went to the Loretta Lynn concert at the Alabama Theatre (the theatre is *amazingly beautiful* on the inside – I have pics of it from a different event here).

It was wonderful! Av bought us tickets right in the middle of the third row, and Loretta and I could have practically hugged from where we were sitting. It was a great show…she carried on with the audience and sang some of the requests that people asked her to sing, including one song that a man in the row behind us asked her to do, and she and her band leader thought it was probably the first time in about 25 years that they had performed it. She ended with “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and everybody went crazy…it was so great to see a legend like her perform!

We figured it out. We’re going to decorate the nursery with home-grown (local artist) pieces!

Over the crib, we’re going to put the framed print with Kathryn Tucker Windham that we got on our last trip to Black Belt Treasures. **Love** it.

Then, we’re going to move pieces that we have by Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Chris Clark, Myrtice West, Lonnie Holley, Floyd Shaman and others in to decorate. We’re going to hang the quilt that we bought from Yvonne Wells at Kentuck on the wall, and then on (really high!) shelves we’ll put some folk pottery.

Oh yes! I love that we’ve got this figured out now!

I need to get a Mose T watermelon! His watermelons were my favorite pieces of his, but I never would get one because, goodness knows, he probably did over a thousand of them. But now, I need one. How can you have a baby due in July and not have a watermelon? Right!?

Now that I’m at seven months, I’ve got to get serious about picking out things for the nursery. I guess up to this point I have tried to hold myself back because of superstition and just the fun of knowing everything I have to look forward to, but I have also had the hardest time picking out what theme to build everything around!

I thought that we might just have something to build on when we thought about using Av’s mother’s childhood furniture set. It is all hand-painted and must have cost a fortune (and it’s a full set – dresser, nightstands, chair, everything – we’d only need a new crib). Today it would be considered shabby-chic, I guess…

Thing is, we did a lead test on it and it came up positive, so we’re not going to be able to use it! Ack!

Since we don’t know if the baby will be a girl or boy, we’re going for a nice neutral look. We have a fantastic mahogany armoire that I think I would like to use, and we’d just need to pick out some mahogany nursery furniture to pair with it – a crib, a dresser/changing table, a little table for a lamp, and a rocker (I’d love to find a big fluffy/comfy chenille rocker that I could nest in!).

So far, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at catalogs – I like the Land of Nod catalog especially, and Posh Tots has some amazing round cribs. There are *so* many wonderful catalogs, and this week we’re going to start shopping at some of the baby boutiques around so I hope to get even more great furniture ideas in person!

Av had his annual allergy sickness late the past week and this weekend – he is allergic to the type of pollen that is super-tiny and just floats through the air (not the bigger types of pollen that make your car yellow if you let it set outside) so he usually gets sick right about this time each year. Thankfully, it doesn’t last too long, but it is hard to see him not feeling good.

If there is one thing that always perks him up, though, it is chocolate! I made him a chocolate chess pie this weekend and…guess what? He was back to being himself Monday morning.

Ingredients:
1 stick unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
6 eggs
3 tbsp flour
pinch salt
1- 5oz. can Pet milk (evaporated milk)
2 tsp vanilla
4 tbsp. cocoa
1 deep-dish unbaked pie shell (or you can make your own)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 325*

Mix together the sugar, flour, and salt – I do this in my Kitchenaid.

Melt the butter in the microwave and then mix in the cocoa (this time, I used some really fantastic hot chocolate that Darlene got me from W-S but you could use Hershey’s cocoa too), then add that to the bowl of the Kitchenaid.

Get the wet and the dry ingredients incorporated (and make sure that before you add anything else that the mixture is room temperature since when you add the eggs you don’t want the mixture so hot that they even think about cooking!).

Next, add the Pet milk and vanilla, then eggs one at a time. Get everything mixed together really well.

Put the unbaked pie shell on a cookie sheet just in case the filling seeps over a tiny bit, then pour the mixture into the pie shell.

Start checking on it at 45 minutes. It took about 55-60 minutes before mine was ready to take out of the oven:

I like regular chess pie and Av likes anything chocolate so this turned out really nice. Yum!

Well, I still have a few more travel pics, but I’m so ready since we’re back home to get back to posting about puttering, cooking, and crafting that I thought I’d post some pics of the amazing flowers that are just bursting here!

These are some of the azaleas in our front yard. I know…they are taking over. I can never bring myself to having them cut back because there would just be fewer beautiful blooms to look at next year! This picture makes me just want to jump in:

 

Since we were staying overnight in Tunica, we decided to have supper at John Besh’s restaurant there, N’awlins. John won the 2006 James Beard Award in the Southeastern chefs category. His other restaurant, Restaurant August, in New Orleans, is considered one of the city’s very best so we were looking forward to trying this one.

There are *serious* differences between dining here and in New Orleans, though. For one thing, getting a reservation was no problem at all. The decor wasn’t as nice as I had figured it would be, and the patrons were dressed waaaay down – even shorts and blue jeans. We could occasionally hear the slot machines going off outside the door (which was kept open), and our server was really-really bad.

We started with the barbecue shrimp, which had almost an Indian-type flavor. They were really good:

Av had the trio of soups – gumbo, crab bisque, and turtle. The bisque was best but they were all good. Sherry was offered with the turtle soup, and rather than the server offering it to Av to add as needed after he tasted it, the server just dumped the whole portion of sherry in…:

Av had the tournedo of beef which was nice:

…and I had the sugar cane-lacquered chicken. The chicken itself was really delicious but I think because there was a sweet sauce all over the plate, it made everything almost sickly-sweet. Not to be all Iron Chef judge-y, but there wasn’t anything else savory on the plate so it was all almost like candy.

I think we must have gone on an off-night because nothing was really “wow” – but really the thing that turned us off the most was the waiter, who besides being very ‘short’ with us, got into an argument with the host…and the argument went on most of the time we were there.

There are plenty of wonderful places in Memphis to try, though, and since it’s only about 30 minutes away that’s probably what we’ll do the next time we want to have something nicer – like Folk’s Folly or Erling Jensen or…

We’ve stayed at this Sheraton hotel once or twice before – it’s actually part of a casino, but the rooms are nice and the very best part is that if you stay here during the week, the room cost is half or less than half than on weekends.

I’ve never heard of a Sheraton being part of a casino like it is here (it’s owned by Harrah’s), but we like it because we’re still in the Delta and only about 30 minutes from downtown Memphis.

Some time soon, I’d love to stay at the Shack Up Inn, close to Clarksdale. It’s at the Hopson Plantation, and they have sharecropper shacks all fixed up for people to stay in! How much fun would that be, to stay in a little (air conditioned & indoor plumbing installed!) shack? Well…it would at least be different. I’ve got a couple of pictures from there here. There’s also a B&B called Uncle Henry’s Place that *used* to be a casino, until the ’30s when it was found out that the money was going to the mob in Chicago (there’s a nice article in the NY Times that mentions it here). I don’t remember where I read about it first, but it sounded *so* interesting…

We had lunch at Walnut Hills (1214 Adams St, 601/638-4910) in Vicksburg – it’s one of our favorite places, especially because it’s a revolving table restaurant and we always get to talk and make friends with whoever else is at our table.

This time we got there early and they didn’t have the hot food ready to bring out quite yet, so I started with a couple of bites of pineapple and cheese salad, some tomato aspic, and coleslaw…

Then everything else came out – there was fried chicken, plantation chicken, corn pudding, squash, blackeyed peas, sweet potato, green beans, butter beans, creamed potatoes, cornbread and biscuits, and about ten other things (literally) that I can’t even remember!

One other revolving table restaurant in MS is The Dinner Bell in McComb, which is really good. I don’t know of any revolving table restaurants anywhere in Alabama, but food is served family-style at Mrs. Wilkes’ in Savannah and Miss Mary Bobo’s in Lynchburg – neither of which we have been to yet but I would *love* to try!

I had wanted to stay at Dunleith for this trip to Natchez, but all the rooms I was interested in, in the main house, were all booked. That was okay, though, because we decided that since we had plans to go up into the Delta the next day that we would just drive up to Vicksburg after the Historic Natchez Pageant that evening and save ourselves about an hour of driving time.

Dunleith has a really nice restaurant, and Av made us reservations there for supper before the show.

This is The Castle – it’s the restaurant we had supper at, and it’s right behind the main house. Inside the menu, they had a note that this is one of the Gothic structures built in the 1790s as part of the original plantation. The first floor of this building housed the horse stables and the second level (the level we had supper in) stored carriages for the property. They still have three of the original carriages at Dunleith.

Next post: Natchez Historic Pageant!