Month: May 2007

Av and I were in the ‘big city’ this week and had supper at The Veranda, and were we ever lucky, because it was the first night with their new chef, Tom Robey, who left as executive sous chef at Commander’s Palace for the position here. Ohmystars was it ever good.

Av started with the softshell crawfish:

…and I had the shrimp remoulade:

…then my entree was the soft-shell crab with a really wonderful slaw and even better crawfish grits:

Av’s entree was sea bass over some really wonderful potatoes:

We’re already making plans to go back with some other friends. Yum!

The NY Times is doing a 12-week travel series right now, on frugal traveling across the US. Their report today was from a trip to Georgia and Alabama, and they’re doing Tennessee and Kentucky next.

In Alabama, the reporter had ribs at Dreamland in Northport (was the original closed that day? It’s really close to where he was…), breakfast at the Waysider in Tuscaloosa, visited the Westervelt-Warner museum (which I haven’t been to but is supposed to be really good), and then went to the Bear Bryant museum, which he actually said reminded him in some way of the Joseph Stalin museum. Blasphemy!

What’s even more interesting than the reporter’s articles, though, are the wonderful suggestions that people are sending in (see the comments section at the bottom of each article post).

I thought about this for a *long* time, until one of my friends said I was just-plain being selfish without giving people an idea of what’s needed for the little one…so I went onto Amazon and made a baby registry. I do feel a little weird about it, but this is really for those of you who asked me directly what to get…and since so many of you read DFK, I figured this is the easiest way to get you the link! I’ll keep a smaller version of this graphic on the right-hand sidebar until the little one comes.

Thank you a million-zillion times for thinking of the little one!

I love to have lots of pictures of family and friends (and soon, many more pics of the little one!) on the refrigerator where I can see them all the time. There are pics of hanging out with friends, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, our honeymoon in Europe, one of our trips to Israel, Av and his dad with the UVA mascot at one of the bowl games, a trip we took to Denver where we went on Route 66, our pets, beach pics, Av standing next to a Shoney’s “Big Boy”, and sweet-sweet ultrasound pics.

Of course, you need a lot of magnets for all that, so in the past I’ve made bottlecap magnets, Sculpey sushi magnets, Shrinky Dink magnets, resin-poured magnets, and picture marble magnets. Today, I made Sculpey watermelon magnets!

I started with these colors – Sculpey in dark green for the outside skin, bright kelly green and transparent color for the rind, bright red (plus not pictured: another large bright red, a pack of hot pink, and a pack of iridescent light pink to get the perfect red watermelon color), and black for the seeds.

The tools I used were: manual pasta machine, acrylic roller, razor blade for making the slices, sharp-pointed tool for making the seeds, use of a toaster oven, magnets, and quilter’s thumbtacks.

First, I rolled out the dark green sculpey on the pasta machine to a very thin setting, then the combined bright kelly green and transparent together on a thick setting (I used the acrylic roller some too, for stretching and thinning). Next, I combined the red, hot pink, and iridescent light pink until I got just the right shade for the inside of the watermelon, and I just rolled that by hand into a hotdog shape:

In this pic below, I’ve rolled the red tube onto the rind sheet and around that, the dark-green sheet. I’ve rolled everything together really well so there aren’t any seams, then used the razor blade to cut off the ends so everything’s nice and even:

To make the seeds, I used my pointy-end tool on a rolled-out section of black sculpey.

Here are all the watermelon slices – I even did two pieces where I took my acrylic roller and made one of the slices really thin (which increased the circumference), cut the circle in half with the razor blade, and used my pointy tool to take out part of the slice to make it look like it had been bitten into!

They were ready to be baked, so I set them in the toaster oven at 275* for 22 minutes (the timing depends on how thick the pieces are).

Once they cooled off, they were ready for hot gluing.

I flipped them over (to their non-seeded side) and made some into magnets and some into thumbtacks.

All done! I love the way they turned out!

I totally forgot to post pics from our last trip to Memphis! There are three things everybody has to do in Memphis – stay at the Peabody Hotel (we stayed there about four years ago), go to Graceland (ah, love it), and eat barbecue.

We were there just for an afternoon, but we managed to try two different barbecue places we hadn’t been to before. There are about seven or eight “main” barbecue places that people love for different reasons…Payne’s, Central, Cozy Corner, Bar-B-Q Shop, Interstate, the Rendezvous (some people don’t consider this real barbecue because the ribs are cooked over charcoal for just a couple of hours. I agree, but I’d still like to try it.), A&R, and Corky’s (which for some reason, lots of people have a bad opinion about, but that may just stem from the fact that they are SO successful rather than being an old beat-down bbq joint which is much easier to love. I thought it was pretty good.). There are probably another ten that deserve to be listed, but I think the main ones are named above.

This is Payne’s Bar-B-Q (1762 Lamar, 901.272.1523):

It’s not one of those cutesy barbecue places with pig pictures and piggy stuffed animals everywhere. It’s pretty spartan and a little dark…but the important part is the barbecue. This is their sandwich, with slaw on it. In Memphis, barbecue sandwiches come with slaw on them – you don’t even have to ask – and that is some strange-colored yellow slaw, too! Almost like relish:

The sandwich was good…Av and I each had a half of this one since we wanted to go to one more place before we left and didn’t want to get full. I did eat most of one of their apple fried pies, though, and it was *soooo good*. Soooo good:

After a little shopping, later that afternoon we went to Central BBQ (2249 Central Ave, 901.272.9377):

We shared a half slab, half dry and half wet. They were just okay. One of the different things you can get at Central is their BBQ chips, which are pretty good.

We agreed, though, that there is just as good and much better barbecue within five minutes of our house and everywhere else in Alabama (and let’s not forget our beloved Miss Leatha in Hattiesburg too). I love that Memphis has such a good barbecue reputation though, because it gets people who live in places that don’t have it to try it. It’d be like going to Chicago and not having deep-dish pizza. Or coming to Alabama and not having fried chicken, collards, and cornbread. So barbecue being Memphis’ culinary claim to fame is a good thing.

One other thing about Memphis that does make it stand apart is bbq spaghetti – I had it once at Corky’s. It’s spaghetti noodles with bbq sauce (and some other things) in it. There’s a pic on Flickr of it here. One person commented on the pic something like “how can you Americans improve on spaghetti?” and another person wrote “by putting bbq on it!”.

Earlier this month, Memphis in May was held – Big Bob Gibson’s in Decatur has won several awards there in the past, but I haven’t been able to find a complete list of the winners for this year so I wonder how they did. One of the funniest things about the competition though, are the names of the teams – things like:

Natural Born Grillers
The Beverly Pigbillies
The Church of Swinetology
Genuswine
Getting Piggy With It
No Pig Left Behind
Pork Fiction
Reservoir Hogs

…and…
South Pork

One of the projects we’re doing with the house is in the library – getting rid of books that we’ll never read again. Our rule is if a book will be a good reference or has some sentimental value, or really will be read again, we’ll keep it. Otherwise, we either give books to libraries or we sell them on Amazon.

I’m really-really bad about saving magazines too, so every so often I’ll go through a giant pile and tear out sheets of what I want to save.

This week, I was going through a huge pile of Oxford American – my favorite magazine. One of the articles I read again was called “The United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors” – it was about a group of a few hundred people in Putnam County, Georgia whose religion is…well…to read more about their beliefs, see here.

Artistically, though, (and what I was most interested in) was how they, as the magazine put it, “…set about turning their little corner of the South into a vision of Egypt with the color schemes and impermanence of Mardi Gras floats. The garishly painted pyramids, temples, colonnades, and statues were mostly made of particle board, chicken wire, and artificial stucco.”

Their leader was sent to prison and the property was seized and later sold to a developer who sometime in 2005, I think, bulldozed the whole thing – but just before, A. Scott took some *amazing* pictures of the complex. There’s a slideshow that can be accessed at the OA site that shows more pics, with audio commentary by the photographer.

At the end of the audio, the photographer says:
I love things that are falling down, I love things that are abandoned, and I love things that are sort-of slightly cheesy, and when you have 40 acres of falling-down faux-Egyptian religious iconography, it’s just wonderful.

There are more pics of Nuwaubian creations here on Flickr.

I’ve been thinking that it would be really nice to have a not-too-big area rug in the nursery, and since we are going with the home-grown artist motif (Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Floyd Shaman, Lonnie Holley, etc) to maybe get a Gee’s Bend rug! I think there are a couple of different ‘scales’ of the rugs that have been licensed – the less expensive line is carried by Shaw Floors.

ABC Carpet carries the more upscale (not nursery-friendly!) Gee’s Bend rugs.

I am *in love* with the blue checkered (which I know would be great if it turns out to be a boy)…but even with it being on sale, it’s still $3800, which is definitely not nursery-friendly…

When Leslie and I went furniture shopping over the weekend, I told her I wanted to find something nice for the den, but also something I wasn’t going to worry over. I don’t want to be the ‘not on mommy’s good furniture’ mommy when it comes to the den. The living room is a different story, but in the den, I figure that’s where we’ll do all our crafting and playing.

I remember going with Nanny to Aunt Helen’s house, and her furniture – this was in the 70s – was covered in see-thru plastic (so you could see it was nice furniture, you just couldn’t spill your tea in it (oh! and she made the best ice tea – she put Tang in it, and would wrap a paper towel around the glass before serving it, which for me as a little girl…I somehow thought that was the classiest way to serve a glass of tea, ever!)). In the summertime when I would be wearing shorts, I remember getting off the couch after we would be sitting there a while, and leaving the top three layers of my leg skin on that plastic-covered couch!

…Anyway…I’m going to see if I can find one of the rugs locally so we can look at the colors.

Av’s mom and dad came over this morning for Mother’s Day, and we all spent some time together, looking over what’s been done to the house in the last week or so (new interior paint in a few rooms, our new garage doors that look *so* good!) and talking about what’s going to be accomplished in the next two-three weeks (new wood flooring in the kitchen and den, the exterior of the house will be painted, a new deck in the back yard, a new exterior door downstairs, a few other things…). I’m not sure why we waited for my last trimester to come for us to say, “wow, let’s think about doing a bunch of things!”!

We gave his mom a card with a bunch of ultrasound pics inside, and giggled over the one that was taken around 20 weeks – it shows a sweet little foot with the second toe just ever-so-slightly longer than the big toe, just like his/her daddy.

Our nesting instinct has really hit and it’s been all cleaning and organizing, too. One of the nice things from the decluttering is that we have several bags of nice clothes and some household items that we’re donating to one of the women’s shelters tomorrow.

Leslie and I went out last night and had a great time. We had a nice supper, went shopping and tried on every pair of Borns in town, and spent some good girl-time together. We’re sooo excited about how close it’s getting to the little one arriving. It makes me think about how blessed Av and I are with so many friends and family that are just blissful over meeting the sweet little bundle that I know will turn our world upside down in the most beautiful ways. We’re so lucky to have so many people who love him/her so completely already!

There’s an article in Wednesday’s NY Times about Koolickles! I wrote about them back in November of last year when Av and I tried one in Clarksdale – they’re pickles that have been…um, marinating…in a Kool-Aid super solution.

One of the really neat things is that the USA Today Blog linked to my pic on Flickr! I was wondering why all of a sudden that particular shot was getting so many views!

We stayed a few nights this week at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham – it was pretty nice:

The hotel was built in the ’20s and just went under a renovation to make some of the space into condos, too.

The Redmont is right downtown, close to the (also historic) Tutwiler, which is where Av and I spent the first night of our honeymoon because our flight to Europe left really early the next day. I’m not sure if it still is, but the Tutwiler used to be considered one of the nicest hotels in town. Hilton owns it now and branded it as a Hampton Inn, which I don’t think does it justice, but I heard that the reason it had to be branded as a Hampton and not a Hilton was that it doesn’t have a pool…

In the lobby at the Tutwiler, they used to (not sure if they still do) carry the Southernness brand of sleeping powders and candles. I have one of their sleeping powders, and when I put new linens on the bed, I sprinkle it over the sheets and it smells *wonderful*!