Month: September 2007

This was our first time back to the showroom at Shearwater Pottery since it reopened (it’s been open back since March):

I’ve forgotten a lot about what the showroom looked like before Katrina, but they have a nice section of the building now for their ‘museum’. I looked around at all the new pieces and picked out this piece:

I asked, and this glaze doesn’t have a name, but I have one other piece that’s this color too. The woman that I talked to said it’s similar to the Spring Green glaze.

I don’t think they have a website, but I know they will ship if you tell them what you’re looking for (228.875.7320).

I made (this is long) Orange Roughy Saute Meuniere Amandine for supper on Monday and it was *fantastic* – much better than what I experimented with last night (which was turkey tetrazzini, which Av says they served at his high school and they called it ‘turkey tetrachloride’ – he wasn’t comparing, just being funny. I hope! It wasn’t tetrachloride bad, but it sure wasn’t great!).

Anyway…this orange roughy was delish. Delish.

Usually I would use trout or pompano to do this with, but I like orange roughy and we haven’t had it in forever. If you try it, experiment and let me know what fish you liked it with. This is my recipe, but I based it on a couple of recipes in the Galatoire’s cookbook.

Ingredients (serves two):
2 orange roughy filets
olive oil and butter to saute with
salt and pepper to taste
flour for dredging
two handfuls of almonds, toasted or sauteed

—for the meuniere sauce:
1/8 c. butter
good squeeze of fresh lemon juice
two dashes Worcestershire
four dashes red wine vinegar
(…but taste it and see if you need a little more of any one thing before serving)

Directions:
First, saute or toast the almonds, and set aside.

Make the meuniere sauce by melting the butter over a low heat until it browns, then add the lemon juice, Worcestershire, and vinegar, whisking continually. Let simmer for five minutes, then turn off heat.

In the meantime, start the fish cooking. Dredge the filets in flour, dust off excess. Saute the fish on both sides in an olive oil/butter mixture until golden brown and cooked through, and season with salt and pepper.

Plate the cooked filets, top with a couple of spoonfuls (okay…more than a couple) of the meuniere sauce, and top with as many almonds as you like.

Those pics I took of the Miller Steam Plant – my friend Darlene’s mother’s friend’s son (did all that make sense!?) took this pic of it at night and it is just *gorgeous*!

I ran across some pictures of David Ayo’s house on Flickr – there are some really great pics of it here.

It’s a monument to his life (there’s more about him in the comments section here)…his mother lives here and it’s beautiful:

After Jackson, we went to New Orleans for Av to attend a big meeting, so we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton again. What’s funny is that one of the clubs we belong to at home is part of ClubCorp, and they have special arrangements with different hotels, so when the club made reservations for us at the R-C, it wound up being less expensive than what one of the Hampton Inns’ rate was in Jackson!

Here’s Shug in the lobby:

…and our room:

the view of the courtyard:

We had a *wonderful* time and Shug slept great…and didn’t make a peep the whole time other than to coo happy little sounds! Yay!

We’ve driven by the Gingerbread house in McComb MS (601 West Georgia Avenue) before, but this time we stopped so I could visit for a minute – they were having a garage sale so I figured this was the perfect opportunity to chat!

This is a pic we took of the house back in February of last year:

Bette Mott, who owns the house, wasn’t outside, but I talked to her husband (I think he had a different last name) and he talked about how she has decorated the house for years and years now, and how she collects gingerbread and dolls . There was lots of both in the yard sale. I bought two gingerbread placemats for $.50/ea…how could you go to that house and not leave with something gingerbread, right?! I don’t know what in the world I will ever do with them, but it only seemed right…

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McComb is also where Loy Bowlin lived – he was known as ‘The Original Rhinestone Cowboy’. There’s a really good article about him here from Raw Magazine. His home has been packed up and moved to exhibit at the Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin

The senior curator at the arts center is the editor for a new book called Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists that’s coming out on September 27th – Loy Bowlin’s house is among the work that will be featured.