January 2009 – Deep Fried Kudzu

January 27, 2009May 17, 2021

Fantail Rolls

The February issue of Gourmet has a recipe for fantail rolls (they are also known as butterflake rolls) – the image on the cover includes them, and they look just the same as what’s served with supper at The Bright Star in Bessemer. I made them this past weekend – tweaked the original recipe only very slightly – oh, they turned out *fantastic*! Everyone loved them.

Ingredients:
6 tbsp. butter, melted

olive oil
2 tsp active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water (105–115*F)
1 tbsp sugar
3 c. all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling out
1 1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup buttermilk

Directions:

I used a bit of olive oil in each cup of a muffin pan. Set aside.

Together in the Kitchenaid, stir together the yeast, water, and sugar, then leave alone for five minutes so that it becomes foamy.

Into the bowl, add the flour, salt, buttermilk, and 6 tbsp. butter. Mix on low with the dough hook until the dough is elastic and smooth, plus not sticking to the bowl, which took about six minutes.

In a large bowl, spread a little olive oil, then place the dough in the bowl and cover with Saran and a kitchen towel. Let rise for 1-1/2 to 2 hours.

Once it has risen/doubled, punch the dough down, then onto a floured cutting board, cut the dough into two equal balls. Roll each of the halves into about a 12″ x 12″ square, then cut the square lengthwise into six strips. I brushed the strips with a bit of olive oil, but you could use melted butter if you like:

Stack those six strips, oiled/buttered side up:

Cut through that stack six times from top to bottom so that you have six stacks. Turn each stack onto its side and into a muffin cup. You can fan the individual pieces out however you like:

Do the same with the other half of the dough so that you’ve made twelve rolls ready for the oven. Cover the pan with a kitchen towel and let the dough rise another hour.

Preheat the oven to 375*, put the rack in the middle. Bake at 375* for 20-25 minutes (mine were ready in about 23 minutes). When they came out, I brushed the tops with butter:

They turned out so pretty and tasted even better:

January 19, 2009May 5, 2021

Valentine’s Day Card Wreath

The Williams-Sonoma catalog has such a great wreath this year for Valentine’s Day. It’s got all these really great Victorian-style cards and I thought it would be fun to try to make one with images from the ’40s…so I found a Golden Book (remember Golden Book!?!) called Vintage Valentines and inside it is filled with press-out valentines, like what were swapped in elementary school! Some of them are even flocked.

I took a wire wreath form that’s about 14-16″ across, and some wide red ribbon, pressed the valentines out of the book (super-easy to remove, I never even had to use scissors at all) – these are just a few – and I there were so many that I still had several valentines left over after the wreath was all done:

…used hot glue to secure the ribbon at different places along the wreath form and just wrapped, wrapped, wrapped.

Picked out the favorite Valentines out of the book and started placing them around, using hot glue to put them on. I put a dish in the middle of the wreath while I was gluing these on because I wanted to make sure that the cards left a nice round open shape in the middle with just a little variation here and there.

A cut length of ribbon, hot-glued into a loop shape on the back of the wreath, is the hanger:

All done!

January 16, 2009May 5, 2021

No More Made-In-Mississippi Gail

I just found out this week – thanks to Ellen (thanks Ellen!) – that Gail Pittman is stopping the manufacture of her Mississippi-made ceramics.

She’s still going to design her products, it’s just that they will be licensed to other companies, namely Southern Living At Home and the Paula Deen At Home Collection and I guess it will be up to those companies as to where their products will be made.

The Mississippi facility where Gail’s things are made now is closing, so I guess now’s the time to complete a collection since all those original, signed designs won’t be made anymore. She talks about it here in a video, and there’s also a statement on her website.

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I was thinking “well, we still have Mandy Bagwell making her things in Montgomery”, but I just emailed them and got an answer that they’ve had to go overseas with their production.

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I can think of several Alabama & Mississippi pottery studios that make their own tablewear (McCarty, Good Earth, Earthborn, etc etc etc) but not any studios like Gail Pittman and Mandy Bagwell that do colorful, hand-painted ceramic dishes. Anybody else know?

January 15, 2009May 5, 2021

Sallie Howard Memorial Baptist Church

We went up through Ft. Payne to get to Mentone, Alabama and got to see the Sallie Howard Memorial Chapel, sometimes called “Howard’s Chapel”.

It is built to resemble the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather church at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California where Sallie Howard, the former wife of the builder of this church, is buried. The Wee Kirk o’ the Heather church is based on the design of the church at Glencairn, Scotland, where Annie Laurie of Scottish lore worshipped.

The rear of the building is this huge rock:

It was dedicated in 1937 by Milford Wriarson Howard, a gentleman lawyer who had political aspirations (he was elected to Congress) but also suffered from financial trouble and nervous breakdowns. This is an excerpt from the excellent-excellent ‘This Goodly Land‘ entry for him:

In 1923, Howard decided to return to Alabama and establish a school for mountain children. He bought land on Lookout Mountain, near Mentone, and neighbors provided volunteer labor to clear land and erect buildings. Despite donations, there was not enough money to cover the school’s bills and the amount owed on the land. Howard was forced to sell off some property, and he began planning a development. His wife sent him money periodically, but, instead of paying off the land notes, he put it into the school and the development. After Howard’s wife died in 1925, there was no money left. Howard was forced to close the school, and he had another nervous breakdown. In 1926, Howard married the woman who had helped him start the school.

To make his land more salable, he started a campaign to build a scenic highway in the area. The highway was built, but it was not completed until the 1930s.

In 1927, Howard sold some of his land and took his wife on a six-month trip to Europe, writing a series of articles about their trip for The Birmingham News. In Italy, Howard was impressed by Fascism and interviewed Benito Mussolini. Back in the United States, Howard put together a book extolling Fascism and went on a lecture tour, but book sales barely covered expenses.

In the 1930s, Howard had no income, and the Great Depression made it difficult for him to sell land. His wife refused to stay on Lookout Mountain, and Howard divorced her in 1936.

Friends loaned him money to return to California, but he used it instead to build a chapel as a memorial to his first wife. He was finally persuaded to go to California, where he died of bronchial pneumonia in December of 1937. The following year, his ex-wife brought his ashes back to Lookout Mountain, and they were interred in the chapel.

The land the chapel is built on is beside DeSoto State Park, and the church was completed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and residents of the area.

It is never locked.

One of the bibles was open to the 23rd Psalm: “The L-rd is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

These words on the beam above the pulpit come from Sallie Howard’s last letter to her husband: “G-d has all ways been as good to me as I would let him be”:

Mr. Howard only requested that one word be printed on the beam above it – “Immortality”.

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The chapel is on County Road 165 at the end of County Road 89.

January 13, 2009May 5, 2021

The Year Of Alabama History, KTW’s Ghost, And Youth Dew

Each year, our state tourism office promotes Alabama with a different focus: this year, it’s the “Year of Alabama History”

I don’t think the website is completely finished, though – I’m hoping that they will put up better links for the trails they mention, like Aviation, Food & Wine, Literary, Music, etc. One nice section is the one with videos of historic places, and several pieces with Kathryn Tucker Windham doing some storytelling. The only thing is, though: Who is Gary!? hahaha! I’m going to email the web people today and let them know that it should say “Jeffrey”. I hope they will get a big laugh out of that too…every second-grader in Alabama knows about KTW and her ghost, Jeffrey!

When I was in sixth grade, my English teacher told us that she was friends with KTW and that once when she called her house that Jeffrey answered the phone. (Okay, here I go waaay off the subject…) This was the same teacher that told us girls that if we ever left our purses in her classroom that we would not get them back. I don’t have the faintest reason why she would say such a thing, maybe because 6th grade is the first time most of us girls ever wore a purse and she wanted to make an impression that we had better remember them – but sure enough, I forgot mine in her class one day. She did give it back to me, but it was missing one thing: the tiny little bottle of Estee Lauder Youth Dew that my Nanny had bought me. I didn’t say a thing. Oh, and this was such a big deal, because up until then the fanciest perfume I had – well, the fanciest perfume any 6th grader would ever need, really – was Love’s Baby Soft! I was just heartbroken the next day when my teacher walked in the room smelling like…I couldn’t believe it…Youth Dew. Oh I sure did hope that was just a coincidence!!

The only other thing I remember about that teacher was that she told us all that she went to school with Polly Holliday (Flo, the “kiss my grits” waitress on ‘Alice’), who was from Jasper, Alabama.

With friends like KTW, Jeffrey, and Polly Holliday, I was starry-eyed and thought my teacher was just next-to-famous.

I thus forgave her regarding my Youth Dew.

January 9, 2009May 5, 2021

Outsider Art Fair in NYC

The New York Times ran an article on Thursday about the Outsider Art Fair that’s going on right now. Here are some excerpts:

But at every turn this fair has a new clarity. The art rises to the occasion of the more refined environment. Each stand contains at least one example of excellence and sometimes several.

By now the term outsider has become close to meaningless in its elasticity. It implies self-taught, which many insider artists are; it also means isolated, although these days younger outsiders are being influenced by previous generations.

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The time may be past when outsider geniuses are discovered, or rediscovered with astounding regularity — from Joseph Yoakum, Martín Ramírez, Henry Darger and Bill Traylor in the late 1960s and ’70s to Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Morton Bartlett and James Castle in the 1990s. While less dominant than in past fairs, these artists are all present, mostly in stands on the first aisle. At Phyllis Kind, Ricco/Maresca, Carl Hammer, Maxwell Projects and Marion Harris you’ll find a kind of outsider art Hall of Fame. Other old guards in the vicinity include Grandma Moses, represented by paintings and an embroidery at St. Etienne; at Gilley’s Gallery, Clementine Hunter (1887-1988) is represented by two walls of paintings (including some strange Cubist heads from around 1970), and a quilt that gives her pictorial language a new complexity.

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There’s a slideshow here.

…and they mention Andrew Edlin Gallery who “is introducing the work of Frank Calloway, an Alabaman whose images of houses, cars and animals executed in saturated colors on large rolls of paper, approach billboard scale.”

I wonder how, or what, the arrangement is for Mr. Calloway’s art to be sold, because when the AP did a story last year about the exhibit at AVAM, it mentioned that:

His caretakers have suspended sales of his (Frank Calloway’s) artwork until after the show after finding out that some of his drawings could sell for thousands of dollars.

This is important because Mr. Calloway is currently under the care of a state nursing home, and he has been cared for by the state since 1952 when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The show he’s in at AVAM doesn’t end until September 6, 2009.

(My post about that is here.)

Maybe it’s just that Andrew Edlin was able to gather some of his earlier works? Not sure.

January 9, 2009May 5, 2021

I Do

Last week, the January/February issue of Mississippi Magazine came in the mail. And that means one thing:

Wedding Register 2009!!!

Now, most of them (I think there are about 350 different wedding announcements) are garden variety – who was there and what they wore, where they were, the flowers, the honeymoon location, and where they live now.

The ones that are wonderful are the ones where the couple did something totally different – something totally *them* – and those are the ones I and everybody else love.

Here are some of the best excerpts:

Following the ceremony, the wedding party rode Oxford’s double-decker bus to the reception…
…Favorite special dishes were 208 South Lamar crab cakes and wontons and Taylor Grocery fried catfish and hushpuppies. The late night “chicken-on-a-stick” from McPhail’s Chevron topped off the evening.

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The two-tiered chocolate fudge groom’s cake was filled with a peanut butter mousse, surrounded by Reese’s peanut butter cups, and decorated with fondant reeds and a fondant mallard.

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The groom’s cake…was a superb replica of the Lyceum, the historic administrative building at the University of Mississippi.

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The groom’s three-tiered chocolate cake featured a hunting theme with edible turkey feathers and shot gun shells…and was placed on a camouflage overlay. (This was Brodie Croyle’s wedding)

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…the bride donned a pair of blue suede shoes only reminiscent of an Elvis fan and Tupelo bride for her “something blue”. The priests and all of the wedding party joined in on the fun at the end of the ceremony by being “All Shook Up” in their traditional Elvis glasses.

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Colonel Reb made a special appearance, arranged by the bride, a former Ole Miss Homecoming Queen, in honor of her groom, a former quarterback at Mississippi State.

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The groom’s cake was a wild hog displayed in a wetland of beige tulle, fresh wildflowers, and cypress knees retrieved by the bride’s father and grandparents.

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And:

And what, after all, could be more grand than resounding brass, the throbbing beat snare drums and ‘From Dixie With Love’ rising to an upbeat crescendo?

That’s right. The Ole Miss Pride of the South band was hired to to come to the wedding:

If you have ever been to an Ole Miss game, the band plays this right after the Rebel Walk and just before kickoff.

Why did I not think of this? We could have had the Million Dollar Band show up and play Stars Fell on Alabama! Although…gosh there’s a part of me that wonders just how much that must have cost.

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The post about last year’s issue is here.

January 8, 2009May 5, 2021

Roasted Brussels Sprouts

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I even knew what brussels sprouts looked like – I mean, how they grew:

They’re available at some grocery stores this way: you just buy the entire stalk. So I did.

It’s so easy! All you do is take a knife and (carefully!) remove the little ‘buds’. Wash them, put them in a ziploc with a little olive oil to coat, salt, and pepper, and shake-shake-shake:

On a baking pan, and into a 400* oven

I started checking them at about 25 minutes and they were ready right at 30 minutes.

Here’s how they looked – oh they were so good! I liked that some of the sprouts were smaller and some larger, so some turned out a little softer and some more firm – not all the same, which was nice.

They may need a bit more salt or pepper once they come out of the oven, but they turned out so nice. One of the things I like best about cooking in the winter is that roasted vegetables – from carrots to potatoes – seems so right.

January 7, 2009May 5, 2021

A Man Named Pearl, And Tree Circus

Pearl Fryar is…well, I’ve read this about him before, but it’s true…a real-life Edward Scissorhands.

He can take just about any plant – in fact, he got started with nursery shop cast-offs – and turn them into healthy, beautiful works of topiary art.

The DVD for “A Man Named Pearl” came out back in November, but I just got it on Netflix last week and it was really-really good (although maybe a little bit long). It was all about how Mr. Fryar got started in 1984 when he decided he wanted to win his town of Bishopville, South Carolina ‘yard of the month’ award. This wasn’t just nice landscaping.

Here is some more footage from ETV:

…and over 100 pics on Flickr.

On his original website (note that this link has been updated to the Garden Conservancy’s, as his is no longer in service), Mr. Fryar even invites everyone to his home at 145 Broad Acres Road and says:

All are welcome and if you find me at home, I’ll stop whatever I am doing to visit with you and tell you about my work and why I create topiary sculpture.

Oh, and he didn’t learn from any books, or take any courses – he’s self-taught, which is probably a good thing, because most everyone in the documentary, including experts in the field, can’t believe what he’s been able to accomplish.

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This reminds me of a show I saw once about the late Axel Erlandson, who did ornamental tree grafting like no one else. He wasn’t like Mr. Fryar in that he didn’t explain his methods, so how he did many of his designs are still a mystery.

Mr. Erlandson transplanted some of his trees to a spot in California that he called the “Tree Circus” back in the 1940s, which he intended to make money with by charging people an admission fee. Over the years, it changed hands until finally today the trees have been moved to a non-profit family theme park called Gilroy Gardens in Gilroy, California.

January 5, 2009May 5, 2021

Hotel Talisi Fried Chicken, We Bid You Adieu

I heard a terrible rumor last week.

It was that Hotel Talisi in Tallassee, Alabama had closed their restaurant. So I emailed them – it’s true.

Hotel Talisi is one of the last small-town downtown hotels around. And while the hotel is still functioning, it was such a treat to walk into the lobby (which is not your usual hotel lobby, and used to have a grand piano in the middle of it, where people would sometimes play) and really have the run of the hotel – even the opportunity to go upstairs and see the…well, I’m not sure ‘ornate’ is the right word for the hallway in an eccentric-grandmother-kind-of-way, but…oh! and it even had a phone booth up there, because there are no phones in the rooms. Each room is different, and the unoccupied rooms have their doors left open so you can peek inside to decide which one you want to stay in next time. Each room has its own *real* key – no key-cards. There’s supposedly a ghost up there too. Oh, but that’s all about how the hotel is different and in its way, wonderful.

What’s missing now is the restaurant. It was a big deal to have Sunday dinner there, and we were always tickled to be in that part of the state and sit down for fried chicken, which Av puts in his top 5. Their buffet was also mentioned as one of the original “100 dishes to eat in Alabama before you die“. Here’s our “last supper” there: broccoli casserole, blackeyed peas, squash casserole, dressing…and fried chicken: