Month: June 2011

Last month, I was at a Borders bookshop in Panama City and saw the prettiest book on French patisseries.  I *think* it was this one.  When I got home, I checked out a different book on patisseries with recipes and it included one for gougeres, which are really what we might think of as airy cheese biscuits or cheese puffs.  A fan of cheese biscuits, cheese crackers, cheese straws, cheese rounds and other various iterations of cheesy deliciousness, I really wanted to try making these myself.  

Oh, and I took German in school as my second language, not French, so I had to look it up to be certain, and ‘gougeres’ is pronounced “goo-ZHAIR” like this.  Just in case you’re lost like me.

I didn’t go exactly by the recipe in the book — changed around a few things — but the finished product turned out to be fantastically delicious gougeres.

Ingredients (this makes about 24-30 regular-size gougeres):
7 tbsp butter
1 cup water
1 tbsp salt
1-1/2 cup flour
6 large eggs
2 cups shredded gruyere

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 400*.

1.) Add to a small saucepan the butter, water, and salt, and bring to a boil.
Bring the heat down to medium and add the flour, and stir together well (2.)
3.) Keep stirring until the flour is completely incorporated, and finally as in pic 4, it will start to form a bit of a film on the bottom of the pan:

This is the point at which the eggs are added.  The Kitchenaid makes this so much easier — just mixing enough so everything is together.  Now mix with the Kitchenaid 1-3/4 cups of the grated gruyere into the dough:

Onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, use a piping bag (I just use a ziploc bag with one of the corners cut to pipe) or use a spoon:

Sprinkle evenly with the remaining gruyere.

Bake at 400* until beautifully browned — 18 to 25 minutes:

Wonderful.

This morning we went to the B’ham City Council meeting to see our friend Joe Minter (below from l-r: Mayor Bell, Councilwoman Smitherman, Joe, Hilda) be recognized for his artistic achievements.  Next month, Joe and Hilda will be traveling to Santa Fe, as Joe’s “Katrina” piece will be included in the International Museum of Folk Art exhibit beginning July 3 entitled, “The Arts of Survival: Folk Expression in the Face of Natural Disaster“.  It’s a huge honor.

Joe presented the City with this assemblage which began as a screen door:

I visited Joe again last week — here he is with his Haiti Earthquake piece:

…and this is the new one representing the tornadoes we had here in April:

Kathryn Tucker Windham joined the ancestors yesterday.

Bless her.

She was 93 and passed away at home, with her family around her.

I’ve been in her company a fair number of times but one in particular was so wonderful — it was one hot July Saturday at Mishkan Israel in Selma.  Al Benn‘s grandson had come in to have his bar mitzvah there and Al asked Av to be the Cantor that day.  Oh it was just a lovely thing  (Av and I used to regularly go to Selma for High Holidays so we could enjoy a smaller setting and of course just enjoy being in the company of everyone).   Al and KTW are friends, so of course she came for the bar mitzvah too.

Mishkan Israel is an old, beautiful building, and by virtue of it being so old, the sanctuary has never been fiddled with to include air conditioning.  Just look at how gorgeous — later I’ll ask Av to add in an exterior shot:

(Images of human figures is something you almost never see in synagogues (because of Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8, about graven images) — I’ll show another exception to that rule here in Alabama in a later post — but here’s one in Selma)

It’s Al Benn, whose grandson had the bar mitzvah she attended, that wrote the piece in yesterday’s Montgomery Advertiser about KTW.

The letter she wrote to my friend Tat about the Huntsville Times’ article about him and his homemade coffin reads in part:

…Mine was built of 150-year-old heart pine salvaged from an old warehouse.  It has rope handles, but is not lined: I plan to be wrapped in a quilt a friend made for me.  My coffin is built six-sided, the real old-fashioned way.  I have a sack of square nails to nail the top down.  Like you, I do not intend to be embalmed or to use a hearse.  In fact, I plan to by-pass the funeral home entirely.  

She wrote her own four-line obituary that only included facts about her family, but of course the AP ran its own.

This is from a piece Al wrote about her 90th birthday party three years ago:

Inside, her friends were treated to Moon Pies, grape soda and water as they pushed toward the table to get a piece of her birthday cake. Among those celebrating was author and political observer Wayne Flynt, who is familiar with the glare of spotlights. He described Windham as a woman who is unique in Alabama.


“Some people are important to intellectuals, journalists or politicians, but Kathryn Tucker Windham is probably the only person I know in Alabama who is important to everybody,” he said.


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Wonderful forever: my friend Joey Brackner’s interview with her for the Alabama Arts Radio Series.  Fabulous.

When we were driving through Andalusia on the way to Florida for our vacation, I was so tickled to see these Woodie Long murals in downtown:

He loved to paint children with kites:

Woodie lived here in Andalusia and also in Florida; he started out as a house painter but one day when he was 45, he picked up his wife’s watercolors (she was taking an art class) and when she came home to see what he had created, she told him: you are an artist.

He was the son of a sharecropper — one of twelve children — and he often missed school to help the family.  Many of his pieces are memory paintings:

Woodie was loved.  He passed away in 2009 but has had two retrospective exhibits that I know of already (one in Andalusia, another in Seaside).  Marcia Weber got started with her amazing gallery in Montgomery showing Woodie’s work, and she has a large collection.

Inside the Andalusia gallery:

Yesterday morning I was in Tuscaloosa and volunteered for a little while at the Alfred Dunner clothing giveaway for those affected by the tornadoes last month. Alfred Dunner brought 32000 (!!) items — blouses, pants, dresses — and those who brought their identification as a disaster victim were treated to a shopping spree with their own volunteer personal shopper, able to bring home several outfits.  How great is that!?  Reuters sent out the story.  Distribution continues at Central High School through June 14 each day from 10a-7p.

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(above: a ‘real’ Clementine Hunter at the B’ham Museum of Art)

William Toye plead guilty in federal court on Monday to conspiracy to sell fake Clementine Hunter paintings; he admitted that he had painted many of the fakes himself.  This is a conclusion that many, many people had already come to for some time now, but it’s good for this to finally be over.  Basically if you have any interest in purchasing a Clementine Hunter painting today, you would want to do so — perhaps only — if it had been authenticated by Shelby Gilley, who passed away in early 2010.  Sentencing for Mr. Toye will be September 7th.

The US Attorney was quoted, “Ms. Hunter was a gem not only for the state of Louisiana but for the art world of this country. This case is extremely unfortunate in that this defendant preyed upon the best of what our art community has to offer. It was all motivated by greed. We hope that this case sends a message of the importance of protecting our artists and the those who are patrons of the art.”

Garden and Gun had a really nice article about this subject with the Toyes last year.

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The Tennessean ran an article about Leonard Piha’s new exhibit at the Arts Company gallery in Nashville.

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New world record for Rube Goldberg machine by this year’s Purdue team:

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Lately I’ve been researching the idea of doing a ‘living wall’ here at our home, and found in some searches that GE sponsored the living wall representation of Van Gogh’s painting, ‘A Wheatfield, with Cypresses’ in Trafalgar Square — it’s up right now.  The press release is here, and pics are here.

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If you’re a fan of kitsch, here’s the kitsch-queen’s home, in a slideshow at the NYT.

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Love these modern-y WPA-ish posters on etsy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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The Alabama Historical Commission with Alabama Trust for Historical Preservation has released the list of ‘Alabama’s Most Endangered Sites for 2011’ (it’s a PDF).

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This month’s Tapestry on B’ham public radio features two *wonderful* pieces — one about the deli lunch in Greenville, MS with lots and lots of people Av knows, and the old Venz Rabbit Hutch restaurant in Logan, Alabama that I went to as a child.

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Fun to think about: literary figures who should be tweeting.

Mother’s Day weekend, the boys treated me with a trip to the Delta for some fun at McCarty Pottery (more about that later!).  Since we were in Merigold, it only seemed right to run out to Po’ Monkey’s and take some daylight pics.

Some time when the boys are staying with Mimi and Papa and just the two of us are back this way, Av really-really-really wants to make it on a Thursday night because we happened to have heard that one of the signs inside reads, “This is a high-class place.  Act respectable.” which is exactly what Av’s expository writing teacher, Mr. Stegner at Indian Springs, had on a sign above the blackboard (which you know isn’t good grammar but that’s exactly what made it so clever).

And for whatever reason, that beautiful connection of words and worlds between Po’ Monkey’s and Indian Springs makes Av happy.

It would have to be crazy-fun, too.

The Mississippi Blues Trail installed a historic marker here that reads, “The rural juke joint played an integral role in the development of the blues, offering a distinctly secular space for people to socialize, dance, and forget their everyday troubles. While many such jukes once dotted the cotton fields of the Delta countryside, Po’ Monkey’s was one of the relatively few to survive into the 21st century. Initially frequented by locals, Po’ Monkey’s became a destination point for blues tourists from around the world during the 1990s.”

The NY Times did a piece about it in 2007, and Annie Leibovitz included her photograph in her American Music book.

Each year, there’s a Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale (we’ve been to it — nice), and the 2012 dates are April 12-15.

In my professional career, I’ve been so lucky with so many wonderful experiences.  One of the best was when I worked at a company in a beautiful building, with a lovely atrium, and my own office was pretty terrific too.  Better than all that were my funny, smart co-workers.  One friend in particular, each morning, would always stop me and say, “well, good morning, sunshine!” (oh, she was just gorgeous and had the cutest voice ever) and that simply made my day, every day.

For whatever reason, making this strawberry jam made me think of her, and how warm it was to always be greeted as ‘sunshine’.  Everyone deserves to be someone’s sunshine!

My sunshine:

Ingredients – this makes a little over four cups of jam:
2 lbs. strawberries
1 tbsp water
1 tbsp vanilla extract
4-1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup lemon juice

Directions: 
Have mason jars in process (I used four of the one cup size jelly jars) and timed to be ready for the point at which the strawberry jam is ready to be poured inside.

Hull and halve each strawberry.  Place the strawberries and water in a large pan and cook over medium heat for 12-15 minutes, until the berries are releasing their juices and becoming soft.

Add the vanilla, sugar, and lemon juice and stir well.  Continue cooking the mixture another ten or fifteen minutes so that it reaches 225* (thread stage) on a candy thermometer.

Remove any foam from the pan with a spoon.

Pour the hot jam into the jars and process for canning.

So, so, so good!

This weekend I’m making jam. Strawberry jam (yum). And being around those glorious mason jars made me think of Glennray Tutor’s photorealism painting Still Life: A Season of Moment at the Mississippi Museum of Art:

…and when the cucumbers are *just* the right size for making pickles…

…then the okra led me to think about another part of the garden, and one of my favorite Faulkner quotes, from a supper-time conversation he had with Katherine Anne Porter in Paris.  Eugene Walter wrote about it this way in American Cooking: Southern Style:

Everything had been laid out to perfection; a splendid meal had been consumed, a bottle of fine brandy emptied, and thimble-sized glasses of an expensive liqueur drained.  The maitre d’ and an entourage of waiters hovered close by, ready to satisfy any whim.  


“Back home, the butter beans are in,” said Faulkner, peering into the distance, “the speckled ones.”  Miss Porter fiddled with her glass and stared into space.  “Blackberries,” she said, wistfully.

In Alabama:
Willie King’s Freedom Creek Festival, Aliceville (Super Chikan will perform!)
Art in the Gardens, Hoover
Mule Day / Chickenfest, Gordo
Vulcan’s Birthday Party, Birmingham
Quiltfest, Birmingham

In Florida:
Billy Bowlegs Festival, Ft. Walton Beach
Watermelon Festival, Chiefland
Battle of Pensacola Anniversary, Pensacola

In Georgia:
Blueberry Festival, Alma
Art on Main, Warrenton
Helen to the Atlantic Balloon Race, Helen

In Louisiana:
Oyster Festival, New Orleans
WYES International Beer Tasting, New Orleans
Spice and Music Festival, Opelousas
Bon Mange Festival, Gheens

In Mississippi:
Elvis Festival, Tupelo
Fais Do-Do and Blessing of the Fleet, Biloxi
St. Paul’s Seafood Festival, Pass Christian

In Tennessee:
Italian Festival, Memphis
Smoky Festival Pottery Festival, Townsend
MooFest, Athens
Blue Plum Festival, Johnson City

Last month when we were in the Shoals, we took the boys up to UNA and visited Leo III and Una — the mascot.  They loved that pretty water fountain too:

The Shoals Theatre sign didn’t have the vertical wave on it a few years ago:

This is the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library:

…the most interesting thing about it is the sculpture relief by James W. Stoves here, which used to be on the Gilbert Elementary School as of 1921, then later the Hibbett Middle School.  The historic marker reads that the artist left coal mining to practice stonework and sculpture, and he went on to purchase the Florence Marble Works.

Such pretty houses in the historic district:

This Maud Lindsay Free Kindergarten was established in 1898.  Maud Lindsay was the daughter of a governor, she wrote 14 books for children, she established this school (the first free kindergarten in Alabama), and was a close friend of Helen Keller.  From the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame bio: “She, who had no college education, often instructed college professors, teaching them the art of storytelling during a summer lecture at New York University. Miss Maud received requests and offers to abandon her free kindergarten in East Florence and to accept positions elsewhere. Always firmly saying, “My place is in Alabama,” she refused all offers including a position with Madame Montessori in her school in Italy.”

Stagg’s Grocery: breakfast and lunch only, known for hamburgers.  Yum.

…and there’s one last thing.  There’s somebody buried in the middle of this road.  On purpose.

“Mountain” Tom Clark, who was hanged in 1872, said…well you can read the sign for the details, but he was apparently a big bully, gang leader, and general-purpose terrorist, who boasted that nobody would ever run over him.  Well…