Month: August 2011

Last week, I co-chaired an event, and it consisted of three main areas: a party to celebrate the 90th anniversary of our group, a project to help and ‘adopt’ a school (more about that later), and for a sweet finish we invited sweet Jan Moon who owns Dreamcakes Bakery in Homewood, Alabama to come speak with us about her experience and expertise as she had worked in the Southern Living test kitchens and then went on of course to open her own successful business.  Big plus: she has a new book, with Southern Living, called ‘Big Book of Cupcakes: 150 Brilliantly Delicious Dreamcakes‘.   Jan was sweet enough to sign some copies for us after she spoke.

This pic on the left has me on the right, and Jan on the left, as I was introducing her, and the pic on the right…

…is my car, loaded with balloon arrangements from our party.  We donated all the balloons to a local hospital to brighten patients’ rooms!  Since all the balloons couldn’t fit in my car, many of them floated outside, and we had so many people smiling at us as we drove to the hospital!  It was so fun!!

Well, this week I just had to try one of Jan’s recipes from her book so I made the strawberry cupcake (minus the food coloring, and a couple of other adjustments — only because I can almost never force myself to make a recipe straight from a book).  This is my favorite cupcake from her bakery so I thought everyone might be tickled to try it at home:

…it turned out *delicious*.  So moist and so nice!  BTW, those cute cupcake liners are Drommar from Ikea.

For shame, Zabar’s!  From the NYT:

Then Doug MacCash, a reporter from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, stopped at Zabar’s while vacationing in Manhattan last month.


“Lobster salad on a bagel: Why not?” he wrote on Aug. 1 on the newspaper’s Web site. “It was delicious, but the pink/orange tails seemed somehow familiar.”


He checked the label. “Wild fresh water crayfish?” he wrote. “Really? At $16.95 per pound?” He photographed the label, just to be sure.


Mr. MacCash had discovered a fact of New York culinary life that New Yorkers had not: There was no lobster in the lobster salad at Zabar’s.

Although, I guess it really means that you know how great crawfish are. Hoping those are deep-south crawfish you’re using, and not that other stuff from overseas, like what I found at Whole Foods (aghast! really, I expected better at WF) a couple of years ago:

The best comeback Saul Zabar had was a Wikipedia article stating that crawfish are in the same family as lobsters.  The first rule should be that no one can ever use Wikipedia of all things as a reference in an apology.  But I guess crawfish are in the same family, and they do sort-of look like little lobsters.  Here’s a crawfish boil Av did:

…but they sure aren’t the lobsters everyone expects.  My favorite lobster roll ever was my first — from Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery, Maine:

Well, the Maine Lobster Council got upset that Zabar’s was calling something other than lobster ‘lobster’.  Rather than just calling it what it is, crawfish salad, they decided to change the name to ‘seafare salad’.  Maybe it’s because I’ve caught crawfish myself, but you don’t really pull freshwater crawfish out of the sea.  You pull them out of your yard.  Or a creek.  Or a crawfish pond (or elsewhere).  But not the sea, really.

Audrey Heckler’s art collection in the NYT: she got her start collecting at the Outsider Art Fair in 1993.

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The McCarthy Cottage at Warm Springs in Georgia burned down last week — that’s where FDR learned to walk with a cane and leg braces.  He first came to Warm Springs looking for a cure in its waters for his polio.  For years he continued to come here, and the building called his ‘Little White House’ gets over 100k visitors each year.

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Sweet Chris Clark remembered in the Bham News.

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Postcardly.

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The H’ville Museum of Art will “host a master artist workshop shop Sept. 8-10 called “Color and Light Revealed Through the Landscape, Studio Oil Painting with Conor O’Brien.””.  Congratulations, my friend!

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It was one thing to sell the building to MoMA, but now the American Folk Art Museum in NYC is considering closing altogether.

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The LA Times has a small piece on Timmyland, Ranchito Cascabel.  Pics here.

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Embezzling $1MM from the Historic Mark Twain House = not a good move.

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Guernsey’s seeks ballpark $8-10MM for Rosa Parks’ archive of thousands of items.

Just three years after a profile on the A.J. Martin Company appeared in ‘American Stone Trade,’ it appears that the proprietor sadly had to place a monument for his own wife in Vicksburg’s Cedar Hill Cemetery:

She was only 19 or so…

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Also: in the NYT — you can purchase a ‘used’ mausoleum, formerly owned by Rev Norman Vincent Peale.

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The Atlantic discusses lasered monuments.  And some monuments have QR codes now.

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The woman who wrote what was the first Yiddish cookbook in America had her monument returned.  It was found just…you know…on a sidewalk in NYC.

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Then there’s this, and this.

Found this in Gordo, Alabama:

Chris Clark passed away today.  Oh, Chris.