Month: December 2011

The NY Times runs an article about regional foods in general every so often, and this week, its lens was somewhat focused on Southern food, in Southern Farmers Vanquish the Cliches.  The article begins,
“IT’S not hard to get Emile DeFelice riled up. Just mention Paula Deen, the so-called queen of Southern food, who cooks with canned fruit and Crisco. Or say something like “You don’t look like a Southern pig farmer.” He’ll practically hit the ceiling of his Prius.


Because there are a few things about Southern food that the man just can’t stand: its hayseed image, the insiders who feed that image and the ignorant outsiders who believe in it.”

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HBO + David Milch + William Faulkner

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New: Fallingwater iPad app.

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In Atlanta, sheep and goats are keeping lawns and lots free of kudzu and ivy.  The company is called Ewe-niversally Green, and look at the before and after pics.

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An interview with Sister Anne Brooks of the Delta Tutwiler Clinic.  There are two doctors in the county (pop. 15.3k).

Wilcox County in Alabama, the second-poorest county in the state, is in a similar position, with one doctor for every 4667 citizens, meaning three in this county…and two of them are nearing retirement.  The documentary, A Certain Kind, looks into their efforts to recruit health professionals here:

A Certain Kind from Carly Palmour on Vimeo.

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Ever wondered how the interior of the Hindenburg was laid out and appointed?

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Interesting article in the LA Times this week about Alabama’s new immigration law, and its effects on Riverside Heights Baptist in Tallassee.

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Divine Disorder, Conserving the Chaos: Conference on the Conservation of Folk and Outsider Art,
National Council for Preservation Technology and Training will take place February 15-16 at Northwestern University in Natchitoches.

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This article about NOLA-native, B’ham-based Deedee Morrison and her Sun-Catcher solar-powered public sculpture in Clearwater, Florida — her website has pics of her other installations including these great lanterns.  Pics of her studio here.

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“Pure for G-d” 2000-year-old token from the Temple in Jerusalem was just announced, and likely was for the purposes of showing that an item had been approved for ritual use.

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The Times-Picayune is asking a question for which there will be *much* discussion: who makes the best king cake?

Several years ago, there was a terrific, terrific gallery in B’ham, and the owners, who became our friends, gave us this large menorah.  This year, we put it on the front porch (those lights are from the Chanukah display we do at our home).  The boys got the biggest kick from lighting the candles this way!  We hope you and your family had a fantastic holiday — whatever holiday you celebrate — this year!

From the AP, in the T-P:

HOUMA, La. — It isn’t the statues, the stained glass or even the pillows on the graves at Southdown Cemetery that bother Terrebonne Councilman Alvin Tillman — it’s the colors on the tombs.


He does not like the red one, the yellow one, the soft dove gray or any of the shades of blue that about a dozen of the tombs have been painted. And he says other people have complained about it too.


“We want to stop this before it gets out of hand,” Tillman said. “Before you know it you’ll go out there and the cemetery will look like Mardi Gras.”


Tillman wants it to be illegal to paint a tomb anything but white.

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Maybe Alvin Tillman should invest in founding cemeteries with ‘home-owners associations’ full of ordinances and self-important governing boards which restrict…everything that is at odds with uniformity.

Then there wouldn’t be room for sweet sentiments, like this one in a cemetery we found in Opelousas:

The Oxford Mound Builders Of The Cenozoic Era, The Quaternary Period, The Holocene Epoch: in other words, people in Oxford are fashioning what is to crudely represent an Indian mound in our days.  Right now.  2011.

And that just seems terribly fake.  Especially considering that all this began in the city’s quest for fill-dirt for a shopping area (they hoped it would be a Sam’s Club but that never materialized) in which the earth beneath a stone mound was taken — see pic above.  And then remains were found across, ahem, Leon Smith Parkway, where the Davis Farm had stood, which was earlier a center of Indian life since the 12th century when various mounds were built, including a ceremonial mound.  The Davis Farm home was even built atop one of the mounds.  So when human remains were found on site…

From the AP article:

Dump trucks loaded with stones from atop a hill behind a shopping center transported their cargo to a site across Leon Smith Parkway on Thursday. The move fulfilled part of an agreement between Oxford and a federally recognized American Indian tribe — an agreement the city needed to proceed with a construction project at the site. It also represented the end of a nearly three-year-long controversy regarding the city’s treatment of an alleged ancient Indian stone burial mound.

Fred Denney, Oxford’s city project manager, said the transport of rocks from the hill to an adjacent site near the city’s proposed sports complex was part of Oxford’s memorandum of agreement with the Muscogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Alabama Historical Commission.

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 Under the agreement, approved in June, the city had to move the stones to an undisclosed location where ancient American Indian remains were discovered last year during construction of the sports complex. At the site, the city must use the rocks to construct a mound approximately 32 meters by 16 meters by 1.6 meters.


((Really?  The idea that a *city* makes amends by building a new mound…))

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The corps halted the sports complex project in February 2010 after the human remains were found at the site, located at the historic Davis Farms. 


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 Once the stones are moved, the city has the go-ahead from the Muscogee Creeks to do whatever it wants with the land behind the shopping center. 


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The city filed a $2 million lawsuit in October against the Tennessee architectural firm Barge, Waggoner, Sumner and Cannon, which designed the sports complex. The lawsuit alleges the firm was negligent and breached its contract with the city by failing to properly advise, supervise and manage the project, resulting in the discovery of the remains. It adds that the firm knew the project site was known for containing historical artifacts and that substantial engineering and technical advice in site preparation would be required.


((*Love* this whole last paragraph.))

The LA Times’ most-viewed home galleries of 2011 includes the Eames home, which is presently, partly, on display at the Los Angeles County Museum.

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Krispy Kreme has an app now to let you know when the ‘hot’ light is on at any of their shops you choose.  And Randazzo’s has a king cake app now, too.

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George Rodrigue’s Blue Dog as victim.  In New Orleans, of course.

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Can you believe this has had $5MM in sales?

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A few years ago, I walked into a country store in Mississippi that had a hand-written notice next to the cash register letting people know that there was a several-thousand-dollar reward if anyone found and took a picture of (but certainly not killed) an ivory-billed woodpecker.  Since then, it’s the one bird I’ve been interested in, as it’s widely believed to be extinct.  Ira Flatow’s Science Friday on NPR did a piece today on the ivory-billed’s cousin, the Imperial woodpecker.  And it’s interesting.

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The Blue Willow Inn, in Social Circle, closed temporarily this week after an outbreak of customers getting sick…  The writer at Atlanta’s CL has it right:
…the place has received much national press over the years, probably less for the quality of the cooking, which is respectable but fairly standard, than for the antebellum setting and a series of grand dining rooms that seek to transport the diner to a more genteel, bygone era. There are only a handful of spots in Georgia serving rustic, all-you can eat Southern fare to the masses — the Smith House and Dillard House are the first that come to mind — but the Blue Willow has the most fancy-pants decor and manners. And it’s the closest to Atlanta, making it a perfect place to take grandparents from out of town.

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The WSJ has a nice year-end mention of the Thornton Dial show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art:
Two decades of relief paintings, free-standing sculptures and drawings attested to Mr. Dial’s power. Their titles asserted deep convictions about ecology, civil rights, the role of women, and politics; their quirky materiality declared their affinity with the oddball objects in Southern “yard shows,” but no special pleading was required for the art or its author. Whatever the works’ lineage or motivations, whatever Mr. Dial’s history, “Hard Truths” was an impressive survey of first-rate works by a major artist. Period.

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Tales of the Toddy, the first-ever Bourbon Spiked Eggnog Competition in New Orleans, with recipes.

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Turducken burger at Flip.

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Salvation Mountain update.

These are pics that Av and Leslie and I made in 2002 when we visited the covered bridges in Blount County, Alabama (I was playing around with b&w film).  The most impressive one is this one, Swann Bridge, built in 1933 — it’s the it’s the longest, at 300+’, of all the surviving covered bridges in the state.

All the covered bridges in the county have been closed for a couple of years, and restoration has just begun.

With the decking up, what is truly remarkable is that there is virtually no rot or decay on unpainted wood that has spanned the river for almost 80 years. Friedberg said that the heart pine wood they used came from trees that had grown slowly for hundreds of years. To get wood that is comparable, the company will have to special order it and have it treated.

“You can’t just go to Lowe’s and get this type of wood,” he said.

In downtown Florence…

2011 would have been the 100th birthday of Tennessee Williams — above is a pic I took of the first home he lived in, in Columbus, Mississippi.  In the NYT article about it, the first paragraph is this:

“DO you know what Spring Pilgrimage is?” asked Brenda Caradine, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Williams Birthday Celebration in Columbus, Miss. “It’s when you Yankees come down South to see our antebellum homes and we take back your money.”

…and the last paragraph is this:

“The entire country still needs Tennessee Williams as a voice for kindness,” said William Gantt, director of the Southern Literary Trail. “His work continues to champion outcasts, and his compassion for them will make him relevant forever.”

Tennessee Williams lived in Mississippi until he was seven, when his father got a job in St. Louis.

His obit in the NYT read in part, “He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart.”


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‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ will be 65 in 2012, and Warner Brothers will be releasing the movie on blu-ray including with three minutes of film that was thought lost until the ’90s “that had been trimmed from the film at the insistence of the National League of Decency and to avoid running afoul of the Hollywood Production Code.”  This version will also include “five documentaries, commentary tracks, Brando’s screen test, a Kazan movie trailer gallery, and a 40-page booklet.”


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In 2005 I went to Benoit, Mississippi and photographed the Baby Doll house where the film, based on his Twenty-Seven Loads of Cotton play, looked like this:

It has since been restored and (wonderfully) looks like this today.

I made eggnog fudge last week — wonderful!  One of the big plusses about this recipe is that with white chocolate added, it stays nice and white after cooking (sometimes without it, eggnog fudge can start to look a little darker in the pan) and of course has that nice flavor.  I wasn’t sure about adding marshmallow creme because that seemed like cheating somehow, but with all that chocolate it was sure to lighten up the density.  Oh, and pecans added a nice bite.  This is an amalgamation of several different recipes I consulted:

Makes an 8×8 pan — 40-48 pieces
Ingredients:
3/4 cup eggnog
1/2 cup butter
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cup white chocolate morsels
1 7oz jar jar marshmallow creme
2 cups chopped pecans

Cooking Directions:
Prepare an 8×8″ baking dish with buttered parchment paper, or tin foil.

Stir together constantly the butter, eggnog, and sugar with a wooden spoon, and bring it up to a boil with a candy thermometer inserted in the pan (this is a perfect job for a heavy Le Creuset pan).

Take the mixture off the heat once the mixture reaches 238* which is soft ball, or fudge, stage.

Now that the pan is off the heat, immediately add the white chocolate, marshmallow creme, and pecans.  Stir very well.  Once the chocolate has melted and everything is very well incorporated, pour into the prepared baking dish, then set that aside to cool.  Once it reaches room temperature, you can put it in the refrigerator to finish setting.  Cut into small pieces as this is really rich.

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For this recipe I used our traditional brand, Barber’s — but I also bought a container of egg nog by Southern Comfort (which is not listed on their website, but it has a FB page)