Month: February 2014

We found this in Carbon Hill, Alabama:

The raw bar was going up — dungeness crab, P and J oysters of course…

I got the fried chicken and mayhaw glaze biscuit, with fresh fruit:

The first time I ever had ‘sweet’ chicken was at “N’awlins” at the Horseshoe in Tunica, where John Besh was ‘Executive Consulting Chef’ and I had the ‘sugar lacquered chicken‘ — and I wonder why it is I ordered this kind of thing again, because I wasn’t really enamored with the idea of something savory with what turned out to be such a cloying coating.  Maybe it’s just the chicken thing, because barbecue with a sweet barbecue sauce is okay.  In any case, this was just alright.  One other thing on the menu: his pain perdu that uses challah with mascarpone and Allan Benton’s bacon.

Trying to get to all his restaurants.  I think the only ones we’re missing so far are Besh Steak and La Provence.

—
Here’s the clip for John’s new-ish book, Cooking from the Heart:

Last week, the International Association of Cooking Professionals (IACP) announced their 2014 Cookbook Awards finalists, and this was one of them.  The winners will be announced on March 15.

One of the recipes from the book, Apple and Pear Tart with Walnuts, is here.

For several years now, I’ve been visiting the Black Oak Cemetery in Grove Oak, Alabama (I have several, several ancestors from the Christian side of my family buried here — if you’re a Sand Mountain Gilbert or Fossett, we’re very likely related) and am really taken with the more primitive monuments of some of those here:

Tree motif:

The upside-down heart motif — which is very interesting, also, the use of ‘bornd’ for the birth year:

John L.A. Brown monument with the beautiful tree and hearts, and the hand pointing upward (occasionally I hear from members of this family since I’ve been posting pics of this monument and cemetery for a while, which is so nice):

This is how the stone appeared in 2005:

and in 2011:

At least once a year, we try to get to William C. Rice’s Cross Garden on CoRd 82 in Prattville, Alabama.  Here are pics from our latest visit, in January:

Astounding how many of these have been lost (hate seeing these for sale; Slotin sold one in November for $450 (although it may have been legitimately acquired originally, terribly likely that the majority of these were not)…to see how these have fared both in quantity and preservation, see my W.C. Rice Cross Garden set on Flickr for pics from years past.

This all began in many ways when he was healed by the Almighty of an ulcerated stomach:
…on April 24, 1960—”in a house trailer, down in Fort Rucker. Sunday morning, about two o’clock.” 

…“Next thing I know, I come up out of the chair, and I spit tobacco all over that refrigerator, and I started preaching.” Rice never had another taste of tobacco, and was never bothered by ulcers again. “G-d borned the spirit in my flesh-body when He saved me that Sunday morning,”

He began preaching, and building what we now know as the ‘Cross Garden’ in the mid-70s.  A really, really nice piece about W.C. Rice and how he got started, complete even with an image from the days when he would take out full-page ads in the Prattville Times and Centerville Press, is here.

The chapel he built:

A series called ‘Strange Universe‘ (1996-1998) aired this visit with W.C. Rice, which was produced in a rather unfortunate, purposefully creepy way:

…but *much* better, albeit without a visit with Rice himself, is:
//player.vimeo.com/video/24084747
The Cross Garden of Prattville, AL from J BraIy on Vimeo.

The ceiling of the 1925 Alabama Power building in downtown Birmingham: