Month: March 2016

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Truck Stop Korma And Incredible Coastal Mexican

This is what Yelp was made for.

There’s a name-/sign-less (well, officially it’s ‘Taste of India’ but I couldn’t find a sign anywhere) Indian food restaurant on I-20/59 around Livingston, Alabama that has some of the best Indian food anywhere. It’s inside the L and B Travel Center right tucked back off the interstate exit — and if you didn’t know there was anything inside…you’d never know. Except…thanks to Yelp.

Taste of India, Livingston AL//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

The owner has this travel center and told me he figured that since they had this restaurant space, he might as well try something. Never mind that it’s aesthetically, um, confusing, that’s not what anyone’s here for. 

Taste of India Restaurant, Livingston AL//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

It’s this. The food is crazy good. And the owner was so kind, he even brought over complimentary mango lassi for each of us. We ordered chicken korma, tandoori chicken, another dish of lightly fried chicken that the boys liked along with incredible vegetable biryani, and of course naan.
Taste of India, Livingston AL//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Taste of India, Livingston AL//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

From now on, we are saving our appetites for truck stop Indian in Livingston — 651 Hwy 28 W.

Also thanks to Yelp (know how people love to hate Yelp but what they’re really hating are the ultra-critical and/or poorly written, poorly considered reviews?) we found this fabulous coastal Mexican restaurant in Trussville, Alabama — La Perla Nayarita (5712 Chalkville Road).

Shorthand for Mexican restaurants is so often chips-and-salsa with standard enchiladas and such on the menu, but at this restaurant, they concentrate on seafood and more tropical flavors. In fact, when you’re seated, they bring out not chips, but a corn tortilla piled with ceviche. That’s it on the left here:

La Perla Nayarita//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
Above on the right, the steamed fish Av enjoys, that’s served en papillote (foil rather than parchment) and it’s like this wonderful surprise when opened because it’s covered in shrimp, peppers, mushrooms…

The interior is just a big open space with flat surfaces, so it gets loud. Loud when they’re showing soccer, and louder still when their roaming group of musicians set up right around your table, and bring a speaker with them. Oh yeah. But it’s fun.

La Perla Nayarita//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

One night, Shugie saw a little girl with a giant pineapple drink, and we ordered it too — a non-alcoholic pina colada.

I did notice on our last visit that they have a separate menu for people who are looking for tacos and enchiladas and such, but their raison d’etre — and what the large main menu is made up of — is serving these great beachy flavors.

This is the Pena en Crema — a (mostly) hollowed-out pineapple half filled with shrimp, scallops, crab and topped with peppers, mushrooms, and cheese. Whatever the idea is about seafood and cheese being wrong, well, this obliterates all that.
Pina en Crema//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Pina en Crema//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Without Yelp, we’d probably have never even noticed La Perla Nayarita — it’s in a small shopping center with its only other neighbors — no kidding — being a liquor store, a pawn shop, and a tattoo parlor.

I asked one of the managers if there were any other coastal Mexican restaurants we didn’t know about (‘coastal Mexican’ was their descriptor) and the closest ones are in Atlanta, where they know of two.

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Loving Vincent, Baton Rouge

This Van Gogh mural, painted on the side of a grocery store on Van Gogh Ave in Baton Rouge, is part of the Red Stick Project. It was produced over the course of four days by 20 students “in collaboration with the Mayor’s Love Your Community summer employment program, the neighborhood association, MECA, and the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge”. Many of the streets in the Melrose East neighborhood have the names of famous artists: Monet, Renoir, Goya, Titian, Cezanne, Rodin, Rembrandt.

Van Gogh Mural, Baton Rouge LA//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Van Gogh Mural, Baton Rouge LA//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

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Loving Vincent, a movie in which every frame is an oil painting, began on Kickstarter and the painting should be finished by August. is still under production, although it appears the painting should be finished by August. May never look at a Van Gogh the same. Here’s the first trailer:

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Goodbye, Jerry Brown

Just this year, we have lost Thorton Dial, Nelle Harper Lee, and now another Alabama treasure, Jerry Brown. A 9th-generation potter, Jerry was the only one known in the country to still have a mule-powered pug mill.

We visited Jerry many times at his shop in Hamilton, at Kentuck, and at the Hamilton art festival that was named in his honor. When our boys were little, he even took them *inside* his walk-in kiln.

In the ’90s, one of my dearest friends was the first to ever ask him to make a female face jug. Sure enough, he put eyelashes on, and…:

Not all these are Jerry Browns, but I have some of them on this shelf:
Face Jugs//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Inside the big fish in the middle of the shelf:
Jerry Brown Man in FIsh//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Al.com reported:
“Molding Hearts, Hands & Minds” program created by the Northwest Alabama Arts Council, which involves fourth-grade students studying the Alabama History curriculum who are selected each year to come to the pottery shop. With Brown’s assistance, they make their own piece of pottery, which is then displayed at the festival. Children from every school in Marion County have participated in this program over the past decade.

 NEA statement:
Washington, DC—It is with great sadness that the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledges the death of 1992 National Heritage Fellow Jerry Brown, a potter from Hamilton, Alabama. Brown was a ninth generation potter whose craft honored both traditional forms such as churns, crocks, pitchers, and bowls as well as continued the family’s line of humorous face jugs.

When Jerry was young, he and his brother Jack watched their father make pottery in his shop near Sulligent in Lamar County, Alabama. Family tragedies led Jerry to give up pottery for 20 years and work as a logger in the pulpwood industry. During a slack time in the logging business, Brown returned to pottery, finalizing plans to build a pottery shop in 1981. Using his memory of what his father had taught him, and with help from an uncle, Brown put together the necessary elements for making pottery including a mule-drawn mill for mixing newly dug clay.

A survey of Alabama’s folk pottery tradition undertaken by the Montgomery Museum of Art led to an exhibition featuring Brown and other potters from northwestern Alabama. The highly successful exhibition helped broaden the market for Brown’s work, allowing him to eventually pursue pottery full time.

In addition to his NEA National Heritage Award, the Alabama State Council on the Arts awarded him the 2003 Alabama Folk Heritage Award. That same year, the Jerry Brown Arts Festival, a juried arts festival, launched in Hamilton, and continues to garner awards by the Southeast Tourism Society as a Top Twenty Event.

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Dolce

When a town’s square is still a center of activity — courthouse in the middle surrounded by little (and sometimes not-quite-so-little) shops buzzing — it’s like a relief that vanilla mega-franchises don’t fit, and don’t fit-in, everywhere. Later this month, tiny Dolce in Troy, Alabama, owned by Jamey McDaniel who makes everything from scratch as it should be, celebrates its second anniversary on the square.

Av and I like to run to the square whenever we’re in Troy and we’re going to be stopping at (completely delicious) Dolce every time from now on. 
Lemon tart
Chocolate and peanut butter tart
Also: maybe because Troy is a college town, Jamie really makes the prices super-reasonable for everything on the menu. We left a big tip to make up the difference in what we would have paid for these slices anywhere else.  
Love to everyone keeping town squares vibrant and interesting. And yummy. xoxo!

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The NYT ran the recipe for agnes b.’s mother’s Tarte au Citron last month:
“…when she was making a tarte she was in good humor, the same as when she came back from the hairdresser.”

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Not Exactly Unicorns And Rainbows

On our last visit to the UT campus in Knoxville, I went to the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture and found something I really wasn’t sure I was going to *ever* going to get to be so close to — and something I haven’t seen in many other museums of this type:

…a narwhal horn. Or maybe it’s preferable to say ‘narwhal tusk’ — it’s actually a tooth and these were sold years and years ago as unicorn horns. Narwhals are arctic whales (I didn’t even realize they existed until I was in college) and you know, since I was one of those girls who decorated her notebooks with unicorns and rainbows (mmmm…still do….) it was instant love when I found out about them.

There’s really a nice mix of exhibits in this small museum; here, the inner coffin of Anesenmes, Priestess of Amun-Re, Dynasty XXI, ca. 1085-950BCE:

Inner Coffin of Anesenmes, Priestess of Amun-Re, Dynasty XXI, ca 1085-950BCE//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Though…I’m thinking one day people may be more circumspect about removing burial artifacts from ancient Egypt. If part of the Egyptians’ beliefs included the importance that they were buried a certain way with a certain process to help ensure their place and comfort in the afterlife, aren’t more modern people in some ways stepping on those religious beliefs by disturbing these environments?

Just a few miles from the museum on another part of campus is what people colloquially call ‘The Body Farm’ which is actually the UT Forensic Anthropology Center. It’s where, if one decides to donate one’s body to science, researchers often study decomposition of the body in various situations in the natural outdoors area (but closed to outsiders) around the facility.  There’s a whole donor packet for people to fill out when making a decision to do this kind of thing and if ones wishes were, say, to be left in the woods to return to the earth naturally, this kind of request will be considered.

Body Farm, Facility at UT Knoxville//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
The body farm is to the right and on the other side of a parking lot fence — about three acres total. I don’t need or wish to see it, but do find it interesting that even the Tennessee Dept of Tourist Development lists it on its website. Appreciate that these researchers are doing these types of studies for a variety of reasons, firstly so that crimes may more reliably be solved.

This, from the facility’s site:
The William M. Bass Donated Collection is currently the largest collection of modern people in the United States. This means that it is one of the best ways to study the skeletons of modern populations. Most of the criteria in use today for estimating age, sex, and ancestry were developed from collections of skeletons from the late 19th century, as these were the only ones available at the time forensic anthropology began. Since people have changed over the last century, it is crucial to have access to modern skeletons in order to develop new identification criteria that reflects these changes. The skeletons are housed in perpetuity–in fact, the first donation received in 1981 is still used in research today.

7. Currently, we have over 1,000 individuals in our collection and average approximately 100 new donations per year. These include individuals who have pre-registered with us, have been donated by their families, or by a medical examiner. They come from 33 different states and 2 different countries.

8. Our pre-donor program has well over 2,750 individuals who have chosen to donate to us prior to their death. These individuals come from all 50 states and 6 different countries and represent all age ranges.

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Just because we are on the topic (this pic below from a visit to Etowah County, Alabama), are wakes at home (rather than just a visitation at the funeral home) happening some in your community?  Interested how often this custom is going on currently, and where. Please contact me if you have some information to share. Thank you!

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