As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
the menu at Kevin’s Revival, from a visit in 2016
Kevin Gillespie will be doing a live chefstream from his home this Sunday 11/1 at 6p EST. He’ll be answering questions in real-time from attendees and will do a q&a afterward. What’s being made? Salmon en Papillote with vegetables and salsa verde, and that warm banana pudding with meringue topping that I mentioned in last week’s TWV.
Eater with Where There’s Pie There’s Hope on Stacey Mei Yan Fong’s 50 Pies / 50 States project.
Alabama = peach blackberry pie with a salted pecan brown sugar crumble topping. Her honey peach pie recipe for SCAD is here.
Joe Minter and me from last month; Joe has several pieces in the collection
Souls Grown Deep Foundation will give living artists a 5% royalty when its collection inventory is resold.
Ted’s Restaurant is a ‘meet and greet’ serving good food fast from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
Alabama News Center features meat & three restaurant Ted’s in Birmingham. On the steam table: dishes like “baked Greek chicken; tender, tangy souvlakia; and savory pastitsio” thanks to the Greek community here. I mean, pastichio — I even make it at home (and buy a big pan of it for the garage freezer during the annual Greek Orthodox Festival). To think you can just run through a cafeteria line in B’ham at lunchtime and get your pastichio on, well, lucky.
“It’s bringing people in and taking care of them and nourishing them,” she said. “That’s what we do. I think that’s why Greeks gravitate towards the restaurant business, because it’s in our nature to take care of people and feed them.”
Tasos can’t resist adding: “The Southern hospitality is the child of the Greek hospitality, because we’ve been in existence for 3,000 years. Without the Greeks, we wouldn’t have the Southern hospitality. Well, I’m sorry. I’m a little proud, you know, to be where I’m from, but we invented that.”
Yes:
chicken and beef fajitas at the original Ninfa’s on Navigation, from a 2015 visit
Fajita burger, okay? Sit with that a sec. I know, I know, but just going to add that it was Ninfa’s (Ninfa’s I miss you) chef Alex Padilla’s literal dream (and yes, literal as in literal) and Texas Monthly wants to talk about it:
mixture of smoky, grilled, and chopped outside skirt fajita meat stuffed inside a ground fajita patty. These two mingling textures are seasoned simply with salt and pepper, then topped with imported quesillo (called queso Oaxaca in the U.S.) and Monterey Jack. The two cheeses melt into a delightfully gooey blend that envelops chopped poblanos. Avocado wedges and twisted rings of grilled red onions finish off the mighty $20 entree. The challah bun is dressed with a mild chipotle mayo, and it’s all served with ramekins of pickled carrots and black-pepper ketchup.
PS challah bun has me thinking of those sweet little rolls we do sometimes at Temple and almost always at Jewish convention suppers, and I may never not pick one up now and think about slathering one with chipotle mayonnaise and all the rest.
KCRW’s Tortilla Tournament was won this year by “puffy, salty, Tex-Mex flour finalist, HomeState: A Texas Kitchen.”
from a visit in 2006
149-acre Natural Bridge Park (the natural bridge is 150ft long, 60+ft high) in Winston County, Alabama is for sale at $3M.
Not for sale, but completely jealous of the people who have this natural bridge on their property in NE Alabama:
Super random:
Yes to the James R. Southard ‘Why Buy the Cow’ exhibit at Institute 193 in Lexington, through November 14.
This interview at Trendland with photographer Jill Burrow, who says “My favourite time of day is definitely when the sun is approaching the horizon. I feel that the sun, one hour from the horizon, is what dreams are made of.”
I’ve eaten at the world’s first underwater restaurant, in Eilat, Israel with a view of the Red Sea, and but wow, here’s Under, the restaurant 5-1/2m below surface in Norway. Their Instagram. Nice.
Was interested to see the Todd Snyder x LL Bean collab but um…somebody in their marketing dept got a little confused (it’s actually on two pages): “If you want hot chicken, you go to Memphis. If you want a proper Burgundy, you go to Nuits-Saint-Georges. If you want to find a cherry piece of vintage menswear, you go to Wooden Sleepers.” Welp, I tweeted him/them that it’s actually Nashville for hot chicken, and that I could be repaid with a pair of those fine boots. We’ll see 😉
Fred Webster’s ‘Snake Charmers’ on view in 2012 at the Chattanooga Aquarium
HBO plans to release a new documentary each week for five weeks, and on December 9, Alabama Snake.
the story of Glenn Summerford, a Pentecostal minister, accused of attempting to murder his wife with a rattlesnake in the sleepy town of Scottsboro, Alabama. The details of the investigation and the trial that followed has haunted his family and community for decades. The documentary features local Appalachian historian and folklorist, Dr. Thomas Burton, who has spent his life studying the culture, beliefs, and folklore of Pentecostal snake handlers, painting a Southern Gothic portrait of Glenn Summerford and his tale of demon possession.
PS the term “serpent handlers” would have been preferred by that community.
Artist Richard Burnside has passed away. From the Independent Mail:
Burnside was a self-taught artist whose “outsider” work has been featured on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum and in Atlanta galleries. It was also on tins of cookies for General Mill’s Immaculate Bakery brand.
kudzu, Prattville AL
Vanderbilt University News on Deliverance (the book) turning 50, and alumnus James Dickey (BA ’49, MA ’50); particularly interesting, his take on Southern female authors
— and sidenote, how many times have you read a piece like this ::scroll to the bottom of that page:: and the reviewer has a toothpick in his mouth? Kind sir, did we catch you unawares, post-prandial from a big lunch at the Golden Corral? This is the Vanderbilt University News, not the Dollar General Daily. I kid, I kid.
Anyway:
In dialogue with The Paris Review, Dickey went on record as saying that the “women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie,” adding that “their scope is limited to the local and domestic with, in some cases, an admixture of the grotesque.” He did acknowledge the greatness of Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, but in the same breath offered the appalling verdict on the fate of Sylvia Plath and her art, saying “She’s not very good. She’s just someone who killed herself out of literary desperation.”
BTW, a couple of days ago, the NYT ran a review on the Red Comet: the Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark — the book is here at Square Books and here on Amazon.
Ah, if you’ve never read Dickey’s poem Kudzu, here it is. Halloween approved.
country pate, from a visit to Coquette in 2016
A team from Coquette is doing the food at the renovated Columns (they dropped the “The”) and Ian McNulty at NOLA.com describes: “Smoked trout roe is dappled between curls of cabbage transformed by char and fennel aioli. There’s a chili-flecked cashew hummus with a rainbow of crunchy vegetables to dip, and broad slices of country ham share a platter with pickles, pimento cheese and puffy shrimp crackers.”
a Louisiana Bendolph quilt at the High, from a visit in 2015
Gallery Nicelle Beauchene represents the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers in New York, is planning a group show in 2022, and will have a solo show for Mary Lee Bendolph in fall 2021.
Hot Springs, 2015
The Southern Review of Books on David Hill’s The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice here at Amazon and here at Square Books
“On a per capita basis,” Hill asserts, without fear of contradiction, “Hot Springs was perhaps the most sinful little city in the world.”
Brittany Howard writes the intro, The South Just Has a Thang, for the Winter Music Issue at Oxford American
How does the South inform my music? How do I describe the sound that your bare feet make when they pat the cool, packed red dust under them? How do I describe the color of the sky when you know there’s going to be a tornado? How do I tell you about my grandmother’s smile when she’s singing old church songs? How can I even tell you the way it feels to hear the cicadas sing in the humid evenings on my great-grandmother’s porch, or the first breeze of fall after an oppressive, jungle-like summer where you worked all week and never got ahead?
ah, selfies are weird
We’re celebrating birthdays around here this weekend and I hope whether it’s Halloween or cooler weather or something just as fun, you’re off to celebrate something too. xoxo!
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