Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
Okay, it’s time. No, wait, I need to start like this: The Ritz-Carlton Lake Oconee (which is actually Greensboro, Georgia) is one of our favorite RCs. And it feels different than the others we’ve been to (Atlanta, Amelia Island, New Orleans, St Louis, and Dallas) because it’s so outdoorsy and not quite so buttoned-up.
I mean, I love the buttoned-up, totally polished too, but this is a sweet departure.
It’s time to figure out holiday plans. Some of the really terrific hotels go to their highest rates and/or they run out of availability. The Ritz Carlton in New Orleans used to be really easy to stay in December over the winter holidays but not right around the bowl games. That’s changed a little, and who knows what that will look like later this year. But the RC Lake Oconee pulls down to a lower rate around the holiday, and it’s also a great time to go.
That’s undoubtedly because one can’t do all the lake activities, etc because it’s cold outside, but the hotel makes up for that with other offerings.
The best way to work around the fluctuations in cost is to book on points when that’s an option, and that’s exactly what we’ve done both times we’ve stayed here. For instance, there are some dates in September that rooms are $1700+. Second week of November, $1900+. There are some $500/600/700 rooms sprinkled around, but you have to get lucky or work around what you want to do with the calendar.
In the summer, we love to go because there are kayaks, canoes, stand-up paddleboard, water bicycle, a great water mat, and more. You can just lounge on the lake beach and get in the water as you please. This is the RC, after all, so there are people everywhere to help with water activities or even just getting your fire pit going in the evening.
This firepit below is used for s’mores every evening.
The pool is a nice size with plenty of loungers, and there’s also a pool for younger guests as well as a hot tub. There’s food/cocktail service at the pool also.
There’s also golf, a spa, an indoor pool, bicycles, access to a sporting grounds, and a little train.
Our first stay was in 2018, when the rooms looked like this, but scroll further down for our stay last December and the new look:
Our latest stay was in December 2020, the last week of the year. The hotel was still beautifully decorated, and this was their gingerbread creation:
Here, the updated room:
Ha, one day we even watched a wedding!
It was cold, so no swimming, and we ate outside at every meal at both open restaurants. The food was not incredible but fine (not going to be too critical as there’s a service shortage and we all need to be especially kind with everything going on).
While the water temperature was too low to get in the water, we still bundled up and sat on the beach, and there was a firepit to keep each group warm
Nightly s’mores was fun, as was the room to explore outside with not too many other guests there.
Another thing to love: so many RCs do a great calendar of events — something going on every single day. For instance, today, there’s “Creepy Candy Crafting” for Halloween, a pumpkin patch, happy haunted hayride, and more. Okay, let’s go. It’s points time. 🙂
Now that some of the groups I’m in are back into thinking about programming, it’s time to think venues. Leslie and I took a girls’ weekend to the Mountain Brook Grand Bohemian, a Kessler Collection hotel in Marriott’s Autograph Collection a couple of years ago.
I love these Kessler Collection hotels. I’ve stayed at the Bohemian Hotel Savannah Riverfront, and the Mansion on Forsyth Park in Savannah a couple of times now. I saw a video with Richard Kessler once and knew he was a fellow Southerner — turns out he was born in Savannah and grew up in Effingham County. In his 20s, he helped found the much more humble Days Inn chain (and #funfact, it isn’t Days Inn because they thought the name was somehow clever — the other founder was Cecil Day, who was also raised in Georgia and taught at Georgia Tech).
Richard Kessler lives at the Armstrong Kessler Mansion in Savannah and occasionally opens it to groups as a venue.
One of my groups looked into booking a class here — they have several, from how to grill, to hors d’ oeuvres and pasta.
On our stay, Leslie and I had breakfast at the hotel restaurant, Habitat Feed & Social, but I haven’t yet been back for lunch or supper.
This is the space, really, though, that we enjoyed most — the rooftop. There’s a VIP Package that’s really just a reservation placeholder deposit that I think one of my smallest groups would get the best use. Av’s been to an event here at night; some venue pics from then here. The art gallery is fun, and there’s what looks to be a small little jewelry box of a spa.
I’d really like to go back to Asheville during the holidays, especially to see the gingerbread competition at the Grove Park Inn — if we don’t stay there, the Grand Bohemian looks fun too.
The NYT published a recipe for butter mochi this summer that sounded so good, I was determined to make it even though then I didn’t yet have a subscription to the Food section. It was only last month, when an annual subscription went on half-price, that I finally succumbed. It’s actually even better than I’d hoped.
Turns out that at the time, I found the perfect free recipe here at Bigger, Bolder Baking. And as this is something I’ve never eaten before or even knew of the concept before the Times’ feature, I decided to go straight with the recipe instead of trying anything new. It turned out *fantastic*.
Not much of a hurdle, but I found out pretty quickly that the required sweet rice flour wasn’t available at my large local grocery stores (Publix, Winn-Dixie, and Piggly Wiggly). I went to an Asian grocery, though, and they had a nice stock of this Koda Farms Mochiko.
I’m not going to repost the recipe here in text, as I did follow it exactly, but again, it can be found here. The steps were easy enough. Preheat the oven to 350*, mix all ingredients:
Pour into a 9×13 — here, I made things easy on myself and lined the pan with parchment paper
Lovely:
Inverted into a larger pan
Absolutely delicious
Wishing I’d taken a more glam picture, but we really dove in. The texture here is different — not jello but somewhat wiggly, dense but not brick-like. Huge plus: okay for Passover if rice is a food your family includes. Really just terrific — buttery and sweet, not at all cakey and interesting enough taste and texture-wise. We all loved it, including the grandparents. 10/10 would make again.
BTW, I put tons of my own recipes here at the Recipe page, and I’m going to be adding a section: OPRIMATTOOTR (other people’s recipes I make all the time or otherwise totally recommend), haha!
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
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We viewed the Doullot Steamboat Houses in New Orleans; they were built in 1905 and 1913 (the first for river pilot, civil engineer, and shipbuilder Captain Milton P. Doullut and his wife, Mary, and the other for their son Paul). The homes are octagonal with, via SAH: “porthole-type openings; broad galleries reminiscent of riverboat decks, draped with double strands of wooden balls strung on steel wires; an enclosed belvedere resembling a pilothouse; and twin metal smokestack chimneys.” They’re right by the water, so in case of flooding, the first floor of each is made of ceramic tile. Drone view here. Also: a half-tester in a bedroom of the first home once belonged to Faulkner.
28 years later, when Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed New Orleans native Lee Harvey Oswald, the funeral home tasked with overseeing Oswald’s burial told gravediggers they were preparing a plot for an old cowboy named “Bobo.” There were so few people in attendance that members of the press were asked to serve as Oswald’s pallbearers.
In contrast, the funeral and burial services for Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Sr. are believed to be the largest ever held for an alleged American assassin.
A Tim Kerr mural in Birmingham
At Under the Radar, Tim Kerr Self Taught, published by Don Giovanni. It includes visits to Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, the Orange Show in Houston, and Joe Minter’s African Village in America. The publication date was set for August but it looks like the book is still in pre-order.
From the Austin Chronicle: …”visionary art” being a term Kerr prefers to “folk art,” which he finds reduces the importance of the spiritualism and visions inspiring these people’s work – accompanied by photographs he took of those artists’ workspaces, as idiosyncratic and as defined by their aesthetics as their artwork. The photos are taken with toy cameras or old Polaroid units, to achieve the same messy, scratchy, uneven-yet-gorgeous look of Kerr’s paintings. Accompanying the book: a soundtrack by Up Around the Sun. It’s all of a piece.
Is it just the lighting, in this NYT piece? Tomatoes this pink don’t get sliced and certainly not featured, they go on the windowsill or better, left on the vine to get right with the L-rd
How to Design a Moon Garden at Modern Farmer and of course what should be included: the night-blooming cereus. Thinking of Welty’s Night-Blooming Cereus Club, and what one lady there in Jackson had said — wince — about what the flower looks like the next day: “like a wrung chicken’s neck”
These two sentences in the NYT piece, Eleven Madison Park Explores the Plant Kingdom’s Uncanny Valley in its restaurant review on the now-vegan establishment: “In tonight’s performance, the role of the duck will be played by a beet, doing things no root vegetable should be asked to do. Over the course of three days it is roasted and dehydrated before being wrapped in fermented greens and stuffed into a clay pot, as if it were being sent to the underworld with the pharaoh.”
The Walk of Life Project cracks me up, proving that WOL is the perfect song to end probably most movies. Also, I’ve thought this forever: couldn’t all movies have at least one Phil Collins song? I’m not even a Phil Collins fan, but it feels accurate
Carlisle Floyd, who wrote the 1955 opera “Susannah” passed away this week in Tallahassee. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2004 and in 2008 was named an honoree of the National Endowment for the Arts lifetime achievement in Opera. From the NYT:
The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.
“We’re treating this as an archaeological site,” said Eric Courchesne, the university’s geospatial services manager, who has overseen drone flights capturing its dimensions — top-down; a view from within the space; and how the installation relates to the neighborhood. A second phase includes filming a walk-through narrated by Minter and cataloging of the artworks, all to go live on a website.
“G-d’s looking down, like the drone,” Minter said. “I want him to see the progress and be able to say, Well done.”
We had two casual sukkah parties four hours apart at our home last weekend and that was crazy fun but also kinda exhausting. Here are some pics of my pre-everybody setup for both:
As the apple sauce mixture is added to the kettle, so is a special family heirloom, used as long as any Horton family member can recall. It’s a 1901 coin bearing a scar from an errant hatchet. It’s in the possession of Jody’s aunt, and it’s tossed into the kettle not as a good luck charm but rather for a very practical reason. Because of the sugar content and the heat of the fire, apple butter can easily scorch. The coin, kept constantly moving by the wooden stirring paddle, prevents that.
Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body also actively connects Ross’s practice to the historic trajectory of artists inspired by the mythology of Hale County, Alabama. His work builds on – and adds new layers of complexity and experience to – iconic works like James Agee’s seminal 1941 book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which featured photographs by Walker Evans, and to artists like William Christenberry, who immortalized Hale County in his paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures across several decades. Ross arrived in Hale County over ten years ago to teach photography and workforce development, and shortly thereafter began documenting the county, state and its people.
Andrew Freear, director of the Auburn University College of Architecture, Design and Construction’s Rural Studio, has been selected as one of eight new National Academicians by the National Academy of Design in recognition of his contributions to arts and architecture.
“…In 1991 she received a letter from Malcolm L. Wheeler, a Birmingham attorney and grandson of John. P. Beggs, the Iron Man Statue maker.
Beggs designed and made three of these statues before he passed away in 1923. One was located in Irondale, and the third one was in Gate City. His father came over from Liverpool, England, and was one of the leaders of the iron and cast-iron business in the early days of Birmingham.”
Set in the middle of North Forest Lights next to Dale Chihuly’s Sole d’Oro sculpture, the North Forest Snow Globe Experience includes two and a half hours inside a cozy, see-through snow globe dome with lights and faux fur blankets, specialty food, cocktails, and a Snow Globe Concierge. Tickets to this snow globe experience also include entry to North Forest Lights and a shuttle pick-up to bring you to your snow globe upon arrival.
“Anyone who tries to tell you James Hemings invented mac and cheese is lying,” she said. “Any cook at the time who had studied French cookery could have been making this. It’s not a [expletive] secret.”
It’s like saying all the French people who immigrated either forgot or decided to never make it once they got here. She’s, um, not a fan of Mr Jefferson, or chefs who claim a spiritual grasp to another place generations away. She IS incredibly well-rounded food-wise. Canning. Growing. Raising livestock. When her mother married a man from New Orleans, he taught her Creole cooking. “He had some real fixed notions about gravy,” she said.
Kenton Nelson’s “American Vernacular” a short piece on the books he loves and how they inspire his paintings at The New Yorker — and on his October 4 cover of the magazine, a nod to an F. Scott Fitzgerald character (Horace Tarbox) from “Head and Shoulders”
…King examines her appreciation for the déclassé. We meet on this chain-filled stretch in Queens for exactly that: a night of tacky indulgence with a bang-bang-bang of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and the Cheesecake Factory.
…Still, King says, “Not as good as I remember.” Is any food you loved as a child ever as good when you’re an adult—or is it the memory that makes everything better?
PS: this should really be in the random section after all, but I’m up for it if you wanna email about how much bigger and better Hardee’s biscuits were in the 80s.
Wondering what Graceland Too is looking like these days? They’re fixing it up.
Looking forward to a relaxing weekend at home…catching up on whatever. Enjoying fall and spending time in the backyard. Hope you’re curled up on the sofa reading or watching something fun this weekend too. xoxo!
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