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We went to the Argo Drive In (there are some pics of it here, but I couldn’t find a website – their phone # is 205.467.3434) Sunday night. The movie started at 8:15pm, and the cost was $10 per car. When we first got a space, we actually had to move because there were so many big pickup trucks (the ones where they are customized to be really tall for off-roading) that we couldn’t see the screen too well in my Volvo! We moved the car, and when we rolled the windows down, we smelled cherry scent. Like…fake cherries. The person in the pickup truck next to us had his windows rolled down and hanging from his rearview mirror were those cherry car deodorizers! It was yucky and funny at the same time. We smelled our clothes afterwards to see if we smelled like fake cherries (we did!)!

About halfway through the movie, we heard something really loud getting closer and closer. At first I couldn’t tell what it was, and then about 50 yards behind us, a train (!) went through!!! It was so funny – we and everybody else just turned up the volume until it passed.

Earlier this summer Av and I decided we’d like to try to go to every drive-in in Alabama (there are eleven) and Mississippi (there are three), so this is another one off our list. The movie was great and we had a lot of fun. Yay!

I’m trying to streamline some of my collections, and I’m starting with books and magazines. There are certain books that I like the idea of keeping, but I know I’ll never look at them again (those I’m selling on Amazon). Same idea with magazines – I like the idea of subscribing to certain ones, but there are some that I only flip through and don’t even really read.

I have lots of cookbooks, and I’m going to try to streamline those as well. I’ve decided that if I don’t use a certain cookbook, I’m going to put it on Amazon for someone else to hopefully enjoy. I’ve had Fine Dining Mississippi Style for about three years now and I’ve never made a single thing from it. It’s really a nice cookbook – it’s one of those books where the author has contacted chefs from all over the state for recipes they use in their own restaurants.

Yesterday, when I was making my menu and shopping list for the week, I took that book down and decided to try making “Vanelli’s Grecian Spaghetti” for tonight’s supper – it’s a recipe from a restaurant called Vanelli’s in Tupelo (update: they’ve since closed), and the restaurant has gotten some really good reviews on Yahoo travel.

What I made is based on, but isn’t exactly, the recipe in the book.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup mushrooms (garden-variety)
1/4 cup cauliflower
1/4 cup broccoli
1 scallion
1 bell pepper
8 oz. spaghetti noodles, cooked
splash olive oil
1 clove chopped garlic
beef sausage (like a beef kielbasa)

First, I prepared all my ingredients. I chopped the mushrooms, cauliflower, broccoli, scallion, and bell pepper and set them in one bowl, then the garlic in another.

Next, I started the spaghetti cooking and then began on the beef sausage, which I cut into bite-size pieces. I heated a skillet to medium-high with a splash of olive oil inside, then added the meat. Once the beef sausage was cooked, I transferred it to a bowl. In the hot skillet, I added all the garlic, then the cut vegetables. They soaked up all the yummy flavor of the meat:

…and once they were cooked through, I added the cooked spaghetti and the sausage back to the pan (and seasoned with salt and pepper). I cooked this for another couple of minutes to get everything hot and mixed together:

…and served.

It was a different in a really good way. Av and I rate dishes “once a week,” “once a month,” “once a year,” and “once a lifetime and this was it” (ha!) and this was a “once a month” dish.

I think we might try Vanelli’s the next time we’re in Tupelo. I love Greek food, and from the reviews, it’s supposed to be really casual and easygoing. Nice!

Today I got to make a craft I’ve been meaning to try – nightlights. Well, the nightlight is already made (!) – what I wanted to try was to make was a picture for the light to shine through. I got the idea of printing pictures of mine on Shrinky Dinks, and it came out really, really well!

What you’ll need:
nightlights with the bulb and clamp included (you can find them on eBay)
Shrinky Dink inkjet paper
computer, software like Photoshop, printer
scissors
oven preheated to 300*
cookie sheet
paper sack cut to fit cookie sheet
a heavy book to insurance-smush the shrinky-dinks flat
hot glue gun, glue

Ifyou know Photoshop, do this: make the image the size you want, then go to levels and wash it out – between 50%-75% of how it started.

Next, go to “image”, “adjustments”, “levels” and move the black arrow that is all the way to the left to *at least* halfway across. It’s important that the image appear very washed out, because the colors concentrate on the paper when it shrinks in the oven. There were certain pictures that I moved the bar about 75% of the way to the right. With a little practice, you can begin to tell how far washed-out the image will need to be to look good in the end. The darker the pic is to begin with, the more washed-out you will want to start it as.

I saved the file, then printed it. When you print it, select that you want to print in color on the best setting, on transparency film (even though you are using the Shrinky Dink inkjet paper). Depending on the dimensions of your image, you may need to change the setting to print landscape so that the image isn’t cut off. Print the image on the scratchy side of the SD paper. In my printer, I put the paper in shiny-side up because it prints on the underneath when it goes through the rollers.

Here’s my first experiment going in the oven: the oven is preheated at 300* and I’ve cut out the image and put it on a baking sheet with a paper-bag cut out to be the liner.

And here’s what went wrong – terribly wrong! Lesson learned: when Shrinky-Dink paper gets hot and starts shrinking, the edges will curl. This is normal and okay. The only time to step in is when you have a big piece that you’re starting with and the edges curl so much that it curls in and sticks to itself. If that goes unchecked you’ll end with this:

(blush.) Okay, that was bad! hahaha! But what I figured out is to open the oven when that happens, a potholder in one hand and a spatula in the other, and to ‘beat’ the offending edge until it starts to straighten out again. Regular curling is okay. Sticking to itself is definitely not okay.

So…I printed out another picture and started over. This time it turned out a lot better, and I also found out that the SD will shrink faster if the cookie sheet (with the paper sack liner) is preheated in the oven.

This time the scary curling starts, – but I didn’t have to do anything to this one – it just uncurled on its own (total shrink time is about two minutes at 300*. You can go longer than that if you need to.). Resist the need to step in unless you’re sure it’s going to stick to itself. This one is just fine:

When it’s “cooked” longer, it will uncurl itself. I took it out of the oven and my handy assistant, Av, took a book and smushed it. This was our insurance that it would cool completely flat.

There are two more that I did. These started at about 4″x6″ and ended at about…2-1/2″x3-1/2″. The magnolia, especially, had this really neat luminous look to it. The camellia turned out great, too!

Here’s one thing to check before you hot-glue the SD onto the clamp. Where you want to put the night light – they are polarized plugs (one of the legs is smaller than the other) – you want to figure out if you’re going to be plugging the night light in up or down. This is important if you have an image that is obviously one way up (like…if you did a SD of a house, you want to make sure the outlet you plug it into is going to show it right-way up). In my home, some of the outlets have the little leg on the left side and some have the little leg on the right side. Anyway, just to be sure, take your nightlight to where you’re going to use it and see how it is going to plug in.

Here, I’ve taken my hot-glue gun and made a bead of glue on the clamp, then pressed the SD onto it:

…and here it is!

I think they look really nice. I’ve got a little work to do to make them look even neater, but that will come with some more practice. I’m really happy with them!

Ordinarily, Av and I don’t go to chain restaurants – but there is a very small five-restaurant chain based in Louisiana called “Ralph and Kacoo’s” that makes *the* very best hushpuppies!

I made some of what I call “hushpuppy fritters” (because they’re more flat than round) one night this week to go with the grouper we bought at Joe Patti’s.

This recipe is based on (but isn’t exactly) the one in the Ralph and Kacoo’s cookbook, and I made it 1/10 the portion in the book – and there was still plenty left!

Ingredients:
1/2 lb. cornmeal
1/5 lb. flour
1/3 cup sugar
a little salt
tiny sprinkle baking soda
1-1/2 tbsp. baking powder
dash garlic powder
1 bunch green onions
1/3 c. evaporated milk
1/2 c. water
1/2 egg (break egg in bowl, stir, use half for this recipe)
dash fresh parsley, chopped

Directions:
Mix together the cornmeal, flour, sugar, salt, b/soda, b/powder, and garlic powder. Next, add the milk, water, 1/2 broken egg, green onions, and parsley. Once this was mixed well, I could tell if it needed a touch more evaporated milk (to make it less dry) or cornmeal (to make it hold together better). Let this refrigerate at least thirty minutes.

To make regular round hushpuppies, just shape into a ball and drop into fryer at 350*. Since I wanted to make fritters, I just spooned it out into a skillet with some oil heated to medium-high (make sure the oil is plenty hot before adding the batter). Since it was just me and Av (and our doggies!) for supper that night, I made four fritters. I let them get nice and golden brown on one side,

…then flipped them over to finish.

These were great!

The August/September issue of Mary Engelbreit Home Companion has a feature on the artwork of Ann Wood and Dean Lucker. Dean sculpts and makes the mechanical pieces and Ann paints. They’re wonderful!

The first one from their website, called “For You” is made so that when the lever is pushed, the girl raises her hand and a snowglobe appears that says “for you.” How precious is that!?

Some of the other pieces on their site have video clips to show how they ‘work’.

Earlier this week, I bought a set of Alabama Art Cards designed by Nall – they are wonderful!

The face of each of the cards is this image, which is also the cover of the ‘Alabama Art’ book he edited, published in 2000.

In the spades suit, he features Frank Fleming, Kathryn Tucker Windham, and Martin Luther King Jr. (jokers are Bruce Larsen and Susan Starr):

Diamonds are Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Helen Keller, and Chip Cooper.

Clubs are Mose T, Betty Sue Matthews, and Booker T. Washington:

Hearts are Nall, Yvonne Wells, and Truman Capote:

…and each of the suits features a symbol of Alabama – the pecan, the dogwood berry, the cotton boll, and the camellia.

Enclosed with the cards is an insert where Nall writes about memories of growing up. He writes, “Before television, I spent many moments playing cards with family and friends, laughing and socializing around a front porch table or under the wisteria arbor. These memories are captured here in the portraits of many of Alabama’s best-known painters, photographers, writers, and sculptors.”

The Ohr O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi was under construction when the hurricane struck, but they’re proceeding and doing programming – including summer camp for kids. The architect on the museum is Frank Gehry (I love the design he did for the Disney Hall, and the Stata Center, especially) so you know it’s going to turn out interesting and wonderful!

I’m really looking forward to the museum being completed and opening, because Ohr’s pottery is just so magnificent. He lived from 1857 to 1918, was involved with Newcomb College pottery for a while, and was a real character – he called himself the “mad potter of Biloxi” and was a huge self-promoter. A crazy handlebar mustache, too!

Today, a piece of Ohr pottery runs in the tens of thousands of dollars. I saw one piece on Antiques Roadshow (they have a pic of his work here), and they said that although there were once 10,000 pieces of his that were purchased, less than 500 are probably “still out there.” They’re so neat, too – thin-walled, pinched pieces that are really abstract. Beautiful.

I bought “The Mad Potter of Biloxi: The Art and Life of George E. Ohr” and just last month, “George Ohr, Art Potter: The Apostle of Individuality” was published. I haven’t gotten it yet, but I’m thinking about it!

Right now, the collection of George Ohr pottery from Biloxi is being exhibited at the Mobile Museum of Art, with Shearwater Pottery (their building was heavily, heavily damaged too). The Mobile Museum site says that the Ohr/Shearwater exhibit is showing until September 30 – and the Nall exhibit I really want to see is there until September 24th – so I’m going to get back there soon!

We drove over to Pensacola from Mobile to go to our favorite fish market in the whole wide world – Joe Patti’s. While Av was getting our order together…some grouper and pompano…I took a picture of these two lobsters being weighed for a customer:

It is crazy-busy there, but it’s really efficient and somehow fun and we love it!

They packed our fish (if you have a cooler, bring it in and they will fill it with ice and pack it perfectly – if not, they’ll pack it to go in one of their coolers) and we were all set.

This is the scene outside the market…every fish market should be this way! 🙂

This weekend, Av and I spent a little time at the largest National Historic Register Site east of the Mississippi (I didn’t realize it until we got there!) – Historic Blakeley State Park. There is a sign to take one of the exits off I-65 not far from Mobile to get to a Civil War battlefield…so Av and I drove out just to see what was there.

The park attendant gave us a little literature about it – Blakely used to be a thriving town back in the 1820s – bigger than Mobile, even – but today there’s not a single building left.

It’s also where the last major battle of the War was, on April 9, 1865, six hours after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. 26,000 soldiers fought there.

Part of the park is on the Tennsaw River. We walked around for a while by the water, and dragonflies were everywhere!

It’s really, really pretty there. Next time, I think it would be great to hike some of the trails out to the Indian mounds in the park. This site has some information about them.

Av and I spent one night in Montgomery this week, at the Hilton Garden Inn.

There aren’t any historic hotels in Montgomery to stay at – so it’s either something like this (which is in the middle of a really nice corporate park) or a B&B. TripAdvisor lists three different ones, but I could only find the website for the Red Bluff Cottage.

I think sometime this Fall, Av and I are going to stay at one or two of the B&Bs in Natchez – but we’re not going during Fall Pilgrimage. I know that if you stay at one of the bigger B&Bs, you have to make sure that when you make the reservation that your room will be in the main house because some of them have so much business that they have built separate buildings for overnight guests on the grounds.

Av and I have stayed in Port Gibson at the Bernheimer House – it’s about 35 minutes north of Natchez. Loren and Nancy are really, really nice, and Loren keeps us updated on the restoration he’s doing to the mosaics on the outside of the home. So neat!