Deep Fried Kudzu

I totally forgot to post pics from the Lake Jackson Indian Mounds in Tallahassee! This park has seven mounds. We walked to the top of this one:


...and this is the tallest mound in the group:


About thirty minutes from Tallahassee are the Letchworth Mounds, and one of them is the tallest in Florida - we didn't go to those, but maybe next time.

There is a really good site for mounds in Mississippi that the National Park Service has - it's here. It doesn't list all the small mounds - which is probably pretty close to impossible to do anyway - but it has a map and description of all the large ones.

One of the things I was most looking forward to on this trip was us getting to see all the master-planned neighborhoods like Seaside and WaterColor again. We usually try to drive through these places whenever we're close to Destin, and this time we got to spend a lot of time going through almost every one of them.

Coming from the east, the first one we got to was Rosemary Beach. Their website describes the neighborhood's style as:

...an intricate patchwork: Singular homes, open spaces and intimate courtyards, woven together by lanes, sand paths and boardwalks. Time- and climate- tested building traditions from the West Indies and American South combine with a rich palette of colors and architectural forms. Deep eaves, shuttered sleeping porches and hipped roofs are both beautiful and functional. High ceilings allow sea breezes to circulate; open balconies offer space to appreciate the sounds of the gentle surf.

This home has really neat cut-outs in the railing on the upstairs balcony:


...I love the tilework on the stairs on this home:


This one is different but it doesn't seem very beachy:

Most of these homes don't have a Gulf view - they're a few blocks and sometimes across the highway from the beach. I think I would rather have a tiny little house right on the water than a huge place even a block away. The homes that are for sale in Rosemary Beach are here - they're selling for between $5.5 million and $795k (for a carriage house).

These pictures below are of homes in Seacrest Beach:


I love these candy colors!


When we were driving to Alys Beach, we saw this *really* different-looking home:


It's in a community called "Paradise by the Sea", and from a distance the home looks like a cruise ship and close up it looks like a.......well......not sure!




Next door is this *amazing* home under construction - I *loooove* this one:

This neighborhood is still in development, and a Gulf-front lot is available here for $3.2M. Ah, I love to dream!

The next neighborhood was Alys Beach. The style of the homes here is described on their website as:
...a marriage of tradition and romance. It's the union of English and Spanish architecture with the soul of a European resort. The architectural style of Alys Beach was born in both Bermuda and Antigua, Guatemala. Beautiful white stuccoed walls and white-ridged roofs are like the white caps on an azure ocean. The style is simple and timeless.

That sounds wonderful, and I can totally see falling in love with that on paper. This is what it looks like:



Somehow it just seems a little antiseptic and institutional. On the other hand, the interiors are crazy-beautiful.

I don't know how this happened, but I only took one picture in Seaside, of this pretty cottage.

There are lots more pretty pictures of Seaside on Flickr.

The last neighborhood we went through was WaterColor:




...which, true to their name, have the prettiest beachy color combinations:

Since Tallahassee is the capital of Florida, I wanted to take some pictures of some of their buildings. See the really tall building in the back? That's their new capitol building. The pretty one in front with the striped awnings is the old building.


This is the football stadium at FSU:


Once we left Tallahassee, we drove on Highway 98, which is the beach road. In Carabelle, there's the world's smallest police station. It's a phone booth, and the police used to wait outside for a call for help.


A little further west, we stopped to play on the beach at a little park with these neat retro sunshades:


The sand was *so* nice! White and soft. These seagulls were loving it too.


When we got into Apalachicola, we saw this man riding his tricycle:


...and went down to the water and saw these beautiful rusty/crusty fishing boats:




Tomorrow: pics from all the pretty towns like Seaside and Watercolor!

When we were driving in to Tallahassee, we had made plans to eat at the Nicholson Farm House Restaurant, which was designated as a Florida "Top 200". I had read that on weekend nights, they have musicians playing on the porch and even ride guests around the grounds in mule wagons (it's supposed to be one house built in 1828 plus four or five others that people dine in). A copy of their menu is here.

It sounded really like it would be different and fun - but when we got there, we saw this sign:

They closed on December 23rd.

Anyway, we decided to make the best of things so we drove on in to Tallahassee and I looked up different restaurants - we wanted to try something we couldn't get at home, so we wound up at Carlos' Cuban Cafe on 402 E. Tennessee Street. A copy of their menu is here.

It was really excellent! I got a dish that I don't see on their online menu - it was called something like "Picadillo", which is ground beef with peppers, onions, and tomato. It came with black beans, rice, and maduro (which is plantain, I think).


Av got the "Pescado del Dio", which was grouper sauteed in white wine and butter - lots of garlic on top - and yellow rice and maduros. He liked it too. He finished with a slice of their key lime pie which was nice.


Now what was really, really, really good was breakfast on the morning we were leaving Tallahassee. We went to Another Broken Egg Cafe at 3500 Kinhega Drive. The pic on the left is of the front of the building and on the right is the pretty view we had from our table of the lake and gazebo:


Av ordered potatoes with chicken. The potatoes were good but the chicken was really dry. Once he had a taste of what I ordered, he totally forgot about his:


This was sooooo good....and it was so much food that I put half of it on his plate. We decided the next time we eat here we will just order this one thing and split it like we did this time. It's the "Southern Crab Stack" and it's a grits cake on the bottom with a crab cake on top, covered with andouille sausage and some tiny shrimp. Ohhhh yum!

We spent one day this week in Tallahassee, and stayed at the Hampton Inn on Lonnbladh Road (there are three different Hamptons here). This was one of the nicer Hampton Inns:

Yesterday I posted about the newer dining room at The Club, so I figured I would go ahead and show some pictures from the original part of the building - especially because this part of it is supposed to undergo a renovation in the next few months. To me...well, I love it just as it is because it is **retro perfection**.

Really - retro perfection. Out-of-date in all the very best ways.

The View (that post is permalinked here), is contemporary and sleek - but this other side - the original side - just has......mmmm........personality.

It's older couples in evening wear (on crowded Friday and Saturday nights, the older women especially wear beautiful sequined and rhinestoned gowns). There's ballroom dancing - I love it when couples who have obviously had lessons get out there and really show off. Honestly, I'm not wild about the food in the main dining room - The View is much, much better - but Av and I go anyway just to watch the dancing!

This room, below, is called the "gold room" - there's a nice lady there that plays the piano, and people congregate there before supper to have cocktails.


See in the pic above, the cage in the back right part of the room? Inside is a white bird:


In the walkway between the gold room and the main bar are a couple of old-style phone booths. I am *in love* with the door hardware - a silver phone handset:


This is *such* a pretty lit wall - it's behind the bar:


...and this is the dance floor in the main dining room. It inspired John Badham (who is from B'ham) to include a lit dance floor in the movie 'Saturday Night Fever'! How neat is that!?


In the foyer, there's a John Badham-signed movie poster that shows John Travolta dancing on the lit floor in SNF.

Here's another pic that I took a couple of months ago when we had supper there. In this picture the band is in a break and there's noone on the dance floor so you can see it really well. I love it!

Tonight, Av and I had supper at "The View" which is the newer restaurant at The Club, in Birmingham.


For my entree, I had the chicken scallopini with a lemon and caper sauce, with sauteed spinach and fingerling potatoes...it was really, really good:


Av got the 'mixed grill' which was made up of three parts: chicken with haricot verts, diver scallop over a risotto, and a small filet with creamy potato. He thought everything was excellent.


We finished by sharing two small dessert cups. One was a molten-center chocolate cake with creme anglaise, and the other was creme brulee with strawberry.

This is a picture of the super-pretty dining room, with a view of the whole city. It is just beautiful at night!

The Chinese New Year ("Xin Nian Kuai Le" means "Happy New Year") began yesterday - it's the year of the boar - and Av and I decided to try making those huge Chinese fortune cookies that were featured in the February 1995 Martha Stewart Living.

The thing about fortune cookies, though, is that they didn't originate in China - they were invented in San Francisco! The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory there has been making them by hand since 1962 - and there's a video here of them being made by one of the two ladies that together produce over 20,000 per day.

If you watch the video, you'll see that the lady featured has little bandages or something over each of her fingers - that has to be because the cookies are SO hot when they come out (400* in this recipe below)! There are only a few seconds to shape them before they get to be completely hard. After the first one, Av decided he was putting paper towels over his hands when he shaped them!

The February '95 issue has pictures about how to shape them, but we weren't able to exactly duplicate this with the ones we made - the dough seemed to crack a little. I'm not sure if I ladeled the dough on too thick when it went in the oven or what didn't go as planned...but they still turned out tasting really good!

I followed the recipe exactly as it is in the magazine - there's a copy of it here on the MS website.

I made rounds of the dough on baking sheets, put it in the oven at 400* for exactly 8 minutes:


They came out really pretty, browned around the edges:


Then we took a spatula and, on top of a kitchen towel, tried to make our best fortune cookie shape:

Not perfect, but they were still fun to make and to try. The recipe makes 15 cookies and Av and I really only wanted to try a couple...plus you can really only make two at a time since that's all that will fit on a baking sheet, so I decided to do something really crazy and make the world's biggest fortune cookie with the rest of the batter. I poured all of it over a parchment paper-covered baking sheet, then when it was done I shaped it with a giant spatula into the ugliest fortune cookie anybody has ever seen, then I fed it to the doggies (wish I had taken a picture of this part!). Even they were a little...surprised!

Xin Nian Kuai Le!

I got the Valentine's Day decorations down today and immediately started decorating for Mardi Gras - here's the mantle:


I put on the purple, green, and gold swags, then topped that with handfuls of beads, doubloons, king cake babies, and throws from different parades:


I love it when Hubig's does their Mardi Gras packaging, so I have to put a couple of those up, too:


Here's the wreath I made last year - directions for this are here.


My Flickr-friend, Flutterbye8567, took a picture of this *great* Mardi Gras wreath - I love this one and I may try to do one more like this for next year!

Mardi Gras Wreath...
Originally uploaded by Flutterbye8567.