Deep Fried Kudzu

Av and I were in the 'big city' this week and had supper at The Veranda, and were we ever lucky, because it was the first night with their new chef, Tom Robey, who left as executive sous chef at Commander's Palace for the position here. Ohmystars was it ever good.

Av started with the softshell crawfish:


...and I had the shrimp remoulade:


...then my entree was the soft-shell crab with a really wonderful slaw and even better crawfish grits:


Av's entree was sea bass over some really wonderful potatoes:


We're already making plans to go back with some other friends. Yum!

The NY Times is doing a 12-week travel series right now, on frugal traveling across the US. Their report today was from a trip to Georgia and Alabama, and they're doing Tennessee and Kentucky next.

In Alabama, the reporter had ribs at Dreamland in Northport (was the original closed that day? It's really close to where he was...), breakfast at the Waysider in Tuscaloosa, visited the Westervelt-Warner museum (which I haven't been to but is supposed to be really good), and then went to the Bear Bryant museum, which he actually said reminded him in some way of the Joseph Stalin museum. Blasphemy!

What's even more interesting than the reporter's articles, though, are the wonderful suggestions that people are sending in (see the comments section at the bottom of each article post).

I thought about this for a *long* time, until one of my friends said I was just-plain being selfish without giving people an idea of what's needed for the little one...so I went onto Amazon and made a baby registry. I do feel a little weird about it, but this is really for those of you who asked me directly what to get...and since so many of you read DFK, I figured this is the easiest way to get you the link! I'll keep a smaller version of this graphic on the right-hand sidebar until the little one comes.

Thank you a million-zillion times for thinking of the little one!

This is our refrigerator - I love to have lots of pictures of family and friends (and soon, many more pics of the little one!) where I can see them all the time. There are pics of hanging out with friends, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, our honeymoon in Europe, one of our trips to Israel, Av and his dad with the UVA mascot at one of the bowl games, a trip we took to Denver where we went on Route 66, our pets, beach pics, Av standing next to a Shoney's "Big Boy", and sweet-sweet ultrasound pics:


Of course, you need a lot of magnets for all that, so in the past I've made bottlecap magnets, Sculpey sushi magnets, Shrinky Dink magnets, domino magnets, resin-poured magnets, and picture marble magnets. Today, I made Sculpey watermelon magnets!

I started with these colors - Sculpey in dark green for the outside skin, bright kelly green and transparent color for the rind, bright red (plus not pictured: another large bright red, a pack of hot pink, and a pack of iridescent light pink to get the perfect red watermelon color), and black for the seeds.


The tools I used were: manual pasta machine, acrylic roller, razor blade for making the slices, sharp-pointed tool for making the seeds, use of a toaster oven, magnets, and quilter's thumbtacks.

First, I rolled out the dark green sculpey on the pasta machine to a very thin setting, then the combined bright kelly green and transparent together on a thick setting (I used the acrylic roller some too, for stretching and thinning). Next, I combined the red, hot pink, and iridescent light pink until I got just the right shade for the inside of the watermelon, and I just rolled that by hand into a hotdog shape:


In this pic below, I've rolled the red tube onto the rind sheet and around that, the dark-green sheet. I've rolled everything together really well so there aren't any seams, then used the razor blade to cut off the ends so everything's nice and even:


To make the seeds, I used my pointy-end tool on a rolled-out section of black sculpey. This movie shows what I did:


...and here's what that sheet looked like by the time I was done!:


Here are all the watermelon slices - I even did two pieces where I took my acrylic roller and made one of the slices really thin (which increased the circumference), cut the circle in half with the razor blade, and used my pointy tool to take out part of the slice to make it look like it had been bitten into!


They were ready to be baked, so I set them in the toaster oven at 275* for 22 minutes (the timing depends on how thick the pieces are):


Once they cooled off, they were ready for hot gluing:


I flipped them over (to their non-seeded side) and made some into magnets and some into thumbtacks:




All done! I love the way they turned out!

We wound up waking up late today, so we decided to still try to make the most of the morning and go to a couple of farmer's markets. Here's a sign that I fell in love with:


For lunch, we went to a restaurant that's pretty much just across the street from one of the big wholesale markets, where trucks full of Alabama tomatoes and Chilton County peaches and Mississippi sweet potatoes and all kinds of other wonderful things are loaded and unloaded. The vegetables are always super-fresh at this restaurant (considering their location, it's no surprise!) so I had a vegetable plate with black-eyed peas, collards, rutabagas, and fried green tomatoes. Av had their flounder, which he really-really likes. Oh, I can't even tell you how good this is!


After the farmer's markets, we went to our neighborhood nursery and bought three beautiful wave petunias - don't they look great!?




In this pic below, you can see that our porch ceiling is painted light blue now. I asked our painters to do that last week because it's an old custom that's believed to keep wasps from nesting up there. Some people call this "haint blue" (if you're not familiar with haints, it's another word for a ghost) because it's also believed to ward them away (there's even a story on NPR about it here) but really I'm from the anti-wasp school.


Av planted our windowboxes with chartreuse and purple sweet potato vines - by the end of the summer these are aways trailing all the way down to the garage doors - croton, pony-tail palm, and a new plant that I can't even remember the name of! The windowboxes look a little sparse right now, but in two weeks there will be a huge difference:


We're really late, but Av's going to plant our vegetable garden and our cotton next weekend! Yay!

This is how Av and I spent part of our morning yesterday:

This is the view I had of our non-stress test at our regular appointment. The top belt is to measure contractions, and the bottom belt has a monitor for the little one's heartbeat. We got one of these last week when we had our little practice-run to the hospital, and this is just to make sure everything is going perfectly now that I'm well into my third trimester. The doctor says everything looks wonderful!

We got an ultrasound, too, and even got to see the baby moving his/her arms around and even yawning! So sweet!

Guess what!? I got my latest issue of the Harvard College Economics Review, and I'm in it!

Okay...no, I'm not really a subscriber...

...but in the latest issue of the HCER, one of my pictures is published! It's illustrating an article called "Immigration: What do National Borders Really Mean?":



It's a picture I took one day when we were just driving through Cullman. We were stopped at the traffic light in front of the courthouse on our way to Huntsville or somewhere, and all these protesters were there. I just rolled down the window and click-click. In the picture, they look like they are really getting their point across!


There are three other things that I've signed permission to have my pics in that are coming up - one is a book called "Food" by editor John Knechtel - it's on Amazon here and will be published October 31, 2007:


On June 29th, the new version of 'Southern Belly' comes out, and I think it will have one of my pics of Archibald's in Tuscaloosa in it:


...and I'm not completely sure any will be used, but I signed permission with the producer for some of my images from Hurricane Katrina to be used as stills in the Louisiana Public Broadcasting show called "Surviving the Storm":

It's airing June 7th on LPB and is narrated by John Goodman.

I've made a little but not a lot of money on my photography (and I gave the rights to use my pics with LPB for free, it is public television after all!) but it has been *so much fun* just to see them being used!

Since the den has gotten a new coat of paint (a *much* better color than before) and will be getting new flooring later this week, we decided to do a little furniture shopping. It's a pretty big room, so part of the room holds my crafting supplies in a big armoire, and I do my crafting on a pretty, antique wrought iron and glass set that was passed down from one of Av's grandparents. Most of the room, though, is the area we will be using as a regular family room - couch, loveseat or big chair with ottoman, and a daddy-chair.

We went to a La-Z-Boy showroom today because one of the things I want to make sure we get is a daddy-chair...you know, a recliner! A few years ago, we bought my PawPaw a PawPaw Chair from them - one of those big recliners that completely folds out and just looks like a recliner. When we walked in today, I told the salesperson that I wanted a recliner but not one you would ever know is a recliner just by looking at it. I can just see Av all laid back in the recliner with a book in one hand and the little one in the other, reading together, getting tickles, telling stories, just talking. Doesn't that sound wonderful?!

Anyway, they are having a Memorial Day sale which is nice, and we found three sets of furniture that we're interested in...and one daddy-chair. We have our nice furniture in the living room, so I don't ever want to feel like I'm having to worry about the furniture in the den. I just want it to be comfortable and fun to sit and play on.

Here's what we're thinking of:

This is the 'plainest' of the couches we looked at - it's cute, but not very interesting:


This is the daddy-chair that Av liked - in this pic I have one of the pillows from the couch above on it to see if it would clash...but what *really* clashed was the styles of the furniture. The couch above is a more contemporary look while this chair even has the old claw-and-ball detail at the bottom of each leg...so that definitely would not go together. I do think, though, that this chair hides the fact that it's a recliner pretty well...


This is another set that we liked...this set and the ones below in this post are by Kincaid:




But I think this one is the one I like best - it has all-reversible cushions like the one above, and I like the texture. Since it has a skirt at the bottom, I think it would go best with the daddy-chair, too:


...and this would be the mommy-chair! I love this chair because I can sit in it all cross-legged and hold the little one really comfortably:

It has an ottoman that goes with it, too.

They had several couches that were this style which reminded me *so* much of Carol Hicks Bolton furniture:

...I think she has an admirer at Kincaid...

I totally forgot to post pics from our last trip to Memphis! There are three things everybody has to do in Memphis - stay at the Peabody Hotel (we stayed there about four years ago), go to Graceland (ah, love it), and eat barbecue.

We were there just for an afternoon, but we managed to try two different barbecue places we hadn't been to before. There are about seven or eight "main" barbecue places that people love for different reasons...Payne's, Central, Cozy Corner, Bar-B-Q Shop, Interstate, the Rendezvous (some people don't consider this real barbecue because the ribs are cooked over charcoal for just a couple of hours. I agree, but I'd still like to try it.), A&R, and Corky's (which for some reason, lots of people have a bad opinion about, but that may just stem from the fact that they are SO successful rather than being an old beat-down bbq joint which is much easier to love. I thought it was pretty good.). There are probably another ten that deserve to be listed, but I think the main ones are named above.

This is Payne's Bar-B-Q (1762 Lamar, 901.272.1523):

It's not one of those cutesy barbecue places with pig pictures and piggy stuffed animals everywhere. It's pretty spartan and a little dark:


...but the important part is the barbecue. This is their sandwich, with slaw on it. In Memphis, barbecue sandwiches come with slaw on them - you don't even have to ask - and that is some strange-colored yellow slaw, too! Almost like relish:

The sandwich was good...Av and I each had a half of this one since we wanted to go to one more place before we left and didn't want to get full. I did eat most of one of their apple fried pies, though, and it was *soooo good*. Soooo good:


After a little shopping, later that afternoon we went to Central BBQ (2249 Central Ave, 901.272.9377):




We shared a half slab, half dry and half wet. They were just okay. One of the different things you can get at Central is their BBQ chips, which are pretty good.

We agreed, though, that there is just as good and much better barbecue within five minutes of our house and everywhere else in Alabama (and let's not forget our beloved Miss Leatha in Hattiesburg too). I love that Memphis has such a good barbecue reputation though, because it gets people who live in places that don't have it to try it. It'd be like going to Chicago and not having deep-dish pizza. Or coming to Alabama and not having fried chicken, collards, and cornbread. So barbecue being Memphis' culinary claim to fame is a good thing.

One other thing about Memphis that does make it stand apart is bbq spaghetti - I had it once at Corky's. It's spaghetti noodles with bbq sauce (and some other things) in it. There's a recipe here and a pic on Flickr of it here. One person commented on the pic something like "how can you Americans improve on spaghetti?" and another person wrote "by putting bbq on it!".

There's also a really great pic at the Rendezvous that's here.

Earlier this month, Memphis in May was held -


Big Bob Gibson's in Decatur has won several awards there in the past, but I haven't been able to find a complete list of the winners for this year so I wonder how they did. One of the funniest things about the competition though, are the names of the teams - things like:

Natural Born Grillers
The Beverly Pigbillies
The Church of Swinetology
Genuswine
Getting Piggy With It
No Pig Left Behind
Pork Fiction
Reservoir Hogs

...and...
South Pork

Last July, I mentioned that Av and I share in getting a box every week from a group of organic farmers - they're all either USDA certified organic or working towards getting their certification. The other nice thing is that about 100% of the items in the box come from Alabama farmers, whereas, according to their website, less than 5% of the fresh produce in local stores comes from Alabama.

This is the pic I took of what was in one of our July boxes:


Lately, we have been getting a lot of beans, cherry tomatoes, garden tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, potatoes, squash, and some other things.

This is a carrot that was in one of our boxes last year:

Have you ever seen such a thing??

Our state farmers market authority has a website that shows markets in each county, plus roadside stands, and U-Pick operations. I think the blueberries start late next month, and then later in the summer the muscadines and scuppernongs. In Baldwin county there's a place where you can pick mayhaws (I think we're at the end of the mayhaw season right now), and those make my favorite jelly. Yum.

Thanks to a lot of competition with the grocery stores around here, organic and natural options are a lot more available than they were even a couple of years ago. About 80-90% of what we are buying right now - fruits/vegetables/fresh fish, chicken, beef/milk and eggs are natural (meaning no growth hormones and antibiotics, buying meat of animals that weren't fed animal by-products, and choosing companies who treat their animals...more humanely).

Of course, we still eat out at restaurants where we don't have the slightest idea where anything came from, but at home we're doing really good!

There are some really, really great websites about eating locally (and/or more organically) and the nice thing is, they're most all like "here's where you can get things" without getting being at all preachy. One is Local Harvest and another is Eat Well Guide. There's also Eat Better America, Slow Food, 100 Mile Diet, and even Consumer Reports has a list of their organic and conventional recommendations.

Since I'm really getting into all this now, I've tried to start thinking about the chemicals that we use in the house...Whole Foods has a PDF about making homes healthier for babies, and one of the ideas is to switch over to more natural household cleaners and products. I thought I would give it a try, so I bought a (on the left) sample pack of Mrs. Meyers cleaning items in the honeysuckle scent - there's a countertop spray (works really, really well), a window cleaner (unfortunately it isn't anywhere as good as Windex), an all-purpose cleaner (haven't tried it yet) and a liquid dish soap (haven't tried that yet either - almost everything we have goes in the dishwasher except our best china and crystal). I'll get a full-size countertop spray the next time I go shopping - the honeysuckle scent makes the kitchen smell *so* good.

What I am really, really in love with (if you can be in love with laundry products) is the Mrs. Meyers fabric softener in lavender. All the laundry products are biodegradable and phosphate free, and made with essential oil - so the lavender makes the clothes smell like lavender after they come out of the dryer and even days and days after. It's not a strong smell, it's just nice. I have to admit, I'm so crazy about it I even ordered a six-pack of it from Amazon!

The interior painting is done and I could not be happier about it! We got the nursery, one hallway, one bathroom, and the den painted. I don't want to ever pick up a paint brush again - leave it to the professionals! Oh! And I had no idea that *real* painters don't use tape - they have such a steady hand and certain brushes and they don't even need tape. Oh yes. Real painters it is. From now on.

Here are a couple of before and after pics. This first one is of the nursery. It was a huge mess when I took this 'before' pic because we were in the midst of moving everything off the walls and out into another room, but you can see it was a peachy color - this is the only room in the house that Av and I have not painted since living here:


...and now, it is this not-too-bright but very cheerful yellow. I am in love with this color:


...and here's the before shot of the hallway:


--and after, with this fantastic blue color and bright, bright white moldings:

...are you wondering what all that is in the floor? We're having to move everything out of the kitchen in preparation for the new floor so all my Martha Stewart Living magazines (that's every issue since the first one in 1990!) are lining this hallway. I'll show pics of the new kitchen and den floors next week once they are complete!