Deep Fried Kudzu

I really like buying ornaments for my friends who celebrate Christmas - and this morning, I got an email from the B'ham Museum of Art for their gift shop's 'Holiday Gift Guide 2007' - and one of the things featured was a selection of Gee's Bend ornaments. They don't have a picture of them on their website, but I found a pic of them here at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Oh! And if you have a Frank Fleming Christmas ornament, you are lucky. Lucky-lucky. I went to a local gallery to see about buying a couple for some friends as presents, and guess what? Apparently Frank didn't bring his kiln with him when he moved to Huntsville, so it sounds like he doesn't want to sell any more of them, and even the ones that they had at the gallery may be going back with him instead of being sold at all. So...this may be the end of any of his ceramic items. Even his bronze pieces are hard to find right now. I have one of his bronze calla lilies, but I would love, love, love, LOVE to get one of his catfish for Av. If any of you know where I can find one, please email me! Thanks!!

We're going to be decorating for Chanukah this weekend, and we've got some new things to play with - things that are like our version of Advent calendars!

I never go into Starbucks, but I heard from someone that this year they had some really neat Chanukah / Hanukkah / Hanukah things, so I went in, and found this *wonderful* little box! Inside each of the little vertical drawers is a piece of chocolate, and after you take the chocolate out, you just put the drawer back in backwards, and on the other side, it shows a lit candle!

(Leslie, I bought you one of these!) I tried to find these on the Starbucks website, but they're not up right now (neither are their super-cute Christmas items for some reason).

The Land of Nod catalog - which has so many fun things for children - has this Chanukah calendar, which I got for Shug...I know he is going to get such a kick when he gets a little bit older at seeing what mommy and daddy have put in each of the days' pockets! This has loops to hang on the wall:

There's a little candle to pull out of the pocket once each day comes:


Land of Nod also makes this sweet calendar for Christmas.

This was given to us last year for Chanukah - it has little doors for each of the candles:

...and you just open the little door for each day of the holiday, and there's a little candle flame that flips to the other side:

This past weekend, we drove through Ashville, Alabama and saw some really pretty, historic places.

This is the John W. Inzer House and Museum. The state tourism website describes it this way:

The Museum, sponsored by St. Clair Camp 308, Sons of Confederate Veterans and Chapter 1488, United Daughters of the Confederacy, contains invaluable documents and articles which only a Confederate Officer, a State Senator and a District Judge, such as Lt. Col. John W. Inzer could assemble. The Inzer home was built in 1852 and is a one- story Greek Revival home. The house was built of red brick, fired on the grounds. The walls are sixteen-inches thick of stacked brick from the ground up. Many of the original furnishings are still in the home.

Look at all the fireplaces!

...and these great double-doors:

This is the Roses and Lace B&B - the house was built in 1890:

Ashville Academy, built in 1831:

This circa 1890 house is the Ashville House Tea Room, and it's for sale right now:

Av and I were in this mid-1800s house a few years ago. We were driving through Ashville and saw the signs in front of this house for an estate sale. I really didn't know much about estate sales, but I knew that I would love to see the inside of this home, so we went inside! The pictures on the realtor's website of the interior look exactly like I remember it:

I really should have taken a better picture of this, but it's the St. Clair County Courthouse. This Saturday, they're having their annual Christmas on the Square festival. I love that they have the courthouse decorated:

Last year, the Alabama Folklife Commission issued "Bullfrog Jumped" - they describe the cd as:

...a collection of songs sung by mothers, grandmothers, school teachers, babysitters, and children across Alabama. During the summer of 1947 they sat at their kitchen tables and on their front porches in front of a portable disc recorder and enthusiastically shared their favorite folksongs with Professor Byron Arnold, a “songcatcher.”

Shug and I listen and sing along to the songs on Bullfrog Jumped during our morning time every day, and we love it. There are 42 different songs! Samples are available to listen to at Amazon here.

One of the other great things about the cd is that Bethanne Hill did the artwork for it. I got a print that she did that depicts a scene from a sacred harp singing framed recently, and I'm so happy with it! I just had it framed very simply in white, without a mat, and it looks great hanging in the hallway outside Shug's room:

Her style is so amazing - look at the women preparing for dinner on the grounds:

...and what's going on inside:

The very beginning of November, I started our first batch of paperwhites for the season (that post here) and I did the experiment that Cornell published, about adding alcohol to the water so that the plants don't get so tall & leggy.

Well, it works - really works! I asked Av to add a half-shotglass of gin to all the paperwhites in the house one week after they got started, except the paperwhite that's on the left in this picture, so we could see what the difference would be. The difference in height is about 10"! That one is kind-of spindly and not as upright, and the one that had gin is just as straight as it can be. Hmmm...I am adding gin to all my paperwhites from now on!

What a fun little boy!

Yesterday, we went for a little trip and we put Shug in his little Ralph Lauren hoodie with the number on the sleeve, and daddy was in his Virginia hoodie! What a cute pair of boys!

The other casserole for Thanksgiving was corn pudding. It takes no time to put together but it really turns out great.

Ingredients:
2 cans creamed corn
3 tbsp butter, melted
3 eggs, beaten
2 cups milk
1-1/2 tbsp cornstarch
salt and pepper (I use lots of freshly ground pepper in this), some cayenne too
butter for the baking dish

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350*.
In a mixing bowl, add all the ingredients and stir to mix well.
Butter the baking dish (I used a 10.5 x 14.75" dish because that makes it a thin layer with lots of nice crust, but you could use a smaller dish and that would make it even creamier inside since it would be a thicker layer) and pour the mixture in the dish:

If you use a large baking dish, this will only take 30-40 minutes to bubble well and bake through. If you use a smaller dish, it may take closer to an hour. When it is nice and bubbly in the middle and golden brown, you know it's done:

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Av's mom put me in charge of the pies and two other dishes, so I decided to make a couple of casseroles.

I love green bean casserole, but rather than doing the usual recipe that has cream of mushroom soup and those weird canned fried onions on top, I tried to do it a little more home-made...and it turned out *so* wonderful! From now on, I'm calling this *the* green bean casserole!

Ingredients (serves 12-14):
1-1/2 sticks butter
2 white or yellow onions diced
1 white or yellow onion sliced very thinly (for onion rings)
16 oz. button mushrooms, sliced into 4-5 pieces each
8 tbsp flour
4 cups hot milk
2 28oz cans green beans (I should have blanched fresh beans but I was lazy!)
12 oz. freshly grated parmesan cheese
oil for making onion rings
flour for dredging onion rings
salt, pepper
10.5" x 14.75" baking dish

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 400*.
First, cook the two diced onions in 1/4 stick of butter, then when they are softened, add the mushrooms and cook until heated through:

In a very large saucepan, whisk together the butter and the hot milk along with the flour. Once that's nice and smooth, add the green beans along with the onion/mushroom mixture. Season with salt and ground pepper:

Take half the contents of the saucepan and pour into a baking dish. Add half the freshly grated parmesan:

...then pour the rest of the saucepan's contents into the baking dish:
...and cover with the remaining parmesan cheese:

Be careful when putting it in the oven, because it is really-really heavy. Set the baking dish in the oven and cook for about 20 minutes - it will be nice and bubbly. While it's baking, make the onion rings. Take the sliced onion and dredge the rings into flour, then place in a hot oiled skillet and fry until done (these are nice if they are super-thin). Season these when they first come out of the pan:
Once the casserole has cooked for 20 minutes, layer the onion rings on top and it's all done!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Every year, I make this pumpkin pie recipe - it's different from the usual, and it's excellent.

Ingredients:
1-1/2 c. buttermilk
1 cup pumpkin
2 tbsp butter, softened
3 egg yolks, beaten
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp baking soda
1-1/4 c. sugar
pie crusts (I always double this recipe, which makes three regular-crust pies, or two deep-dish pies)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 400*.
Add the buttermilk, pumpkin, butter, and beaten egg yolks to a large bowl:

...then add the flour, cinnamon, sugar, and baking soda, and mix well:

Bake for 10 minutes at 400* then lower the temperature to 350* and cook for another 40 minutes. Check on it at 40 minutes and then every five minutes until it stops being jiggly in the middle.

Yum!

I want to start making a scrapbook for Shug soon - what I'd like to do is to make the first book of him from our first ultrasounds to him being six months old, then do another every six months.

I've been thinking about doing it digitally and making it into a real "book" using either Blurb or Lulu. One great thing about either of those is that it would be super-easy to order several and give them to different family members and friends.

We have tons of ultrasounds - in fact, this is the very first one, when Shug was only about 5-1/2 weeks:

It was our very first peek at Shug - we had a high-risk pregnancy so rather than getting two ultrasounds during the whole nine months, we got something like eleven or twelve!

(this is one of our very first pics together:)
Now Shug's 4-1/2 months old and is talking and giggling all the time (and rolling over both ways!). He is so much fun!

Leslie wants us to get together and do a traditional scrapbook. There are lots of fantastic ideas for page layouts here in the Scrapbooking Flickr group, and we got one of those big new scrapbooks from the Martha Stewart line at Michael's to play with. I'm going to download the software for Blurb and see if I can get started on our first digital scrapbook this week during his nap-times, too...fun!

I've been going through all my catalogs to pick out presents for next month, and when I flipped through the Mignon Faget book, I found this gumbo necklace!

It's got shrimp, crab, and okra in silver (or gold) along with keishi pearls, flourite, and peridot. Ohmygosh do I ever love it! The red bean charm bracelet and the banana leaf napkin rings are great too.

The catalog says that the banana leaf napkin rings are made out of pewter. Av's dad, who can make, fix, dream-up, invent, and in general do anything, made some tallis clips out of pewter that he was showing me this weekend. He made a mold, heated the pewter, and cast the clips. They looked great!

I thought to melt any kind of metal like that, you would need special equipment, but he said that pewter has such a low melting point that it's very easy to do (and it's lead-free). The next time he does this, I'm going to take pictures! So interesting!

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Tom Fitzmorris' sends emails M-F about the food scene in New Orleans, and he's got a listing of restaurants that will be open on Thanksgiving this year (Bayona, Brennan's, Commander's, Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse, Ralph's on the Park...) along with some recipes, here. The savory bread pudding sounds wonderful...

Oh - and I just went to the Commander's website, and in the summer of 2008, they're going to open a restaurant in Destin! Hmmm...

It is that time. Time to order holiday cards!

I've been looking for *the* card this year. There are so many great ones out there...I am loving the ones from Scriptura in New Orleans - below are just a few of my favorite designs of theirs. I'm thinking about getting a few of the ones with the streetcar that say on the inside "let the good times roll!" and the one bottom-left with the beignets that says on the front "let it snow" & inside, "warmest holiday wishes". Frosty the snowball is sooo good too! I'm emailing them right now to see about ordering a few...

The Museum of Modern Art shop in New York has these pop-up menorah cards, which are nice.

Robert Sabuda, who does those wonderful, huge pop-up books also designed a big Christmas wreath that's available in the Moma shop, here.

Jack Cards has this very peaceful, lovely Chanukah card.

Last year, we sent out these very simple letterpress Chanukah cards from Yee-Haw Industries in Knoxville. I don't see any new Chanukah designs from them, but while I was looking around, I saw this Christmas card they have that is SO great!

It probably would be easiest just to send out Happy New Year cards but it's so much fun to shop and send out holiday cards!

I almost forgot -- Rattle-n-Roll, the people that did Shug's baby announcements, are doing custom Christmas cards with up to four family members, and 100% of the proceeds is going to the American Red Cross - San Diego Wildfires fund. Nice! I'm going to email them and see if they can do ours with "Happy Chanukah"...it may be too late to get them back in time for Chanukah, but we'll see!

Av's mom found this necklace at a local art festival last month, and when she saw that the artist had a design with my favorite president, she got it for me! It's made my Kem Alexander, who has a website called "uncommon concrete". Besides these very-different jewelry pieces, she makes all kinds of extraordinary concrete bowls, eggs, and other pieces.

I really liked that in her biography, she said:

Every single year as I was growing up my Mother asked me: " What are you going to be when you grow up?" Every single year I made up an answer to keep from saying: "Can't you see what I already am?"

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It would be wonderful to always have it figured out, like Kem did! I never had any idea of what I wanted to be...even in college. I graduated a little over a year late, in part because I was so terrible at making up my mind. The good thing, though, was that when I was doing my paperwork for graduation, my advisor agreed that in addition to my BBA (bachelor's in business degree), that we could put together all those credits of me 'figuring it out' into a liberal arts degree! So I got a BBA *and* a BS in Liberal Arts. Whenever someone says something about me having two degrees, I'm always like "don't be too impressed! I got one of them just by accident!"

Av and I were talking the other day about degrees - his bachelor's degree from UVA is 'religious studies'. Now, I would have never done that, because I would have thought to myself "gosh, you never open the want ads in the newspaper and see that someone wants to hire a person with a religious studies degree!". But you know what? It was the perfect thing for him, and it's from him following his own thoughts, instead of trying to be so practical like I was trying to be, that he wound up having his own business at the age of 20 or 21.

When I was a Junior in college, I went to my co-op office to see if they could get me an internship somewhere, because the last thing I wanted was to graduate and not be able to say that I had any kind of professional experience. I was really-really lucky and got a job as...more or less a file clerk...and my manager and I just really clicked. She promoted me and promoted me so that by the time I graduated, I had a terrific resume. But the person in that department that taught me the most didn't have a business degree at all - he had a degree in Forestry. Forestry Management or something like that! He was just terrific and blew everybody away...so I guess I shouldn't have worried so much about my degree!

Now, if I had to do it all over again, there's a part of me that would have done the exact same thing because I had lots of wonderful experiences with the path I took --- but I think really what would have suited me so well would have been if I had gone to Ole Miss and gotten a degree in Southern Studies. I can just see myself going around and collecting oral histories and photographing things and doing documentaries...

...and you know what? I am sure - absolutely sure - that I would have still met Av and married him if I had done that. Absolutely sure that we would have still met and fallen in love and had Shug. No doubt about it. That makes me feel good.

The other night, Shug woke up at 4am. He has been so good, since about the time he was two months, at sleeping through the night, but he woke up at 4am and after I fed him and put him back down, I couldn't go back to sleep. I just looked over at Av and it came to me. I whispered, "you know what? I know what all this has been leading to. Why I got my business degree and was in purchasing and also have this love of art and meeting people and learning about folkways. I know what I am supposed to do."

And he said, "I know. I was thinking the same thing."

It will take months & months to put it all together, but it's perfect because it's also something that Shug can be a part of, so he can stay with me all day, just like now.

I'm not ready to say it out loud. Yet.

But there's something new that I want to do. And it's something wonderful.

Last night for supper, we had *the* most amazing duck! I have to admit, I have been a little hesitant to try to cook duck before because I know that if you overcook it the least little bit, it's yucky, but I was really careful and it turned out perfectly. It's really easy, and takes hardly any time to make.

Ingredients (serves four):
4 pcs duck br.
1 small jar muscadine jelly
1/2 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup honey

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350*.
Add the last four ingredients to a saucepan, bring to a boil, then let simmer for about 10 minutes so it thickens up a bit.

While the sauce is going, heat a large pan to medium-high and add the duck, skin side down. Be careful, because it will really start to sizzle and pop pretty quickly, but that doesn't last too long. Cook the duck (without trying to move it at all) for five minutes - it should get a nice golden-brown skin.

Flip it over and cook it for another three minutes.

Place the duck into a baking pan and set in the 350* oven for another ten minutes - but check for doneness at about five minutes. This should get the meat to just a tiny bit more than medium-rare (of course, if you like it less done, bake it for less time).

Pour the muscadine sauce over the top of each piece of duck, and it's done.

I'm making pies again for a church in town that feeds the hungry on Thanksgiving, so besides the flavors I know I'll be making, I thought it might be nice to try something different this year. The November issue of Southern Living includes a recipe for "pecan cheesecake pie" which sounded really good, so I made it.

It is good, but Av and I agreed that a just-cheesecake or a just-pecan pie is better than this combination for some reason. The same thing happened when I made a Key Lime Praline pie earlier this year - the combination of flavors sounds really good, but it isn't better than either of the things that are being put together (although I know that doesn't sound right). Maybe it's just us!

A link to the recipe is here.


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The paperwhites that got started a little over a week ago are really growing (post here). I followed the directions from Cornell, and after a week, we added alcohol to the water - about half a shot-glass of gin - so that they wouldn't grow quite as tall. A few days later, and there is already a difference!


The one on the right got the added alcohol - it is already shorter than the one on the left that didn't get any!