Deep Fried Kudzu

Tonight in Baton Rouge, "God's Architects" is being screened at the Manship Theatre, Shaw Center for the Arts at 7:30p. It's also been screened at the New Orleans, Indie Memphis, Sidewalk, Lone Star, and Southern Circuit film festivals, and the director received the Louisiana filmmaker of the year award.

Another project I freelance worked with Lowe's Creative Ideas team on is in the latest issue of the magazine! It's called 'stone bath mat' and the directions are right here.

I've shown this pic before of a sign at one of my favorite vendors at the Montgomery Curb Market:

Last month when we were in Corinth, we had lunch at Borroum's Drug Store - it's thought of as *the* place for a slugburger there. Ah, really I love it because it first opened in 1865 and is Mississippi's oldest drugstore and soda fountain!

"Slugburgers are a mixture of ground pork, soy flour, and spices. The mixture is flattened into a patty and deep fried in vegetable fat. The patty is placed on a hamburger bun with garnish of mustard, pickle, and onion.

Developed during the Depression when money was scarce and so was meat, slugburgers were made with a mixture of beef and pork, potato flour as an extender, and spices, then fried in animal fat. Mrs. Weeks, credited with creating one of the first, found the 'burgers' were a way to make meat go a little farther at the family hamburger stand.

Selling for a nickel, sometimes called a slug, the imitation hamburgers became known as slugburgers."

...and since it's a soda fountain, I got a *real* cherry Coke! I even let Shug have a little sip - he's never had any kind of soft drink (and won't again for ages) but since 95% of everything both babies eat at home is organic/antibiotic-free/pesticide-free/no added growth hormones/etc etc etc (thank you Whole Foods), I figure one sip of cherry Coke now that he's 2-1/2 years old will not undo all the good we've done...

...and that was a good cherry Coke!

The boys split a sandwich and Av and I both had - of course - the house specialty, slugburger:

In 1927, C.F. Penn began frying hamburgers, with a secret ingredient, in Morgan County.

Eighty-two years later, C.F. Penn Hamburgers is still frying hamburgers with a secret ingredient at its 121 E. Moulton St. location in Decatur, but it may not make it to year 83.

Co-owner Franklin Penn told his employees he would make a final decision Jan. 31.

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Penn’s is barely changed from its days in the 1920s, when hamburgers sold for 10 cents each or three for 25 cents.

In its early Decatur days an “all-the-way” burger included mustard and onions. That’s still the case for today’s $1.30 burger, but Franklin Penn dwells on the grudging inclusion of optional catsup as a milestone in the restaurant’s history.

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C.F. Penn, who ran the restaurant until his death in 1958, did it on a cash basis. He paid for hamburger and other supplies daily.

He paid wages daily, before the employees left.

“He always said, ‘If I have to go out of business tonight, I don’t owe anybody anything,’ ” Franklin Penn recalled. “I wish I could say that.”

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The nation’s obsession with healthy food, suspects Franklin Penn, has been unfair to his restaurant.

Unlike the early days when C.F. Penn fried the burgers in lard, the restaurant has for years used high-grade vegetable oil. Customers know this, because they watch longtime employees submerge a spatula into four inches of oil, fishing up the elusive patties. Franklin Penn’s theory is the vegetable oil makes them healthier than other hamburgers.

“Nobody would believe it, though,” he lamented. “People still refer to our high-priced cooking oil as grease.”

And while the family will not divulge the secret ingredient that seems to absorb so much grease, Franklin Penn insists it increases the healthy qualities of the burger by decreasing the meat content.

“Adding something to it makes it more healthy, not less healthy. If you analyzed it,” Franklin Penn posits, “it would have less fat content than McDonald’s or Burger King or anyplace else.”

When Holstein visited the site last summer, it was still intact.

But when he returned to the area Monday, he could find no sign of the mound or the village remnants.

The land is now flat, with tire tread marks clearly visible in the dirt.

"It's been flattened like a pancake," Holstein said. "There is just grass over it now."

Holstein believes the temple mound and village are related to a stone mound on a hill behind the Oxford Exchange. Last year workers hired by the city of Oxford attempted to destroy that mound and use the dirt below it as fill for a Sam's Club. Following protests from local residents and activists, the contractor hired by the city's Commercial Development Authority apparently stopped work there, and a private landowner says he is now providing fill dirt from his property.

The city is constructing its new sports complex on land near the former Davis Farm property on the other side of Leon Smith Parkway. The area near the location of the temple mound on the Davis Farm site is slated to become ball parks.

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Before construction began, Holstein and other JSU researchers prepared a report for the city. The report said the Davis Farm property contained some of the most significant archaeological sites in northeast Alabama. It recommended the city leave the sites alone.

City officials agreed to the recommendation and told the Alabama Historical Commission the site would be left alone, Denney said.

Stacye Hathorn, Alabama Historical Commission state archaeologist, confirmed Tuesday the city agreed not to disturb the sites.

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"There was a big noticeable hump … maybe somebody stole it at night," Holstein said, jokingly. "(It) has been here since the 12th century and now it's gone. It was there when the city bought the property."

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Mayor Leon Smith said Tuesday there should be archaeologists at the site, but did not know if they found anything. Smith said he was not familiar with the city's agreement to avoid disturbing the Davis Farm site.

"Fred Denney knows more about that than I do," he said. "If there is anything wrong out there, I don't know anything about it."

Holstein said he never came into contact with any Alabama archaeologists during his examination of the area.

According to the JSU report, which noted 12 separate excavations conducted by researchers, all of the sites on the Davis Farm property yielded hundreds of artifacts, indicating the area was occupied for thousands of years by prehistoric American Indian populations. The artifacts included gaming stones, greenstone tool fragments, and large amounts of ceramics and house wall fragments.

Records indicate much of the temple mound was bulldozed by farmers in the 1950s, Holstein said. He said the apparent loss of the village and mound was significant.

"History is important," he said. "There was a high probability there were human remains under that mound. It would be like tearing down Abe Lincoln's cabin."

To Holstein, the sites could have been restored and turned into an attraction similar to Moundville, near Tuscaloosa.

"I'm not against development," Holstein said. "But you can work with the natural and cultural resources."

My favorite issue of Mississippi Magazine each year is the annual wedding issue. It's here! Some years are 'better' than others in terms of how people personalize their wedding...this year is a little bit of an 'off' year (maybe the economy? who knows...) but there are still some good ones:

...(the groom's cake) a large white baseball cake sat on top, complete with red icing stitching and accented with the letters MSU in maroon. White chocolate dipped strawberries with red icing stitching were placed at the corners of the cake, which sat on a table accented with deer antlers and a string of lights made from shotgun shells.

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To represent his outdoor hobbies...another cake designed as a pistol in an open carrying case.

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The late-night "Chicken-on-a-Stick" from McPhail's Chevron topped off the evening. (this is the second or third year that people have mentioned serving guests c-o-a-s from McPhail's)

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...their getaway vehicle, a 1987 Chevy Silverado adorned with the proclamations "Honk 4 Love!" and "We in Love, Y'all!"

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The groom's cake depicted a picnic table with crawfish, potatoes, and corn, which was a tribute to his Louisiana roots...

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...the couple's first dance, a mix of Journey's "Faithfully" and "Pop, Lock, and Drop It"

Wow! I got some of the greatest emails last week after the first post about graveshelters (so I'm thankfully not alone about thinking how interesting these are!).

Here are some I found in Walker County, Alabama.

At the Corinth Church of Christ:

carport style, dirt surface.

At Little Vine Primitive Baptist Church (they also hold an annual Sacred Harp singing at this church):

carport style, green painted concrete surface.

Sardis Cemetery:

"open house" type with tin roof, dirt/sand surface.

also at Sardis Cemetery:

"open house" type with shingle roof, sand surface.

a couple of stacked stone monuments called 'rock cairn', covered in resurrection fern:

these are called 'comb graves' - monuments in which two slabs are positioned together to make a triangular, gable shape:

...and here it's done with what look like fence sections:

Fairview Church Cemetery - and see the hand-lettered sign there on the left? It makes me wonder if the gentleman who paints all these similar signs all over...well, particularly west-central Alabama - attends church here. I'd love to meet him.

carport-style with chain link fencing and grass carpet. Highly decorated.

...and this is another cemetery with several folk custom sites. This one is 'swept' - that is, they covered it with sand to try to keep grass from growing - and has curbing to outline the plot:

Later this week I'll post more from South Alabama.

This week Leslie and I decided to have lunch at a tea room. We've both been to a few and wanted to try a new one, so we consulted the Tea Map Tearoom Directory. Two of the tearooms in Alabama are in the 'Top 100' of this website, so we tried the very top one, the one with 5 stars and 172 reviews - the Spiced Pear Tearoom in Homewood.

I think they're going for the shabby-chic look here with the discount store furnishings and wallpaper border. Unfortunately the ratio of shabby to chic was shabby: 95, chic: 5.

When we were taken to the room in which we were seated, we passed by their restroom, door swung wide open (and was when we left). The flatware here was the bottom of the bin at the restaurant supply store, and there was a chipped teacup at one of the settings. Even our little teapot had been repaired, poorly.

The next course was a big disappointment. The savories - which I wanted dearly to love because fondness of tiny crustless circles of white bread is written into my DNA - held shredded deli ham, another of tasteless pecan and chicken salad, and another of very dry, flavorless pimento cheese. The fruit was...well, fruit, with the apple cut carelessly (you know...tearoom...the little things are the important things). And the worst part of all was that someone in the kitchen had obviously microwaved the quiche because the eggs had that odd just-nuked texture and the crust was sad and soft and limp. Neither of us enjoyed this course.

Last was the trio of desserts. I asked the waiter to please tell us what the plate was composed of, and he didn't know. Okay. Well, I'm thinking that top left is a cake with chocolate mousse, top right is frozen salad (think fruit plus syrup plus Cool Whip), and bottom is a roulade with lemon curd. At this point we were just ready to go.

We were looking forward to holding our pinkies up high while sipping sweetly on hot fruity tea, but today they were at half-mast since the experience was a bit disappointing.

But! How on earth do they have all those gushing oh-this-was-great reviews on the Tea Map site when we were so unimpressed? We must have gone on a very bad day. Oh well! Next time we will try the place that the other nice ladies in our dining room suggested, Miss Rosemarie's on Valleydale. The pinkies will rise again!

The boys are getting so big!

There's a fantastic bookshop in downtown Montgomery called New South Books on South Court Street. Love the neon sign:

Few American cultural landscapes are as intriguing as that of the Southern folk cemetery.

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A material culture haven, the folk cemetery possesses artifacts of commemoration and memorialization that provide a powerful statement about local sentiment toward and respect for the dead. The folk burial landscape is in part characterized by hilltop location, scraped ground, mounded graves sited on an east-west axis, highly personalized and emotive forms of decoration, and cults of piety (annual rituals such as graveyard work day, decoration day, and homecoming which bring the community together in remembrance of the dead). Among the more expressive of the decorative artifacts is the graveshelter, a house-form structure of small to modest proportions commonly erected over individual graves.

There was so much really wonderful information in this paper. I've seen graveshelters that look like tiny brick houses, others that look like...well, you know - I'm going to show several here, in future posts just because this is so intriguing. But this first one here is in the style of a carport. It's in the cemetery at New Hope Primitive Baptist Church near Sipsey, Alabama:

Underneath are the heavily decorated places for a whole family. Oh, it's terribly sad:

Well, I've never been to Tavern on the Green in NYC (remember the Folger's commercials from the '80s, where they secretly replaced the fine coffee they usually serve with Folger's Crystals...can anyone tell the difference?) but noticed when I was looking through the Live Auctioneers website that they will be selling the physical assets of the restaurant on Thursday of this week. The restaurant closed in the early hours of January 1st after a big New Year's Eve celebration.

Well, the funniest thing happened Saturday night! We were coming back from a quick trip to Mississippi (more about that later this week) and decided to have supper in Oakman, Alabama at a place called 'Old York' - we'd been there before during the day:

Well, we were all hungry and thought that the Bull Pen Steakhouse would be one of the more interesting places to have supper on the way home. It was!

We ordered our entrees (it was all wonderful) plus an appetizer. One of the appetizers on the menu was "bull fries". Now, if you've spent any time in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, that part of the country...you know what those are. And I won't go into it here because it's not a part of an animal that we...ahem...usually discuss in polite company, but this is food after all that thousands of people eat and enjoy every day here in the US, Mexico, Spain, etc. You know. Ah, if this is not yet ringing a bell, there's a Wikipedia entry on them here. And ohmygracious in Throckmorton, Texas they even have a festival for this food every year.

After last night's game, I have to share these pics of each of the boys when they were just the right size for their Alabama outfits:

Shugie:

Roll Tide!