Deep Fried Kudzu: February 2010

Changing

Posted by ginger On Friday, February 26, 2010

Tin Man w/ Heart at Jim Bird's Hay Creations, Forkland AL

I use Blogger to publish Deep Fried Kudzu, and they've sent out an email stating that they will no longer support FTP uploading. Since I have a custom designed template, that won't really translate to the way I will have to publish DFK from now on with them - so on Monday (or Tuesday...gosh, I hope I'm done by Monday) things will look different here. Better, I hope, but definitely different.

Oh! And!!

The next post is going to be of a (crazy-good, wonderful) visionary environment that not too-too many people have seen. Okay! See you Monday!

31 Months And 15 Months, And 11 Years

Posted by ginger On Friday, February 26, 2010

These boys! They are the *best*!

...and Av and I celebrated our 11 year anniversary this month, too!

Yay!

Castle, Catfish, And Okay A Couple More Graveshelters

Posted by ginger On Friday, February 26, 2010

We've heard wonderful things about Red's Catfish in Cragford, Alabama forever, so we decided to take the boys there for lunch one day. On the way through Lineville, we saw their water tower in the shape of a castle turret:

Lunch at Red's was *so* good. As in...*soooo good*. It's on 11 acres of catfish ponds (bottom left pic) and inside there is a huge chainsaw-carved catfish that both boys got a big kick out of:

Ohmystars. Is it the best catfish in Alabama? Maybe! Av is still sticking with Ezell's in Lavaca but I think I'm going with this:

On our way out, we passed by a little church with this statue in its cemetery:

It's for B. O. Dawkins, who passed away September 25, 1918. He was a Private with Company E 306 Engineers.

This monument is perfection. Not in a hyper-realism aesthetic but...you know where I'm going.

The stone behind reads:

G-d Smiles On Valiant Soldiers

Their Record Is On High

Ah, then we were off...saw some nice bottle trees:

This church in Roxana has a castle motif for its steeple. I have a friend who's an architect, and he said that churches 100+ years ago used to order their steeples out of what amounted to a catalog. So you could have a church of any architectural style, and the members could order a steeple that was Second Empire or Queen Anne or any number of other designs (I guess with the thinking that a very stylized steeple would make the overall building more grand). So together you have this incredible look. Love it.

The church cemetery has a graveshelter:

Tin roof, wood structure, dirt surface.

...and coming back home there was this graveshelter we found in Dadeville right on Lake Martin:

Shingle roof, wood structure, dirt surface with tablet. 1886.

North Central And North West Alabama Graveshelters

Posted by ginger On Thursday, February 25, 2010

More in the graveshelters series - this is at Blue Springs Baptist in Somerville:

Wood structure, shingle roof, dirt and gravel surface.

Joey Brackner (who I've been talking about graveshelters with) took a pic of a graveshelter at Macedonia Primitive Baptist in Sulligent back in the '80s but it's gone now. *Love* the sign:

This is at Ballard Freewill Baptist in Detroit. You know...Detroit, Alabama...

Wood structure, shingle roof, dirt surface.

Quilts For Haiti

Posted by ginger On Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami will host an auction of quilts from Gee’s Bend to benefit the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund in association with the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance on March 13. It's open to the public (quilt reserves from $10-30k) and there will be no commission or other fees - so the proceeds will be completely channeled into the fund.

Quilters donating to the auction include Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta P. Bennett, Marlene Bennett Jones, Ruth Kennedy, Lucy Mingo, Nancy Pettway, Qunnie Pettway, and Stella Mae Pettway.

The Quilters of Gee’s Bend are designing a tribute quilt specifically for the auction, comprised of individual squares created by the group then pieced and quilted.

From the press release I was sent:

“The earthquake in Haiti brings to mind the disaster that took place in Gee’s Bend in 1930. My father, Rev. Purnell Bennett, born September 17, 1917 in Gee’s Bend, told us the story of the tragedy often to remind us how we overcame with the help of others. In 1930 a local merchant who had extended credit to the residents of the Bend died. His heirs demanded immediate repayment of all debts. To meet the demands, families sold their animals, tools and seed to raise the money. The community survived thanks to the Red Cross. They provided rations and the acts of giving, a lesson passed down from generation to generation in our community. We survived this tragedy with the assistance of others and that’s why we are giving from our hearts. Our quilts have warmed families for hundreds of years and through this auction we will raise funds that will provide Haitians some comfort and necessities. Residents of Gee’s Bend will donate cash to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to provide additional support,” says Lovett Bennett, President of the Gee’s Bend Foundation.
---

...and if you're a bottle tree person too, look at the current show at the gallery: In Search of A Sacred Place.

Alabama's Civil Rights Trail Book, She Really Wasn't Just Tired, And Claudette

Posted by ginger On Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Last year, I was asked to contribute several photographs for a book the University of Alabama Press was going to publish entitled Alabama's Civil Rights Trail: An Illustrated Guide to the Cradle of Freedom. The book is out now, and it's really nice - rather than a thick volume on what happened where, just paragraph after paragraph, it's written more like a travel book which in so many cases is infinitely more interesting. You know where to go, why it's important, and what to make sure you see when you get there (literally, that's how the sites are broken down). Nice and simple.

The Foreword is done by Juan Williams who writes in part:

That is why Alabama's relationship to its treasure trove of history is so very intense - it is personal. And for many in Alabama there is a sense of protecting family secrets and family pain, not wanting to air dirty laundry. After all, there are heroes and villains, racists and agitators, activists and traditionalists in the story. There are murderers and liars, too, on every side of the tale. They all have their stories to tell, and every story has a power to it, insight and inspiration that comes with each soul's version of his or her Alabama history.

---

But when I arrived at the Institute (Birmingham Civil Rights Institute), I was stunned to see that it was across the street from Kelly Ingram Park, the place renown in history books as the gathering site for so many civil rights protests and clashes between police and demonstrators.

The main door to the institute was practically across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a living shrine to four black Sunday school girls killed there by a segregationist's bomb. And a short ride from the museum will take you to what remains of the jail where Dr. King wrote an American classic known to every high school student ' "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

It is mind boggling that there is so much American history concentrated in any one place, but it is in Alabama.

It's really a great book, and I can't wait to use it as a resource the next time we go on a big trip. But there's one thing...

Chapter One begins in Montgomery, and it starts with Rosa Parks. And {cringe} part of it isn't right.

To be sure, those things mattered to Mrs. Parks. She knew the history of racial oppression in the South and was becoming more active in the struggle against it. But on the afternoon of December 1, she was simply tired.

Reducing Rosa Parks to being tired on a bus is a terrible discounting to what a strong, politically involved woman she really was. And the NAACP agrees.

Rosa Parks had been active in the NAACP since the early '30s. Her husband volunteered for the organization on the Scottsboro Boys case. She was the chapter's youth advisor. She worked with the AL president of the organization on a Montgomery voter registration drive in the early '40s. She was elected secretary of the Montgomery chapter. In the early '50s, she went to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee and attended on scholarship a workshop on school integration for several weeks.

Books that forward the idea that Rosa Parks was just someone too tired to move from where she was sitting on the bus are not giving Rosa her due.

The NAACP website states:

Contrary to the folkloric accounts of her civil rights role, Mrs. Parks was not too tired to move. Rather, she had been a knowledgeable NAACP stalwart for many years and gave the organization the incident it needed to move against segregation in the unreconstructed heart of the Confederacy, Montgomery, AL.

I love that on page 26 the author mentions Miss Claudette Colvin, who was arrested for the same thing Rosa Parks did nine months earlier, at the very same bus stop. We should have probably learned her name in high school history classes. She had just spontaneously had enough, and wasn't backed by anybody. The New York Times writes about her:

The adults who brought about the monumental transformations of the civil rights era decided not to make an example of Colvin’s case; they feared she wouldn’t be the right public face for the Montgomery bus boycott. But it was her rebellious act that got things going. Hoose describes her personal struggle against the culture around her in terms young people of any era can readily understand.

Growing up in Jim Crow Montgomery, Colvin questioned everything. She shocked her peers when she stopped straightening her hair and challenged the dominance of the light-skinned, popular girls at school. “We seemed to hate ourselves,” she told Hoose in an interview.

Her refusal to move on the bus one day after school and her subsequent arrest became a rallying point for the burgeoning civil rights movement; suddenly every one knew her name. Publicity about the case spotlighted the meanness of the segregation law and prepared the way for Rosa Parks’s famous stand.

---

Colvin read about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott and decided she had to return to Montgomery to take part in the movement she’d helped ignite. One year after her arrest, while her infant son slept at home, she became a star witness in the landmark federal lawsuit attacking segregation, Browder v. Gayle. The attorney in the case, Fred Gray, had remembered Colvin for her bravery and also her declaration to the police as they dragged her from her seat: “It’s my constitutional right!” Gray later said, “I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks, but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.”

Those were some beautiful, strong girls.

House of Prayer

Posted by ginger On Monday, February 22, 2010

Wish I knew *anything* about this little House of Prayer (it's name is engraved over the entrance). It's in Calera, Alabama and we visited it with the boys this past weekend. Inside there's just a little round bench in the center that looks like a painted millstone.

On the same road is this house...built by the same dome-shape aficionado? Hmmm...

Blackberry Cobbler

Posted by ginger On Friday, February 19, 2010

It doesn't snow here. Well, it sometimes snows, but it's the kind of thing that you dream about mostly and if you wake up and a snowflake has adhered to a blade of grass, school's out, the banks close, the town shuts down. If we're lucky, we get about one snowflake a year.

That's the way it should be.

Last week, it snowed here three times. In one week. And it was *snow*. Like...I think we got 3" of snow. Well, I like snow, it's a novelty, and it makes everything look pretty, especially the cobalt blue on the bottle trees.

But there was so much of a formerly very-seldom event that I was thinking how great hot, humid Alabama August nights are.

...on the porch swing, with some fresh blackberries baked into a cobbler and maybe a little scoop of vanilla ice cream. Barefoot. While watching lightning bugs float past the azaleas and up into the crepe myrtles.

Ah.

Recipe (6-8 servings):

12 oz. frozen blackberries (those frozen ones are just fine for this, and although you can find fresh ones at the store you know they came from a million miles away)

A tiny bit less than 2/3 cup sugar, plus more for dusting

1 tbsp cornstarch

**Half** the recipe for buttermilk biscuits

Steps:

Preheat the oven to 400*

In a small, deep ovenproof dish (I used a 5" square Corningware dish), stir together the frozen berries, sugar, and cornstarch until the berries are evenly well coated:

Make the buttermilk biscuit recipe, but add just a touch more buttermilk to it (about 1/8 cup) than you would for regular biscuits so it's a touch more 'loose'. Spread the biscuit dough on top of the blackberries. You can make it even and completely cover the berries, but I like for the berries to peek through here and there...just pretty:

Sprinkle more sugar on top of the biscuit dough - about 1/8 cup or so. This is entirely to your preference - a little sugar or a lot? Do what you like.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until top is a nice golden brown and the berries are bubbling happily:

Oh that's good:

Northeast Alabama Graveshelters

Posted by ginger On Thursday, February 18, 2010

East of Kilpatrick, Alabama on Hwy 68 is the Lathamville Baptist Church, which has three different graveshelters in its cemetery. It also has some areas with folk customs, such as swept/sanded, mounded graves with curbing:

Graveshelter #1:

Carport-style, metal roof, gravel surface.

Graveshelter #2:

Elaborate carport almost gazebo style, metal roof, swept, sand surface.

This one is the most recent, and shelters a monument from 2009. One interesting thing is that at the far end of the graveshelter in this picture is a monument for one person in the family which is not covered.

Carport-style, pea gravel surface.

As of just two or three years ago, there was a graveshelter right here at the Kilpatrick Cemetery:

Gone.

According to the cemetery rules, no monuments or markers above ground level are allowed any more. Also, 'no sand, gravel, coping, or slabs on graves'.

Without a doubt, folk customs are going to be done in to aid lawn mowing efficiency.

At Blue Springs Baptist in Somerville:

Wood structure, shingles. Dirt and gravel surface.

Musician Alan Jabbour and his wife, Karen made a cemetery tour a few years ago and also found these shelters. It was from their site that I found the one in Kilpatrick that has since been removed. Their pics can be found here.

---
Next week I'll post some from west Alabama and northeast MS...

So Trendy!

Posted by ginger On Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Southern food. It's trendy!

I mean, it's trendy if you're not in the South.

Av was reading the February 15 issue of New York Magazine and asked "did you know there is a 'fried chicken boom' in New York? And what is a Tipsy Parson?".

Apparently, according to the magazine, there are "Southern-themed establishments that have sprouted up in the midst of the city's well-publicized fried chicken boom (Brooklyn Star, The Redhead).

From the article/review on the new Tipsy Parson restaurant:

...clearly designed as a decorous, tea-social alternative to the usual barbecue joints and fry houses that pass for southern restaurants in this Yankee town. The bar list includes several Confederate-themed cocktails (a Slushee-like julep spiked with pomegranate, a bracing Mississippi Mule made with ginger and rye instead of gin) and is accompanied by a variety of snacks, many of which are, in fact, fried and served on paper doilies. They include deviled eggs (with possibly not enough mustard); fat, golf-ball-size hush puppies and stacks of fried pickles (both overbattered); and excellent, plume-size cheese straws, served with appropriate ceremony, in a square, silver-colored cups.

...catfish po’boy (on a Parker House roll), and pigs in a poke (poached eggs, plus Andouille sausage, plus toast soldiers, plus grits). The lunchtime burger ($16) is fairly respectable too, provided you don’t mind your patty covered in an iridescent layer of pimento cheese spread (I didn’t). For dessert, the deep-dish apple pie (for two) is almost ample enough to make up for the lack of fried chicken, and the chocolaty grasshopper pie is a proper cough-syrup green. But the most satisfying of these crypto-southern confections is the eponymous Tipsy Parson, which is made with chunks of sponge cake, layers of fruit trifle, and just enough brandy to conjure up pleasant images of summer hats, green lawns, and church picnics in July.

Couple of notes: a poboy on anything other than Leidenheimer bread is not right; to use a Parker House roll is *really, really* not right. Were they saying above that among the fried snacks are deviled eggs? I was able to find a pic of someone who had fried deviled eggs but I've never had one:

Used under CC 'Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic' pic by thenoodleator. Thank you!

One of the new things at Tipsy Parson is the 'Luther'. It's a bacon cheeseburger with doughnuts rather than the customary hamburger bun:

Used under CC 'Attribution 2.0 Generic' pic by gsz. Thank you!

Not sure how that gets classified as Southern if it's true that it was named after Luther Vandross, who was born in NYC - and they don't even use Krispy Kremes - but okay.

I looked it up to see if this fried chicken 'boom' was going on elsewhere, and found an article from a writer at the Houston Chronicle that's been going over the wire:

Among the many culinary predictions for the new year is this bone-in, crispy-skinned, juicy-fleshed morsel: Fried chicken, the beloved American food, is suddenly hip, trendy and poised for finger-licking reawakening.

Several food prognosticators called fried chicken the toast of 2010 (Epicurious.com said it is the year's front-burner dish; restaurant consultants Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Co. proclaimed "fried chicken is the new pork belly").

In truth, the hot fat has been roiling for more than a year to produce this deep-fried moment. Top chefs such as Thomas Keller at Ad Hoc in Yountville, Calif., Andrew Carmellini at Locande Verde in New York and David Chang at his Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York have been sending foodies aflutter with fried chicken (in Chang's case, it's a double wallop of crispy bird: southern-fried chicken and triple-fried Korean-style clucker in the same entrée order). Expect to see fried chicken on the menus of hot new restaurants this year in addition to chefs tinkering with various ethnic interpretations of the classic.

Food experts say there are many reasons for the fried chicken renaissance: the poor economy, a return to the "basics," and the continued exploration of iconic American dishes.

Okay, and one last Southern-fried thing: the History Channel's new show, Food Tech (they should let someone give it a more interesting name) , is doing an episode Thursday night:

Nothing beats the taste of a Southern fried meal--and host Bobby Bognar traces its amazing journey to your plate. In Alabama, Bobby wades among 275,000 catfish during feeding time--and discovers how each fish scooped from the pond becomes a fillet within just one hour. At a Louisiana alligator farm, he dares to grab a gator from its holding tank, and learns how gators owe their survival--in part--to those who eat them. Did you know that one popular Southern favorite, rice, reaches your plate by falling from the sky? Or what it takes to extract frying oil from a lint-covered cottonseed? Or what makes the South's favorite spicy condiment, Tabasco sauce, so hot? And what do giant fans, fire and cannons have to do with putting peach cobbler on the table?

Oh! And when I was doing the search about Southern food elsewhere, I found an article in Canada's National Post about the Toronto restaurant, Southern Accent, and what they're doing for Mardi Gras. They feature a recipe for blackened chicken livers. Gotta wonder about the poultry in Ontario when the first ingredient is "boneless chicken livers"! Cute. haha!

Happy Mardi Gras!

Posted by ginger On Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Tuesday

Posted by ginger On Monday, February 15, 2010

...back tomorrow!

Statues And Graveshelters And Grancer The Dancer Too

Posted by ginger On Thursday, February 11, 2010

Okay! More graveshelters. First, in Magnolia Cemetery in Greenville, Alabama is this remnant of a graveshelter. The Library of Congress has this image of how it appeared back in the '30s:

The cemetery also has some Victorian cast iron monuments (many more of these type can be found in Pioneer Cemetery in Greenville):

This statue of Reverend F.W. Ward (1857-1925):

These monuments were all painted with a coat of white house paint:

This is the graveshelter at the Fort Dale Cemetery (also in Butler County), and the LOC also has a photograph of it from the '30s. In their pic, there are a few more graveshelters here, but they are gone now.

Tin roof, wood structure, dirt surface.

...ah, I just had to include this when we were on our way toward Enterprise. It's a pic we took of the 1940s post office mural (made possible by the Treasury Dept Section of Fine Art, sometimes just called 'the Section') at the post office in Luverne by Arthur Getz, who also created 210 covers for The New Yorker.

Beautiful.

Okay! This graveshelter is at Bethany Methodist Church on County Road 533 in New Brockton:

Shingle roof, wood structure, pea gravel surface. The roof of the shelter is painted haint blue to keep the wasps out.

At the New Home Cemetery in the Basin Community, near Elba on County Road 413:

Terra cotta roof tiles, fully enclosed brick structure, sand surface.

In Alberton, on AL Hwy 134 at New Life Baptist Church:

This is a 'swept cemetery' as people have taken care to try to keep the surface clean from grass growing by applying sand and pea gravel.

Shingle roof, wood structure, sand surface.

Now this is something *really* different. It's in the Harrison Cemetery in Kinston, and is the monument for William "Grancer" Harrison (1789 - 1860), known as 'Grancer the Dancer'.

From what I've been able to find, he was a plantation owner whose slaves referred to him as 'Grand Sir' which, shortened, became 'Grancer'. He had a dance hall built for the weekly Saturday night events he put on, and was well-known to put on a good time. He's even featured in KTW's 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey because there's a legend that he can still be heard playing the fiddle, calling out square dances and doing jigs in his clogs.

When he planned for his funeral, he asked that he be buried in his bed, wearing his dance clothes.

And so...

...his monument, in the shape of a bed.