Deep Fried Kudzu

If you haven't already, it's time to make your Mardi Gras wreath!

Instructions here.

I've never been a huge fan of zoos -- we're members at our local zoo and we usually get there 3-4 times a month, but it's just not something I have ever been able to truly, truly enjoy.  I imagine that it's that guilty feeling of seeing animals that might otherwise have lives with more freedom, more space...but I also know that some of the animals are there because through a myriad of circumstances, and it's the best and safest place for them to be.  That's what I keep telling myself, anyway.  I know a lot of you feel the same way.

Well, last month, we went to the Montgomery Zoo and it was nice.  Most of the animals were in more spacious accommodations and it didn't seem so zoo-like.  Another big plus was a large playground that the boys enjoyed.

We paid extra for each boy to be able to feed the giraffes.  Shugie *loved* this part and when the giraffe held out his tongue, Shugie did too!

Groundhog Day is this coming week.  The local news crews always go to the zoo and see whether there's a shadow or not, but last year I heard that my hometown was celebrating 'Possum Day' in August to see if "Bug Tussle Bill" feels a breeze (if he does, fall is coming early).  I think I like the idea of Possum Day even better.

This past Sunday, a television station in Idaho ran a piece about a unique canoe sculpture that's being built there.  It's by Christopher Fennell, who is originally from Florida and then Georgia, but now lives here in Alabama -- it wasn't until today that I realized we have seen other pieces by him.  This temporary one was at the Magic City Art Connection in 2009:

This is in the western side of B'ham (Cotton Ave & 9th St SW).  He made it from wood and tin roofing of a 100-year-old home in Nectar.  House flower:


Every time I hear something about Nectar, I think about the covered bridge they used to have there (1932 - 1993) that was 385' long and the seventh-longest covered bridge in the world.  Here's how the site looked when we were passing through there in 2007.  You can still see the three pillars:

The BBC ran a wonderful piece about Don Justo, 85, a former novice monk who was expelled from his monastery when he contracted TB around fifty years ago.  Since that time, he has spent his inheritance building a church that is 131 feet tall and is partly modeled on St. Peter's at the Vatican.

What's really interesting is that it's built of items he has recycled -- rejected bricks and broken tiles from factories, oil drums, etc.  Not an architect or bricklayer, Don Justo's background is in farming.

All the pics interspersed here are used courtesy Gustavo Marin on Flickr under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.  Thank you!

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His church has no planning permission or formal architectural plans. All the details, Justo says, are "in my head".

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Partly modeled on St Peter's in the Vatican, Justo claims his construction also borrows from the White House, various castles and other Madrid churches. It's an eclectic mix.

The vast central dome took 20 years to erect and there are two dozen more incomplete cupolas around the building.

There are cloisters, a sacristy, even a cavernous crypt. Sections of several walls have been painted gaudily to depict scenes from the Bible.

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"Realising my ideal spurs me on. People today are very passive, they don't value anything. They're slaves to worldly things."

But Justo is well aware his extraordinary ideal may never be fully realised.

As well as finishing the windows, the central dome still has no cover and the floor is bare; spiral staircases curl up towards the heavens and end in mid-air.

Scrawled on the wall in chalk are urgent appeals to visitors to donate funds for the church's completion.

So far, the town council has tolerated the illicit structure, which lures a steady trickle of visitors to the nondescript suburb. Some suspect the chaotically-constructed church will not outlast its creator.

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...the eccentric edifice as an icon of the town now, unlikely to be torn down.

Justo has bequeathed his building to the local bishopric in the hope it can eventually serve as a fully functional parish church. That's his ideal, though he's pragmatic.

"Who knows what he'll do. It's up to him," he shrugs. But as Don Justo rushes back to yet another urgent task, he says he has no regrets.

"If I lived my life again, I'd build this church again, only bigger. Twice the size," he smiles, his elderly eyes sparkling.

"Because for me, this is an act of faith."

Ooooh.  I like him.  Growing up in Cullman and visiting Ave Maria Grotto so much, I think that's what gave me an appreciation of art environments and the people that create them, especially.  These pics are ones I've taken there myself:


The idea that Brother Joseph Zoettl took things that no one had any use for -- old cold cream jars, shells/rocks/tiles/marbles...people used to mail him all kinds of things to incorporate into his works...



...which people have enjoyed for years and years...


Thank goodness for people who do wonderful things by faith alone.

We found this on a door in an industrial section of B'ham -- part of the so-very-nice You Are Beautiful graphic 'movement':

...more of these later in the week...

...so I stayed home tonight with the babies -- we had a great time -- and Av went to a fundraiser.  One of the things for the live auction at the event was a signed 50th-anniversary 'To Kill A Mockingbird'.  Instead of making the winning bid, Av brought me home two pictures of it!  He must think I have a really good sense of humor.  Hmmm!  Lucky for him...!

Lunch was so delicious today I couldn't *not* post it. Leslie and I had lunch at Bottega, one of our favorites.  If you keep up with James Beard winners, this is one of the three restaurants in B'ham that Frank Stitt owns (the others are Highlands and Chez FonFon, which I also love).

Leslie had the grilled chicken paillard - she said it was great:

I tried something totally different - the Persian piadine with feta, walnuts, and herbs:
After we left, I wondered if this is in Frank's Bottega Favorita cookbook, and it is -- on page 80.  This was so good -- and I could only eat half -- that I've been thinking about talking Av into lunch next week here just so I can have it again soon.

We shared dessert which was what I think was the strawberry mousse cake.  It just felt so wrong to be eating strawberries in January, but since it was on the menu and you can almost never go wrong at Bottega...well...

Last weekend, we were in west Alabama and along the way visited St. Andrew's Church (or St. Andrew's Episcopal Church) in Prairieville on County Road 12, not too far from Demopolis.  It's listed on the National Register of Historic Landmarks -- and it's easy to see why:

Gorgeous Carpenter Gothic.

According to its application to the National Register, it:

"is a country church believed to be designed by Richard Upjohn" and "was built in 1853 by slaves belonging to members of the church working under the direction of Peter Lee and Joe Glasgow, Master carpenters, who were slaves of Captain Henry A. Tayloe."  Episcopal services were held in Prairieville in 1834 and the church was consecrated in 1858 by the first Episcopal Bishop of Alabama.

It "served the planters of Perry, Hale, and Marengo counties of the Canebrake area and many baptisms of white families and slaves are recorded in the church annuals. After the War Between the States the number of parishioners steadily decreased because of removals, deaths, and a decline in the population of the community."

"Around about 1950 the bishop of the diocese and suffragan bishop, in alternate years, began holding a service in St. Andrews's Church on the fifth Sunday of a month late in the summer or early fall. These services are attended by people from far and near and, weather permitting,the congregation usually fills the church to capacity. As many more people, seated outside the building, hear the services through loudspakers. After worship is concluded, a picnic dinner is enjoyed under the shade of the trees in the church yard."



In this collage, bottom-middle pic, this is the monument for Mrs. Mourning Bocock -- on November 1, 1886, she established a trust fund (that was increased with the bequest of a granddaughter of Captain Taloe) that the application states has kept the church building in repair and maintained even still.

The Washington Post just ran an article this week about how there is only one place of business in D.C. with the word 'Dixie' in the name.  It goes on to talk about a further shift South in 'Southernness' and thus, the 'Sweet Tea Line':

(I'm interspersing some pics I've taken of businesses with the name Dixie in this post.  Clicking on any of them will take you to their Flickr page.)

"The cultural Mason-Dixon line is just moving farther and farther south as more people from other parts of the country move in," said H. Gibbs Knotts, a professor at Western Carolina University who, with a colleague, conducted a survey of Dixie-named businesses as a way to measure the shifting frontiers of the South. ..."From what we're finding, D.C. and Virginia are not appearing very Southern at all these days," Knotts said of the survey, published last year.

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That's about right, said Sharon Ash, a University of Pennsylvania linguist and co-author of the 2005 Atlas of North American English. A 1941 study placed the Washington area in the South for pronunciation purposes. But her atlas now draws that line about 45 miles north of Richmond, which was the capital of the Confederacy.

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"That whole area feels more metropolitan than it does Southern," said Watson, who is based in another evolving corner of the South: Chapel Hill, N.C. "Down here, we make jokes about occupied Northern Virginia."

To northbound Interstate 95 lovers of Southern food, Northern Virginia used to mark the "sweet tea line," beyond which diners could no longer expect to find the hyper-sugared version of the South's national beverage.

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In his own attempt to quantify the shifting sands of regional identity, Knotts and a colleague last year reproduced a 1970s study that looked at what names businesses choose for themselves (they excluded the widespread Winn-Dixie grocery stores so as not to skew the sample). The "Dixie" that once proudly figured on signs throughout the region has largely receded to a pocket of the old South in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

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But Greg Carr, who grew up in Nashville, sees Southern markers here. Carr, chairman of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, said he recognizes the fading signs of the Old South in this region.

"For black folks, this is still very much a Southern city," Carr said. "D.C. has very little in common with a stereotypical Northern city."

Carr cited the presence of an entrenched black elite in Washington as a characteristic of Southern cities, along the lines of Atlanta and Charlotte. Its still-living history of sharply segregated neighborhoods is another sign, as well as the paucity of white ethnic neighborhoods, such as Italian or Irish sections of Baltimore, New York and Boston.

"Even the architecture is more Southern," Carr said. "You have no concrete canyons in Washington."

Even as black residents from other states and countries move to Washington in greater numbers, the cultural feeling of African American communities remains Southern, he said.

"Anacostia, that's the South over there," Carr said. "Folks with their shirts off washing their cars, waving at you as you pass by. That's Southern."

And at least one major retailer still views Washington as a Southern market. Although Safeway has no stores in the deep South, the supermarket chain says its cluster of stores between Culpeper, Va., and Frederick, Md., posts the company's biggest sales of such regional offerings as fried chicken, ham hocks and other "country meats," collard greens and sweet potatoes, spokesman Greg TenEyck said.

Adrienne Carter, 66, is a big buyer of such ingredients. Along with her husband, Alvin, Carter owns the Hitching Post, a soul food restaurant on Upshur Street NW. To her, Washington remains Southern, but the feeling is fading.

Av, who was born and raised in Alabama but went to the University of Virginia for college (as did both his parents), is not going to like hearing that the school he loves, Mr. Jefferson's school, isn't really in a state that's so Southern anymore.  But I think he was already realizing that.

One of the most interesting things about the article was the graphic content that the Washington Post put online. After doing their scoring, the researchers put states in three categories, "Southern to the Core", "Pretty Darn Southern", and "Sorta Southern".

Southern to the Core: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Last weekend at Pie Lab, Shugie drank his tea out of a Mason jar.  Can't get any more Southern than that!

A couple of weeks ago, we were in Gadsden (I do family cemetery visits several times a year) and I found in my WPA book a mention of the Turrentine / Argyle Circle / Haralson Avenue neighborhood.

It's a wonderful section of town with such gorgeous homes.

The house top-right here is for sale.  Tour here.





One of the things I like best about this neighborhood is all the diversity of architectural styles:

The home top-left in this pic is for sale here.  The home bottom-left in this pic is for sale here.  That kitchen hurts, but otherwise, it seems very nice.  And would you ever in a million years look at that house and think $79,900?  Me either.

A couple of the homes on this street that are for sale even have elevators.