Deep Fried Kudzu

There's a woman in the East Lake neighborhood of B'ham that lost her 100-year-old red oak tree to a lightning strike...but not quite.  The tree surgeons suggested that it be ground down, but she said 'no' and instead...

"The Lion of Judah is very strong. But yet, it's going to be holding a butterfly, this lion. So that it has strength, but yet it has compassion and love, too," said Rivers.


The artist who made the lion is Andy Cummings from Indian Springs, Alabama.

I wonder if it would be wrong for me to switch dentists just so I could go to the one with this installation that Andy did in the office.

Chris Monroe, who owns a pie stand in Arkansas called "Hunka Pie" baked 100 pies in one day.

He has me beat by a long shot.  The best I've been able to do is 28, when I filled up this table (shortly after this pic was taken in 2005).  I bake pies for every major holiday: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, for a church about ten minutes from my home who serve the hungry.  I always try to beat my record.  But 100?  I wish!  Plus: those were 100 pies, each different.  Wow.




For a few years when Av and I were first married, I made ten pies every Sunday morning for this particular church, and we thought it was so cute and funny because at the time, they gave Av a key.  So Av had a key to that church, and a key to our synagogue.

How many people can say that?!  So sweet.

This week, I made one pie: grits pie.  Basically it's chess pie + grits.


Really, really nice.

The Commercial Appeal is doing a great series on 'Abandoned Memphis' right now.

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(I am not a fan, at all, of either of the people in the midst of this, but...)

Thank you, Frank Bruni, for pointing out the 'unsavory culinary elitism' that reared its ugly head last week.  Wondering: when will the duck confit disappear from the menu at Les Halles?  Bavette de Boeuf, who will order you without the blue cheese sauce?  Paleron, Bernaise...minus the bernaise?  And Hamburger Rossini, what will you be called without your house-made foie gras terrine melting on top?

...glass houses...

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Vodka may be produced in New Orleans soon.

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Oh, BP, BP, BP.  Sigh.

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On a very happy note, I can't wait to buy Amy Smyth's cards at Target when they arrive in mid-September.

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Frank Lloyd Wright designed six hotels, and one of them is restored and once again accepting reservations.  In Iowa.

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The 'recession special' at Robert's Western World in Nashville is a PBR, fried bologna sandwich, chips, and a Moon Pie or Goo-Goo Cluster for $5.  Meanwhile in New Orleans, the COOLinary menu at restaurants ends soon, but I'm thinking about the lunch at Commander's.

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One of Gehry's projects in Utah (which would have included the tallest building in the state) isn't going anywhere right now...but his 76-story 'New York by Gehry' is now open.  And beautiful.

The Ohr-O'Keefe Museum in Biloxi that Gehry designed is going to be giving free admission to Mississippi residents on Labor Day.

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Glorious summertime!  Shug has decided he loves cicadas (I always have too!), and the praying mantis.  Here, both boys find something so interesting in a mason jar:


...because...how could you not fall in love with this little alien face, right!?


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My friend Greg let me pick muscadines at his home last week; u-pick muscadines at the big farms will probably open up everywhere the first part of September.  We've gone to Wenker's Vineyard in Marshall County the last two or three years.

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Greg went with me on my latest visit to Wade Whartons's home/art environment last week -- new tulips from shovels:


a bull from a bicycle seat and handlebars (and Wade is working on another new piece...something like a superhero mosquito):

If you have any interest in Alabama pottery, you should know Joey Brackner and his (*fantastic, encyclopedic*) book, Alabama Folk Pottery.

I know Joey, so when I found these curious markers in a Walker County cemetery, I asked him what he thought.  He says they were made by the Loyd family in Pine Springs, near Sulligent.



Sure enough, there's a picture of a very similar marker in his book.  The Loyds did register a US patent for stoneware tombstones in 1879, and they kept making these into the 1890s.  They're all salt glazed with cobalt decoration.  

We saw this on the way to the Bright Star in Bessemer, Alabama:

Last week, I co-chaired an event, and it consisted of three main areas: a party to celebrate the 90th anniversary of our group, a project to help and 'adopt' a school (more about that later), and for a sweet finish we invited sweet Jan Moon who owns Dreamcakes Bakery in Homewood, Alabama to come speak with us about her experience and expertise as she had worked in the Southern Living test kitchens and then went on of course to open her own successful business.  Big plus: she has a new book, with Southern Living, called 'Big Book of Cupcakes: 150 Brilliantly Delicious Dreamcakes'.   Jan was sweet enough to sign some copies for us after she spoke.

This pic on the left has me on the right, and Jan on the left, as I was introducing her, and the pic on the right...

...is my car, loaded with balloon arrangements from our party.  We donated all the balloons to a local hospital to brighten patients' rooms!  Since all the balloons couldn't fit in my car, many of them floated outside, and we had so many people smiling at us as we drove to the hospital!  It was so fun!!

Well, this week I just had to try one of Jan's recipes from her book so I made the strawberry cupcake (minus the food coloring, and a couple of other adjustments -- only because I can almost never force myself to make a recipe straight from a book).  This is my favorite cupcake from her bakery so I thought everyone might be tickled to try it at home:

...it turned out *delicious*.  So moist and so nice!  BTW, those cute cupcake liners are Drommar from Ikea.

For shame, Zabar's!  From the NYT:

Then Doug MacCash, a reporter from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, stopped at Zabar’s while vacationing in Manhattan last month.


“Lobster salad on a bagel: Why not?” he wrote on Aug. 1 on the newspaper’s Web site. “It was delicious, but the pink/orange tails seemed somehow familiar.”


He checked the label. “Wild fresh water crayfish?” he wrote. “Really? At $16.95 per pound?” He photographed the label, just to be sure.


Mr. MacCash had discovered a fact of New York culinary life that New Yorkers had not: There was no lobster in the lobster salad at Zabar’s.

Although, I guess it really means that you know how great crawfish are. Hoping those are deep-south crawfish you're using, and not that other stuff from overseas, like what I found at Whole Foods (aghast! really, I expected better at WF) a couple of years ago:

The best comeback Saul Zabar had was a Wikipedia article stating that crawfish are in the same family as lobsters.  The first rule should be that no one can ever use Wikipedia of all things as a reference in an apology.  But I guess crawfish are in the same family, and they do sort-of look like little lobsters.  Here's a crawfish boil Av did:


...but they sure aren't the lobsters everyone expects.  My favorite lobster roll ever was my first -- from Bob's Clam Hut in Kittery, Maine:


Well, the Maine Lobster Council got upset that Zabar's was calling something other than lobster 'lobster'.  Rather than just calling it what it is, crawfish salad, they decided to change the name to 'seafare salad'.  Maybe it's because I've caught crawfish myself, but you don't really pull freshwater crawfish out of the sea.  You pull them out of your yard.  Or a creek.  Or a crawfish pond (or elsewhere).  But not the sea, really.

Audrey Heckler's art collection in the NYT: she got her start collecting at the Outsider Art Fair in 1993.

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The McCarthy Cottage at Warm Springs in Georgia burned down last week -- that's where FDR learned to walk with a cane and leg braces.  He first came to Warm Springs looking for a cure in its waters for his polio.  For years he continued to come here, and the building called his 'Little White House' gets over 100k visitors each year.

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Sweet Chris Clark remembered in the Bham News.

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Postcardly.

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The H'ville Museum of Art will "host a master artist workshop shop Sept. 8-10 called “Color and Light Revealed Through the Landscape, Studio Oil Painting with Conor O’Brien.”".  Congratulations, my friend!

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It was one thing to sell the building to MoMA, but now the American Folk Art Museum in NYC is considering closing altogether.

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The LA Times has a small piece on Timmyland, Ranchito Cascabel.  Pics here.

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Embezzling $1MM from the Historic Mark Twain House = not a good move.

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Guernsey's seeks ballpark $8-10MM for Rosa Parks' archive of thousands of items.

Just three years after a profile on the A.J. Martin Company appeared in 'American Stone Trade,' it appears that the proprietor sadly had to place a monument for his own wife in Vicksburg's Cedar Hill Cemetery:

She was only 19 or so...

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Also: in the NYT -- you can purchase a 'used' mausoleum, formerly owned by Rev Norman Vincent Peale.

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The Atlantic discusses lasered monuments.  And some monuments have QR codes now.

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The woman who wrote what was the first Yiddish cookbook in America had her monument returned.  It was found just...you know...on a sidewalk in NYC.

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Then there's this, and this.

Found this in Gordo, Alabama:

Chris Clark passed away today.  Oh, Chris.

After writing about my friend, the sweet bottle tree artist Stephanie Dwyer yesterday, today's WSJ is running an article entitled, 'Bottle Trees Join Grand Tradition of Pink Flamingos, Garden Gnomes'.

Except...

I don't think that's accurate.  In fact, I'm leaning toward insult, even if Felder Rushing, who I really-really enjoy, is okay with it.

Bottle trees are a cultural tie, a tradition.  This isn't kitsch or a fad.  For Southerners, anyway.

In part, from the article:

The trees have long been a fixture of rural Southern yards and in Caribbean island communities, where property owners commonly decorate real—but dead—trees with bottles.


The manufactured versions, which can be short or tall, are popping up everywhere from New York to Alaska. 


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Gardener's Supply Co. says bottle trees made in India are one of its top sellers in garden decor, a category that has been growing 15% annually, the company says.


"Bottle trees are the modern pink flamingo," says Felder Rushing, a garden author in Jackson, Miss., who is writing a book about the trees. "People are bored of the plantings we have. And you can only have so many naked goddess statues out there."


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Some landscape architects wish the bottle tree trend would stay where its roots are.


"They have their place in Southern culture, but usually they risk looking totally tacky and like someone's leftover party binge," says Susan Cohan, a residential landscape designer in Chatham, N.J. "It's a country gardeners' thing. Not something I'd ever want or recommend for my clients."


For non-Southerners to erect a bottle tree can seem inauthentic...


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Bottle-tree tradition is believed to have originated in Northern Africa where they hung glass orbs outside of dwellings to help deter or trap spirits, according to Mr. Rushing. The practice came to the Southern U.S. in part via the slave trade and other immigrants and became an inexpensive, colorful form of décor in poorer Southern communities, he says.

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Well, I have a bottle tree made from woody kudzu, a bottle tree chandelier, and a bottle tree table.  In early January, for several years now I've set to making bottle trees from my neighbors' discarded Christmas trees.  These things aren't in the same solar system to garden gnomes and flamingos.  I don't think they were for the people back in the 30s who had the bottle trees that Eudora Welty photographed, either.

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Bottle Tree beer.

In 2008 I had the good fortune to attend the annual Double Decker Art Festival (next to Kentuck, it's my favorite of the year) in Oxford.  I came home raving about Stephanie Dwyer and her bottle trees.

(and her booth was so busy, this was seriously the best pic I could take:)

Since then, we've become friends.  We try to see each other whenever she's in Alabama or I'm in Jackson.  She's one of those people who you *want* to know because she's got such a great...um...energy.  She's busy.  She's an artist.  She rescues stray and abused animals.  She's got whatever it is that you want to be around.  She's that person that you could literally call at two in the morning for whatever, and she would be there.


Some of us can use our families as the strongest foundation from which to leap, knowing that no matter what, from that strong foundation there is a soft netting on which to fall.  Others of us leave home knowing we must make it on our own and never look back, making a family for ourselves in which we will be that strong foundation and we will be that soft netting for ourselves and others.

Stephanie's story is in the Clarion-Ledger this week.  She didn't let her upbringing, or a bad romantic relationship ruin who she is inside.  Her core is so strong.  I am so proud to be her friend.

"I have been dealt a really good hand," she says. "I prayed for God to put a protective hedge around me, and people started coming out of the woodwork to help me. I have so much work to do, it's hard to keep up. And the people of Mississippi have made me one of theirs.


"The truth is, they saved me."

On the second floor of Mary Harmon Bryant Hall, in the Special Collections Library, there is a custom Tiffany window, originally installed on campus in 1925.  Of course I had to go see it!  It's *gorgeous*.


The text in the bottom middle reads, "As crusaders of old they fought their heritage to save.  To the Cadets of April 3, 1865 and all Confederate soldiers-students of the University 1860-1865.  Placed by the Alabama Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy, A.D. 1925.  Con amore."  It originally was going to cost $5000, but Tiffany Studios gave the UDC a $1700 discount.

Ooooh that cotton boll:


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In November, the Huntsville Museum of Art will open their exhibit, In Company with Angels: Seven Rediscovered Tiffany Windows (the windows were originally installed at a church in Cincinnati that was victim of an eminent domain issue in 1964).


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St. Luke's in Memphis has one of the largest collections of Tiffany windows in the country.