Deep Fried Kudzu

We wish the world a happy birthday (this is from two years ago):

May you enjoy a New Year of love, health, prosperity, happiness, and comfort!

It's almost Rosh Hashanah, so I'm decorating again...

Sculpey apple thumbtacks and magnets I've made:


This is from three years ago, when it was 5769 (I've gotten the numbers from Michael's, and spraypainted them silver, every year), and also this shows the Shana Tova banner I made:


...and caramel apples for a sweet New Year too!  Just piped the year on this one with chocolate:

These made everyone happy.
I need to take some pics of this year's things!  Soon...

These are the best biscuits I've ever made, everrrr.  And I've made them so many times with both buttermilk and the boys' 1% milk that the recipe is so good it turns out great either way.

No rolling pin, no cutting them out.  The secret to great biscuits, which everyone knows already, is to use a cast iron skillet and to preheat the pan the entire time in a 500* oven.

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
1/3 cup cold butter, diced in smallish pieces -- plus more for prepping skillet
3/4 cup buttermilk or regular sweet milk, or more to get a nice consistency

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 500* with the empty cast iron skillet inside.
Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, then add in the butter pieces.  Add the liquid.
After the oven comes up to 500*, take the skillet out of the oven and put an extra pat of butter inside to melt.  Any extra butter should be poured from the pan back into the mixing bowl (just this little bit of extra butter will not melt the rest of the cold butter in the dough but it will be so nice and brown from being in the 500* oven that it is such a great addition.
Mix the dough again and correct with more buttermilk or milk if necessary.
Spoon the dough into the super-hot skillet.


Start checking on the biscuits at 12 minutes, they will likely be done right around 15 or 16.  Ooooh they are so good!  Tall and big and fluffy, and buttery-crusty on the bottom.  Could not be better.


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The best biscuits I ever had were at a festival in the mid/late 80s when I was growing up, at Horse Pens 40, and they were called 'Baptist Biscuits' -- so good I am still remembering them!  I just did a search, and those Baptist Biscuits have even been mentioned a couple of times in newspapers, that they originated with Aunt Plummer Hyatt in 1961 who cooked them there in a wood-burning oven under the sweetgum trees.

In 1973, the Tuscaloosa News reported on a festival there with bluegrass and Sacred Harp music, and quoted on person as saying:
"After that, you'll have your lungs full of mountain air and your belly full of Baptist biscuits..." 

NYT slideshow and more of Rosh Hashanah food.  Jam cake is obvious, but jam-filled mandelbrot?  Must be tried.

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A 35,000 sq ft museum to be built in Greenwood MS to house a porcelain collection? The Porcelain Museum of Dresden State Art Collections seems favorable to loaning items, and arranging exhibitions.  Nice.

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September 24 and 25, Guernsey's Auction House will sell among its other listings Elvis' first guitar, the one Gladys bought him at Tupelo Hardware.

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If you listed to Terry Gross on NPR, Fresh Air, you know she is a great interviewer.  This week's interview with Maurice Sendak was so raw and so truthful -- among the best ever.

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The T-P ran an article about Leah Chase's art collection.  *Love* her John Biggers piece.

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The NYT has a piece on food from the War.  Not so much sugar, lots more salt.

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A tin tree.

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Goodwill Industries of Middle Tennessee posted what's believed to be a rare photograph of Robert E. Lee on their auction website and it sold for $23k.

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Finally on September 19, Roberta Smith did what she needed to do.  The American Folk Art Museum seemed teetering on closing.  As arts critic for the NYT, she began her article with the words, "Please. Someone, everyone, do something to save the American Folk Art Museum from dissolution and dispersal."  She goes on:

But we should be clear about one thing: There was no failure of curatorial vision. During its 10 years in its new home the museum functioned more or less as the center of folk-outsider art research and development in this country, if not the world. It mounted exhibitions of outsider greats equal to any insiders the 20th century produced, among them Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger, the Chicago recluse who is represented by a gift of some 5,000 artworks and related materials. Drawing primarily from its collection it has organized inspiring exhibitions of quilts, painted furniture, whitework coverings and sandpaper paintings, and the thick-piled, often pictorial textiles known as bed rugs. It took the survey of Thomas Chambers, one of the great undersung masters of 19th-century American marine and landscape painting, originated by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Wednesday night, it was announced that *the museum will stay open*.  Thursday I got an email from the Museum, noting:

In addition to developing a financial plan, the Trustees are also creating a strategy that will increase the visibility of the Museum’s renowned collections and extend the American Folk Art Museum brand. The Museum will seek to establish a revitalized and expanded program of loans to collaborating New York City institutions, as well as packaging traveling exhibitions around the U.S., as ways of sharing folk art with wider audiences. The Brooklyn Museum, the New-York Historical Society, and the Museum of Arts and Design have expressed interest in working with the American Folk Art Museum to identify potential exhibitions where the museums respective collections inform and excite one another. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will display approximately 15 major works of art from the collection in honor of the opening of the American Wing and The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art.

Well, yay!

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Rachel Bobo, I miss you terribly on FB!

...in Greenwood MS...

The last time we were in the Delta, we stopped at Dockery Plantation just outside Cleveland.  It's one of the places believed to be the 'birthplace of the Blues' as among its residents were Charley Patton, Henry Sloan, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, and Roebuck 'Pops' Staples.  There's a historical marker about that also.

This restored (but not functioning currently) service station is on the grounds:

...as well as some storage and processing buildings:




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The boys found this nest (or what's not really a nest) of these Killdeer eggs there outside the Plantation church -- Killdeer will lay their eggs right on the ground, like here where they're so well camouflaged with the gravel.

I have a friend who knows that I've never met a museum I didn't like (just the idea that someone would go to the trouble of opening a museum about any particular genre or thing, I find completely charming), so we were off to the High Church of Capodimonte, the Evelyn Burrow Museum at Wallace State in Hanceville.


There was crystal.  There was Bohemian glass and Carnival glass.  There were bronzes.  But oh, my, was there ever Capodimonte.

Evelyn Burrows talks about her collection on looping video, under her porcelain chandelier:

While Capodimonte does nothing for me really, it was sweet to see what the college did for the collection of one of its patrons.

One of my favorite buildings in downtown B'ham is the Alabama Power building (1925), because it's so decorative:

Looking up from right there:


Favorite part: those old-style filament bulbs:



It was hard to get a good picture of the filament, but it's gorgeous:


Filament bulbs have been for sale in the Rejuvenation catalog (if you like vintage lighting then...) forever, and they're being carried by Restoration Hardware now too.  In love with their quad loop tungsten filament bulb with the glass tip.

Plumen makes fluorescent bulbs that are actually beautiful, too.

Our power was off for a couple of days this week, due to the tropical storm.  Having a 4- and 2-year-old at home with no electricity (and not able to play in the backyard because of all the rain) isn't the most fun for them, so we packed up and drove to Atlanta.

Oh, we had the best time!  We went to Ikea...(they were installing some new kitchens!):






...had lunch at Bagel Palace:


kippered salmon salad + whitefish salad...mmmmmm....


...and when we were leaving, Av mentioned we were in town since our power was out in AL, and they gave us free bagels!  How nice is that?  Thank you, Bagel Palace!


The big score was bringing home some frozen, ready-to-bake H&H Bagels from NYC at another shop.  Yum.

We snacked on a couple of eggrolls from Chai Peking at the Toco Hills Kroger, then did a little more shopping at Your Dekalb Farmer's Market.  It is huge.  Huge-huge.  This is their 'stand':

We declare the world is designed to work. We are responsible for what does not work. We make the difference.

No matter how technologically advanced we become, we cannot escape our fundamental relationships with food and each other. The possibility of these relationships is the world market. In this context, the world works for everyone free of scarcity and suffering...

My WPA book refers to it as 'modern architecture' -- the US Post Office and Courthouse in downtown Chattanooga:

Art Deco, yes...




The Section arranged for this sculpture of cast aluminum, 'The Mail Carrier' by Leopold Scholz.  It was installed in 1938.

Scholz' wife, Belle Kinney of Nashville, was herself a famous sculptor, and they worked on many projects together, namely the pediment sculptures of the Parthenon in Nashville, 'Lady of Victory' the WWI Bronx County war monument in NY, the bust of President Polk in the Nashville State Capitol, and the busts of John Sevier and Andrew Jackson at the US Capitol.






The building, designed by architect Reuben Harrison Hunt, was built between 1933-34, and in 1937 its plans were "selected by the American Institute of Architects as one of the 100 distinguished and representative buildings in the United States erected since 1918."  It's on the National Register.

Next door to Maggie's Diner in Tuscaloosa (if you are craving meat and three, and who doesn't...) is Howard + Linton's Barbershop.  It got our attention especially because at Maggie's there was a brochure about historic churches, schools, homes, and businesses, especially in regards to the civil rights movement.  One of the businesses listed was this one, we passed on our way in:



...the brochure mentioning that the owner, Reverent T.W. Linton was instrumental in the movement in Tuscaloosa, and that the barbershop has all sorts of artifacts and memorabilia from that time, along with his collection of more than 600 shaving mugs.  So Av goes in just to meet the gentleman there, shake his hand, and took this pic:

Inside Smith Hall on campus at the UofA is the Alabama Museum of Natural History, and it is *gorgeous*:

Columns like this just ask for husband-leaning:

There were a ton of fossils and other artifacts, but one of the better-known items on display here is the Hodges meteorite, the only meteorite ever known to actually hit a person.  It crashed through Ann Hodges' roof...


...bounced off her radio...

...and then struck her on her hip, which left, as you can imagine, a bruise.  She deserved to have it named after her, right?

From Time Magazine:
Suddenly, across the noonday sky from west to east, swept a brilliant fireball. It left a long trail of white (some observers said black) smoke, and it flew so high that it was seen almost simultaneously in Greenville, Miss., Montgomery, Ala. and Atlanta. Over Sylacauga it exploded with a boom like thunder (some said a series of booms). A schoolboy in Montgomery, 50 miles away, insisted that the blast almost knocked him off his bicycle.

People thought the smoke might have come from an airplane crash, and Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery sent out 40 planes to look for wreckage (Mrs. Hodges' home was in Oak Grove, in Talladega County).  When the Air Force found out that what fell from the sky was at Ann Hodges' home, they sent a helicopter to pick it up, and left with it -- all before Mr. Hodges came home from work that day.

Now, in honor of the event, sculptor Don Lawler installed a piece he called 'Falling Star' in front of the Sylacauga City Hall.

After we found the sculpted Lion of Judah, we drove past East Lake United Methodist Church:

...with this terrific bas relief above the doors: