There are people in America using teabags like Skoal, putting the little pouches between their cheeks and gums and riding the little bump of flavor for an hour. Don’t ask me how I discovered this. I hang out with odd people.
In mid afternoon, the National Weather Service in Wakefield, Virginia issued an air quality alert. The Weather Bug app on my Droid relayed this stifling event to me. The message was like a tornado warning except instead of twisting air, there was no air, just ozone. It smelled like a paper mill had cranked up [...]
Lunch in the South requires a pickle. Often dinner requires one as well. Breakfasts in Alabama have been known to sport a pickle if it is hot outside, which is about 83% of the time. Southerners love sweet pickles. Bread ’n butter pickles are also perfectly acceptable options for any meal except grits. Grits are [...]
There are a lot of new back-to-basics cookbooks being published these days with the Slow Food movement and it’s first through third cousins roaming the aisles at bookstores.
Steve gave me a tubular coil of deer sausage a while back when I was in Alabama. It is darker than pork or beef sausage and much leaner. Steve had shot the deer and a friend had made the sausage by hand. Not being a hunter, I have to say, it was a little exotic.
I’ve often spoken of my bizarre Forest Gumpian past as it relates to famous people (especially Southerners), and I will not rehash that list of historical and cultural figures yet again. It is just not that interesting anymore, at least to me, anyway. But I have had one unmentioned encounter that warrants a story. To [...]
Perhaps you’ve read about the Southeast Asian Civets’ droppings coffee. Very rare poo, indeed – literally. A cat-like Civet eats the coffee beans, digests them, craps them out and people gather the caffeinated civet turd mixture and sell it for $227 a pound. And people drink it.
For almost 30 years I have been trying to convince people north of South Carolina that boiled peanuts were one of the best and worst things you can put in your mouth. Best because they are so damned tasty. Worst because they are so damned salty. And like every Southern contradiction, that is why the [...]
You like lemonade? You like limeade? Here’s a little test: Go to Chick-fil-A and get a big cup of lemonade. According to Answers.com, it is “the best drink in the world.” That’s what one commenter said. BzzAgent.com concurs. I have to say, I have seldom tasted better lemonade ever, and I’ve filtered a lot of [...]
We were driving through West Virginia last weekend. The countryside was beautiful, the sun was shining, it was porcelain cold on the other side of the windshield glass, snow stretched to the mountains on our right. Farms with humped barns pressed against the highway. As we topped a hill, we noticed something gray and short [...]
A recent article in Oxford American resurrected my latent desire for jerky. A friend from Alabama asked me if I had ever had frog jerky. I grew up in the deepest of the Deep South, but I have never even thought about frog jerky before. I have had beef jerky, of course, while hiking – [...]
Complaining is an art. I know. I have been practicing for years. So have a lot of other people. We complain about politics, our jobs, the weather, our marriages, money, food, health, traffic, the economy – we even complain about sex (too much, not enough or the wrong kind). I listened to a group of [...]
I just left Mama J’s, a soul food restaurant in Richmond, Virginia’s Jackson Ward neighborhood. If you are from the South, this mall, family-run business lays down a product that will compete with anything your mom or grandmother or grandfather has ever cooked. And I don’t care if your mom is Paula Deen or your [...]
I recently read that a cookie factory in Virginia had to shut down for two weeks to “change the recipe” for frozen cookie dough it manufactures. The same plant had a recall of cookie dough last year for some other reason. This time there was e coli in the dough. No cookies, thank God, were [...]
During the holidays I was hit by a moment of revelation while watching Bobby Bowden coaching his last game at Florida State. After his final win, he gave a press conference. He was classic Bobby B. I flipped channels and there was Paula Dean on the Food Network. That is when it hit me; Paula [...]