Most buy the flavored teas in round bags.

“It fits perfectly in there and gives me great flavor and ‘tea breath’ for at least 45 minutes,” said one friend.

I guess 45 minutes is about the limit of a teabag stuffed in one’s jaw.

“Oh yeah, I do that all the time,” said another friend.

I tried it. I bought some spearmint tea. It works. I don’t know anyone who sucks on the little coffee pouches like you find in hotel rooms, however, but I’m sure they’re just not admitting it – yet.

My head was perfectly positioned between the 99º sun bleeding the sky of all color above me and the 450º glowing charcoal below in the grill. Angus burgers were sucking up lush smoke from soaked hickory chips. I was saving the wieners for later so they would not burn. That was the plan anyway.

Cooking the burgers was a fairly simple arrangement: season them and put them on the Weber and let the heat and smoke do the rest. Wieners, however, are delicate little tubes of beasts. I had boiled three different brands, Nathan’s Famous, Boar’s Head and chubby Ball Parks, marinating them in two bottles of Shiner Bock Mesquite Smoked Beer. Only a Texas brewery would bottle a smoked beer. Not much for drinking, in my humble opinion, but great for cooking. The smell brought back memories of my father and Uncle Pete in sauce-stained 1960’s undershirts, pushing meat around on a homemade grill supported by bricks in our backyard.

July 4^th, 2010 was a beautiful day until my wieners began their quick descent into what looked like Slim Jims pulled from a burning store. I was heartbroken. But I fought through it. The air quality alert dragged on. About 8 pm, we decided to go to the fireworks display at King’s Dominion, an amusement park north of Richmond. This involved sandwich-making and an ice chest.

We don’t pay for this yearly show of fiery patriotism. We usually mooch it from the side of the road with thousands of other cheap bastards. This year, we wedged into a truck stop parking lot across from King’s Dominion, pulled out our yard chairs, ate sandwiches and waited. About an hour later, we discover the flaw in our plan.

When you park at night, it’s not easy to see everything that might possibly obstruct your view of mooched fireworks. When the first explosion went off, however, we saw them, three fat oaks, just tall enough to blind us from the action – another setback to top the burnt wieners earlier in the day. Blooming pops of sizzling color silhouetted the trees not unlike the view Moses had of the burning bush that was never consumed just before God laid the Ten Commandments on him at Mount Sinai. I was pissed. It got better. While we sat and ate during the hour before the fireworks began, hundreds of people had pulled into the parking lot where we sat, most in pickup trucks, many wearing no shirts – a sure sign of a day of drinking as I have learned from watching episodes of Cops. As the grand finale flooded the night with enough firepower to impress a busload of Afghan rebels, I realized the implications of our location. For the next two hours, we jockeyed and cursed and fought for vehicular position while the police sat in the air conditioned comfort of their cruisers listening to satellite radio or whatever cops listen to when they don’t feel like untangling a pile of angry, semi-drunken rednecks in enough trucks to tow an aircraft carrier. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. could not have improved his car’s position in this crowd. Horns blared. An ambulance came. More yelling. Cans were thrown. Bumpers were dented. Jacked-up tempers added to the air quality alert. In the distance, as if on cue, the National Anthem played sadly.

As I sat watching the sweaty mayhem around me, I realized that this display of hatred of our fellow Americans was what we were celebrating on our nation’s birthday. I saw an opening to gain a few yards, catching a glimpse of a kid, perhaps seven years-old, in the bed of a truck knifing into the lane ahead of me. The little boy held his middle finger up as if saluting the flag and screamed, “Screw you!”

His father, driving like a maniac, had the radio cranked up as loud as it could go as Lee Greenwood sang, “And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free. And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me. And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today. ‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land God bless the U.S.A.”

Yeah.

Southerners love sweet pickles. Bread ’n butter pickles are also perfectly acceptable options for any meal except grits. Grits are no friend of pickles, by the way. This feud goes back to the King James Bible, or so I’ve been told.

Southerners are known worldwide (or at least the world between Georgia and Texas) for these two sugary, vinegar-soaked cucumbers. We’ll even eat a cuc snapped right off the pungent vine if the mood hits us.

My grandmother made every pickle I ever ate until I was 18 years old when I left for the University of Alabama (where she sent me pickle packages often). Her recipes were usually some form of sweet or sweet and sour pickles, although she did it differently every time she canned a mess, making absolute replication impossible. She was sneaky that way.

Her inconsistencies made for consistently tasty pickles, however. But my tastes have changed over the last few years, and while I will never turn up my nose at a sweet or bread ’n butter pickle, dill pickles are my favorite version of a gourd’s twisted sister today.

Last year we made our own dill pickles and at the risk of sounding uppity, they just may have been the best I have ever eaten. Burning my hand trying to fish the boiling Ball jar out of the water may have prejudiced my opinion, to be sure, since when you suffer to acquire something, it is all the more valuable. Everyone who tasted one of those homemade pickles grunted after the first bite like a fat man unbuttoning his pants after a heavy meal. In June, though, I found a serious competitor to my pickles in the deli section of Kroger.

Finding them was hardly an accident. I had a jar of trusty Vlasic dills in my cart when a man of experience with some type of logo printed on his shirt approached me and converted me to his sour religion.

“You like dill pickles?” he asked, staring at my Vlasics.

“I do,” I said, suspecting a forthcoming sales pitch. What came, however, was a heartfelt testimony of pure belief not unlike my mother used to exhibit at West Highland Baptist Church.

“If you are a pickle man, like myself,” he said holding my cart for effect, “let me introduce you to the best dill pickle you will ever eat.”

“I have been introduced to that pickle,” I said. “I made a whole shelf-full last year and just recently ran dry.”

“I beg to differ, sir,” he said. His face rippled into a sincere rictus like that of a head coach recruiting for an SEC team. He grabbed a jar of Boar’s Head Kosher Dill Whole Pickles and tossed it from hand to hand like a cold football. “This, right here, will change your mind, my friend.”

He handed me the jar and didn’t ask my permission as he pulled the Vlasics from my cart.

“I’ll return these,” he said. “If you don’t like those Boar’s Heads, just bring them back, no questions.” He smiled confidently. “I am certain that won’t happen, though. Absolutely certain.”

It did not return the pickles. I ate the entire jar in less than three days. Boar’s Head matched my pickles crunch for crunch. I was humbled.

I never saw Mr. Pickle (as I’ have come to call him) again. I suspect he worked for Boar’s Head. After several jars, it does not matter. I am now a Boar’s Head pickle man. It was not his words that convinced me. The pickles performed as advertised.

I use them for everything, including eating them right out of the jar, putting them on burgers and using them in my infamous grilled chicken salad (which will be another blog soon).

I am munching one as I type this sentence, my keyboard smelling of garlic and dill and vinegar. The crispy taste reminds me of something my father once told me:

“Son, you may experience a lot of things in life, both good and bad, but when you get right down to it, there is nothing in the world like a damned good pickle.”

The recipes in these books are less Emeril than Aunt Emma. From making your own preserves to butchering your own meat to homemade everything, just like great-grandma used to do, these books tell the how’s and why’s of the forgotten skills of cooking. By the way, that’s one of the new book titles out there, “The Forgotten Skills of Cooking. The Time-Honored Ways Are Best: Over 700 Recipes Show You Why.” That’s a mouthful on the cover alone. It was enough words to get a review in the New York Times.

This $40 how-to-and-why textbook from Darina Allen tells how to kill and dress a chicken or made sausage – both skills I skills I practiced during my youth in Alabama, but not from overt chef-ery; we just needed to eat.

In this month’s issue of Oxford American, John T. Edge wrote about Southern community cookbooks.  He focuses on a particular tome called “When People Were Nice and Things Were Pretty – A Culinary History of Merigold, A Mississippi Delta Town.” Damn, another title that would gorge a tribe of hungry librarians.

In the Merigold book, Paula Deen calls cooking a chicken impaled on a beer can: “Beer in the rear.” Edge says the book skews a little white and doesn’t really acknowledge the contribution of African Americans and Native Americans in Southern Cuisine. And in my opinion, there would be no Southern Cuisine without those two groups.

Mr. Edge goes on to say that Africans brought us deep frying, honed the art of sweet potatoes and I’m pretty sure that greens and everything else I like to eat was not concocted by white women slaving in their kitchens, but by black women literally slaving in white people’s kitchens.

After reading about antique cooking methods, eating in the South is pretty simple: take away Soul Food and all you have left is empty cast iron skillets.

“I eat everything I hunt,” he said. “This ain’t no hobby. Whatever you can hunt or grow saves on groceries.”

I have seen deer all of my life, leaping stiff-legged through fields and desperately sprinting across the road. I’ve even hit one in a rental car. But I have never been much for hunting, so I have never had many opportunities to eat deer beyond a rare strip of deer jerky or deer barbeque here and there. I have never eaten deer sausage. And this deer was hiding in a two-foot link in my freezer.

Real sausage, as I have written about many times, like real biscuits, is best cooked in a cast iron skillet. I have more than a few and they are not Johnny-come-lately chunks of heavy metal. My grandmother seasoned the one I used over 80 years ago, so even if I screw up, it knows what it is doing when the heat comes knocking.

Deer sausage has little fat. Fat, as you know if you are from anywhere south of Canada, is what makes sausage so sausagy. Steve said he and the sausage maker in Andalusia had added a little fresh pork to the mixture so it would not have the consistency of a Slim Jim. At the considerable expense of the deer, these guys know what they are doing.

It was much darker than pork sausage. It was smoked and tasty. It smelled like when I used to stand behind Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas with my eyes closed imagining what my tongue would soon understand.

Smothered in Yellow Label syrup, straight from a shelf in a small grocery store in Covington County, the deer sausage slowly went away after several cookings. Now it lives in my memories, this deer sausage. It is kind of creepy how we get attached to such things.

Example: Last week, I passed the huge Bass Pro Shop on I-95 north of Richmond. I have been in the place a few times and seen all of the taxidermied deer. I hate to even admit this, but my mouth started watering as I looked at the big sign in my rearview mirror. I felt guilty and hungry and conflicted. That is what deer sausage cooked in a cast iron skillet will do to you if you are not careful.

As a teenager, I was a fried chicken junkie. I could eat more chicken than any man alive, including Jim Morrison (check out The Doors “Back Door Man). I looked at the meat itself as a necessary evil. It was the wrinkled crust that twisted my tongue, shifted my gears and fortified my loins. Ophelia delivered.

Damn; she understand the delicate intricacies of fried chicken crust to the point where men would drive a hundred miles to touch their tongues to her goodies. She had a talent and a skill and a wicked obsession. What Colonel Saunders did with eleven herbs and spices, Ophelia did with far less.

I tried to get her to lay the secret on me but she just smiled and shook a crooked finger, saying, “Honey, if I give that up, I ain’t got nothing left in this world but a few gold teeth and a 1968 LTD.”

She worked alone in her kitchen and no health department official dared question her preparation techniques for fear she would cut them off. Her place was open when she felt like cooking and was filled with the rich, poor, famous and criminal.

Ophelia could do things to a chicken wing that would make Bill Clinton actually have sex with Hillary and convince George Bush to admit that Dick Cheney had his hand up his ass the whole time moving his lips like a puppet. I can’t even remember the side orders at Ophelia’s place, which wasn’t really a place at all, but a few tables under a bent grove of loblolly pines next to a ditch of a creek nudged beside a small wooden kitchen no bigger than a walk-in closet.

She served collards cooked in pork fat, yams swimming in cinnamon butter and cathead biscuits the size of a coffee saucer. I do remember her saying that mac ‘n cheese was for wimps, however, and if you ordered it, you could kiss her ass (she said that phrase with only her eyes). Unlike Burger King, if you wanted it your way, you would not get the damned thing. She served what she wanted and you, by god, loved it, or left. I never saw anyone leave except after their shirts and belts were tighter.

Ophelia is long dead now. A part of me died with her – a few inches of artery at a time. And I am not alone.

It’s a rare thing. Of course it should be. Drinking something that fell out of a cat’s butt would be rare beyond ever happening at my house. When something has passes through an animal’s digestive tract it needs to be called fertilize, not caffe latte.

Why just the civet’s droppings? Why not a Doberman’s droppings? Load that bad boy up on some green coffee beans and wait for the cash to start dropping. How different can a civet’s colon be than a Golden Reteriver? Or a Bobcat? Hell, I could quit my job if I could convince Rudy to scarf down a pound of so a day of beanery. I would be happy to follow him around with a plastic glove for $227 a pound.

Even better, I have a cousin who weighs about 400 pounds. This guy could easily put down ten pounds of beans a day, no prob. He would be a one-man gourmet coffee crap factory. Just set up ESPN on a nice screen, a recliner and bring on the beans. He’d take care of the manufacturing process while you wait. It’s a win win.

People all over the world are beginning to buy civets and do this full time. When you go to a nice restaurant and say, “This coffee tastes like crap,” there’s probably a good reason for it.

I have written countless stories and blogs about boiled peanuts for so many years that I will not waste your time now to go into exactly what it means to boil and eat them. Google it if you don’t know. Or go to a chic NYC eatery.

I have four bags of boiled peanuts waiting in my freezer right now. And these four bags came from people in Alabama who treat boiling peanuts like Brett Favre treats a football: with vigorous respect and un-retireable loyalty. Down home it is an art, a vice, a sin and a religion. I suppose the same people who are freaked out about sucking the heads of crawfish feel the same way about boiled peanuts. It is just too yucky. And that’s what makes it perfect.

One New York chef boils his goobers then deep-fries them. I have never tried that but it sounds like trying to convince a Crimson Tide fan that football is fun to watch. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt before I say it is clichéd overkill. But damn, only a northerner would misunderstand the relationship between a boiled peanut and a deep fryer.

Still, I’m going to have to give it a try. How could I not?

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 lemonade through my kidneys over the years. Truth is, I have never tasted better lemonade than this.

Now go to Sonic and order what I consider the best limeade ever squeezed by minimum wager teenagers into a fil-A-similar cup: Sonic’s cherry limeade. This stuff will give you a sex life even if you don’t date. It’s that good.

Disgruntledhousewife.com says “Get the Route 44. You will be begging for more.” This is limeade porn right here. And to complete the metaphor, there are real cherries in it, with the stems for testing your tongue-tying skills.

If you don’t have a Chick-fil-A or Sonic near you, snag one of those cheap AirTran tickets to a city that has both and soak your mouth in these two citrus supermodels, just to know what non-alcoholic perfection tastes like.

Okay, perhaps that sentence came out a little awkward now that I read it again, but even in its sexual overtones, the intent is intact.

These two drinks will make you feel like you’ve been on a little vacation in a Styrofoam cup. Both are good enough to lure right-wing Baptists into a sex toy store. You see a pattern forming here? That’s no accident. These two drinks are eyeball-rolling, breath-taking, mouth-puckering, teeth-gritting, loin-shivering awesome.

Of course, if you disagree, you can comment about your favorite lemonade and limeade below. And don’t puss out and say, “the best is the one I make at home.” I don’t drive thru at your house so give us an option we can all go buy. That’s how my taste-test rolls.

Let’s hear your opinions. And if I get no comments, consider my opinion to be correct.

They were goose stepping and bobbing their heads like people wearing iPod earbuds. There was a grand pattern to the goose dance, a wave of feathery motion. This was a lot more than a gaggle of geese. This was a hoard of geese.

“Why aren’t they flying?” I wondered. Not even one tried to lift off. They just jerked and weaved across the landscape. It was freaky.

Have you ever seen a big flock of birds descend on a grove of trees and cover the branches in avian darkness? It is otherworldly. This was much stranger. These geese could have filled the mall in DC. I have never seen this much of anything, except fire ants.

The goose gauntlet went on for half a mile like long-necked cattle.

“But they can fly,” I kept saying. They didn’t.

I have seen turkey and chicken farms, but I never thought about geese farms until I Googled it. People like to cook their goose. I figured geese were independent like most birds. They come and go as they please. Not these. They roamed by the thousands with no inclination to leave. We slowed down and I looked into their faces. It is hard to discern a bird’s intentions since their facial expression pretty much consists of wide eyes and a beak. The look could have been joy or horror or pain or nothing. Birds would be great poker players.

Upon entering Leesburg, we pulled up to “Mom’s Apple Pie,” a bakery rumored to have the best apple pie available on any given day pretty much everywhere. Turns out Mom sells a lot more than apple pies. She had all kinds of pies. I stared at the loaded racks and countertops and wanted to ask, “You don’t happen to have goose pie do you?” I just figured, a big wad of geese, then a few miles later, a big pile of pies. It seemed like a viable connection to make at the time.

Nothing looked like goose pie (not that I have ever seen a goose pie), but the apple pie did look wickedly good. So did the sour cherry pie and the chocolate pie and the Boston cream pie and the pecan pie and, well, as I said, there were a lot of pies. I will be making another trip up to Leesburg to purchase a pie, probably apple, maybe key lime when it warms up outside. I will, however, stay away from the goose farm farther west. I am not really sure what is up with that.

(NOTE: Since I wrote this, I returned to Mom’s and devoured a sour cherry pie. They are not paying me to say this (although I will take a few free pies if Mom is so inclined), but it was damned fine pie (to steal language from David Lynch in Twin Peaks. Go to Leesburg and check it out.)