Hopefully you’re waking up this morning and headed outside to chase fish, birds or four-legged critters to burn off yesterday’s big feed. For those who’ve been working hard entertaining family and friends and rustling up a pile of grub to feed the famdamnily gathering yesterday, spending much more time in the kitchen is the last […]
Friday Feast
With Thanksgiving looming large on the culinary horizon we’ve been fishing around for a week or so looking for a great cornbread stuffing recipe to suit our new Southern digs. As good fortune would have it a few days ago friend and uber-talented chef Libby (Austin by way of New Orleans) called with a question […]
Roughly ten days after offering up this post about apple brandy, the Sir Isaac Newton and attractive Southern redheads, this email popped up from RA… I’m a professor (civil eng.) in Oxford at Ole Miss and long time fly fisher; I get out to Montana or Wyoming twice a year, end up fishing a fair […]
There’s a recurrent theme in an old 1965 Western spoof – The Hallelujah Trail – (a longtime clan favorite) where the grizzled old mountain guide and soothsayer Oracle Jones can only foresee future events after several hearty pulls on the whiskey bottle. Oracle Jones is masterfully played by English actor Donald Pleasence; when called on […]
Back on Wednesday an email from Marla popped up, the delightful semi-retired executive chef (Savannah mostly) I had the pleasure of meeting (and jousting a bit with) over Southern Skillet Cornbread a few weeks ago. She had misplaced the recipe I gave her for our damned good great southwestern corn muffins and asked if I’d […]
Back on a steamy July night a few weeks ago I was roughly two-thirds of the way through a damned eventful drive (carjacking) from the southern-most Seattle metro to Birmingham, crawling along a busier-than-it-should-have-been two lane in the Arkansas hills, when all hell broke loose weather-wise. I’d seen the thunderstorms off in the distance in […]
With October temperatures in our Southern neighborhood now running pretty damned close to the ideal range (low 70s for highs this week), fall and even some late summer produce is still rolling into the local farmers markets. Last Saturday I was off scrounging green tomatoes to try yet another batch of Piccalilli (Chow Chow in […]
Back a few years ago, on one of those three day runs to the Green River I was known to take occasionally with some friends in Salt Lake City, we had a buddy bring along a friend of his wife’s visiting from Hawaii. Many of you probably had the same visceral response to that phrase […]
As we continue our immersion into Southern culture, we’ve come to remember that just as nearly every southern family has a ‘family recipe’ for grits, gumbo and fried chicken, they also do for Cheese Straws. A staple of southern home entertaining for decades (if not centuries), even our parents reared in various locations on the […]
Walking out to my truck late yesterday afternoon neighbor Gerald, who’s birthday shindig dinner I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, yelled something over that I couldn’t quite understand (he’s a for-the-most-part spry 90 but not as loud as I assume he once was…). I set the load of gear I was carrying down and […]
She Who Must Be Obeyed and I are beginning to get settled in new digs down South. We have a huge learning curve ahead of us as to how things work in this part of the world in general, though we’re at least at the point where we don’t get lost every time we drive […]
Our education in Southern cooking took a major leap forward this past week. While She Who Must Be Obeyed was off in Vermont enjoying what appears to have been a very well done Orvis meeting, I was invited to a birthday party for a remarkably spry neighbor celebrating his 90th. (The party had to be […]
A few weeks ago I was making the first of what has now been three solo drives between Seattle and Birmingham and found myself about an hour out of Memphis late one afternoon. Having driven most of the day before, through the night and into that particular day, I was tired as hell, famished and […]
We’ve long been fans of Mat Trevors’ The Saltwater Journal blog portal for a number of reasons. He’s an unabashed foodie, accomplished fly fisher, world traveler, astute observer of the salt water environs, lives in a damned nifty place (“…minutes from the Salish Sea in the Cascadian Bioregion…“) and shares a penchant with us for […]
A few years ago friend, mentor and occasional son-of-a-bitch Ed came back from a business trip to Atlanta swearing he’d eaten the best fried chicken on the planet. This was back in the day when Scott Peacock was cooking at The Watershed in Atlanta; this point of history being significant in that Peacock had been […]
