That’s a white oak basket, made by an elderly Black gentleman from Montgomery county, Alabama. We purchased this back in the 1980’s. The oak splints are finely split and woven. We honor his incomparable craftsmanship and legacy by storing all our veg seeds in it. No one else that we know has ever seen a hinged handle like that.
Another masterwork from an equally elderly Black gentleman named John Reeves, which we bought in the eighties in the town of Gay, Georgia (population: 92.).
Sturdy Basket
This thing could haul an orchard full of apples. However, it can’t touch our mac Daddy basket, when it comes to payload.
Quilt Heaven
That’s a cotton basket, once common everywhere in the South. I get to add that I am one of the last generation to pick cotton by hand. It would take a good long while to fill up this thing. Made in my home county of Cullman, Al.
My Handiwork
An earring rack for MJ to house just a few of her immense stash of earrings. It’s what to do with dead Mountain Laurel.
A decade or so back, I went to a job interview in a building with bars on the windows, and I had to be given a security code to get in the door. Then one of the women interviewing me called me the following:
A Foodie
I had just enough restraint to not slap her up both sides of her head. Everyone alive eats food. I probably should have called her an alcoholic.
Mouth Feel
You can only use this term if you own a high class brothel.
Fork Tender
Stick a fork in it. That term is so last century.
Cheap Recipes
Seriously? I have a recipe for acorn flour (actually, I do.)
Paper Thin
Get out your micrometer. Don’t cook anything that thin for more than ten seconds, and never get it hotter than 451 F. See Ray Bradbury.
Tantalizing
No comment.
Neo Nazi
A food term? This requires a brief dissertation. Anything that begins with the word “neo” is to be avoided, if not shunned. You are either a nazi and a fascist, or you are not. I am only waiting for someone to use the phrase neo foodie. Oh snap, I just did.
My favorite job interview was where I was asked, “Have you ever been too drunk to fish?” My answer was “No, but you don’t know how much I like to fish.” They offered me the job almost immediately.
When the temps hit freezing here in the South, many people go into semi-hibernation. Not me–I’m as busy as a porcupine sticking spines into the mouth of a fox. I think I have a paint recipe that doesn’t require ten coats to cover something. It may take even only one.
New Tempera
2/3 cup Boiled Linseed Oil
1 Egg
1/3 cup Water
3 tablespoons Pigment
Mix them together in that order. The extra oil and pigment make this is a nice thick paint. I must have been channeling my hero Sandro Botticelli. My covid mask has a print of the Birth of Venus on it. Thus far, no one has objected to the nudity–on the mask, that is.
My main man HD Thoreau wrote, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” I have done this with my lemon chicken recipe, which I have been obsessed with for years.
Sauce
Juice of one large Meyer Lemon (or two smaller other lemons)
Sugar
That’s it. MJ and I ate this dish a hundred times at a Chinese restaurant in Tuscaloosa, and it took me years to realize the Zen truth of simplicity.
Chicken
Cubed Chicken Breast
Cornstarch
Salt and Pepper
Peanut Oil
The last is for deep frying, and an inch and a half is enough. Serve with rice and green peas. Nosh away, as this is fantastic.
Everyone has a recipe like this, but add real eggs and real ham, along with fresh herbs, and you have a real breakfast, or an anytime dish for two, for that matter. Cut directly to the chase, with two ramekins/custard cups.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon melted butter
2 Eggs (or more)
Cream
Diced Ham
Diced Onion or Shallot
Toppings: Grated Cheese and Chives
Cook this in a bain-marie, a hot water bath, a method which allegedly was invented by an alchemist named Mary. How she got in all that hot water we’ll never know. I crank up the stove to 550 F. This can also be cooked on the stove top.
How much cream, ham, and onion? Fairly small quantities, but let your conscience and doctor guide you. The cheese makes this a gooey work of art. It’s done when the cream bubbles.
Tomatoes, in season, make this the best egg dish imaginable-wild cherry tomatoes are the best, cooked whole in the dish. Complaining about having your favorite fruit being out of season is as old as ancient music. Oh, snap, that’s the title to a great satirical poem by Ezra Pound.
Ancient Music
Winter is icummen in, Lhude sing Goddamm. Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, An ague hath my ham. Freezeth river, turneth liver, Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm, So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm. Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
“Pass the damn ham”– Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird
We have plenty of dope sticks in the South, like our new US Senator from Alabama, a former Auburn football coach named Tupperware (I think that’s right,) so take our new Senator, PLEASE. This dude was fired by Cincinnati–the college team. I would say we really need Chairman Mao and some re-education camps, but that would be too tough on people who never got an education to begin with (Tupperware could not name the three branches of the US Government, when asked.).
I’m Talking about Sides
So let’s get off the train to Crazytown, and have a real Southern New Year’s meal. You also have my permission to make this any time of the year. The ham is the star, but the sides are the supporting actors. MJ came up with yet another new ham glaze this year. Superb is only the beginning.
Ingredients
Juice of 4 Oranges
Juice of 1 Lime
Maple Syrup
Honey
Mustard
Make this as rich as you want. I like lots of Mustard, MJ lots of sweet, so split it down the middle. She did grow all the citrus.
I accidentally found a sustainably grown ham. Seek, and ye shall find.
The sides? Collards are a classic. Serve with pepper sauce. I have some high octane made.
Welcome to our Southern Table, Metaphorically
You get one dollar for every cowpea you eat (seriously). All you get with macs and cheese are extra calories. Thanks, James Hemings. He was the chef for Long Tom Jefferson.
Rolls finish this off. We will be eating leftovers for the indefinite future.
When you get up early on New Year’s Day to feed the chickens, and the low temp is 67 F, something is seriously wrong. That something is Anthropogenic Climate Disturbance, aka Global Warming. It’s fine now, but the summer will be when the bill comes due.
There is one constant, however–the wonders of chicken excrement. Americans in general treat chickens like a protein machine, caged, abused, and thrown away and eaten at a very early age. Our flock of eight ramble around all day, eat greens and high protein food, and we get eggs by the dozen. Better, possibly is the giant piles of excrement, which I compost. I am just beginning to use it as fertilizer. It could be the GOAT (greatest of all time.)
Chicken excrement and I go way back. When I grew up on the old farm, that was our main fertilizer, and sometimes the only one. As it turns out, industrial scale chicken production produces industrial scale chicken stuff. We had tons of this stuff at a time, which means we had tons of vegetables, and pounds and pounds of beef–we fertilized the pastures with chicken stuff, and even had to buy a giant stuff spreader to be able to do it.
So the moral for this new year is, what goes around, comes around. I have been fertilizing my mustard greens with chicken stuff, and feed the greens to the chicks, and the egg quality just gets better. I composted my garlic plants (forty in total,) and they took off like weeds. I just layered my young asparagus patch with several inches of compost. I better get the asparagus steamer ready for spring.
Knowing that I have a not wholly rational obsession with camping stoves, MJ gave me this little ring of cast iron for Christmas. It came from South Korea, so I assume it was made there, or possibly nearby. If we ever get a day where the high temp is below 60 F, I will crank it up with the following top:
Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate.
The ultimate hand warmer, or possibly an infant Dalek. Only Dr. Who nerds will get that reference.
I attended the New College at the University of Alabama before I became decidedly Old School. In our Humanities seminar, we did things like break boards with our bare hands, and rappelled down a bluff on the Warrior River. As the only former High School ath-a-leete in the class (three sports), I was put on “belay,” so I had to hold the rope at the bottom of the bluff, and was responsible for everyones’ safety. One young sorority woman showed up to the rappelling exercise wearing a very short skirt. She slipped, flipped upside down at the top of the bluff, and showed everyone a nice pair of legs. Despite the distraction, I got her down with no visible harm.
To ahh, elevate the conversation, I declare that Lost Art Press, which published these two tomes, is a national treasure. Based in the South (Kentucky), they edit, typeset, and publish everything in the US. And these are some quality hardback books.
Their first famous book was actually written by an Estonian scholar named Ants Viires, and the full title is Woodworking in Estonia: Historical Survey. The strange and literally bizarre story of it’s translation and dissemination alone are worth the price of the book. The key players were the USSR, Israel, the USA, and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia. Just another day when I wished I could make stuff like this up.
The book itself is thorough, readable, and best of all, it has pictures. Therefore I don’t have to do things like visualize how you can hand plane a board on a bench without a vise.
I Swear that’s not Me in the Picture. He’s planing Left Handed!
The publisher of this book, and co-founder of Lost Art, Christopher Schwartz, was obviously inspired by this classic. Here’s the cover of an equally fine book that Schwartz wrote.
Now We’re Talking really Old School
I’m making projects out of this book I got for Christmas like crazy. I’ll write about those later, but I see three more workbenches in my future. Schwartz, and his researcher Suzanne Ellison, go all the way back to Imperial Rome, and the oldest known workbench illustrations. Strangely enough, those benches work as well, or better, than modern ones. This design comes from a fresco from Herculaneum, buried in AD 79 by the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius.
Legs Again. Get your Mind off of Legs.
I will be forced to make one of these eight legged benches. Hopefully our local sawmill hasn’t closed yet. I’ll need a good sized slab of wood.
After the Stanley company turned into a seller of screwdrivers and hinges, I soured on US made woodworking tools. There were fantastic tools being made here, but they cost as much as a car payment. As I always had a car payment already, I turned to German and Swedish tools, as well as the occasional English one (Oops, I forgot about the spectacular quality of Canadian tools, and the value of Eastern European ones).
Then I ran across the smaller manufacturers like Gramercy and Flexcut. Flexcut blew me away with quality and value combined. I already had the carving tools sharpener (superb), when MJ surprised me with the gift of the folding carving knife, after I was commissioned to carve a spoon for the book A Gathering of Spoons. Wow. It was love at first cut.
Then last summer rolls around, and I have a large walnut bowl to carve (it still isn’t finished.) If I had not found the 2″ Flexcut gouge on the Highland Woodworking website, it probably never would have made it to the stage where it is now. And I had intended to mortgage the house and buy a Swedish gouge made by Hans Karlsson. Now I have a gouge and a house.
At any rate, I also have a re-vamped carving bench. More on that later.
Southern Fusion Cooking 