Grits Is Just Little Taters

I live in a weird neighborhood made up mostly of people who are not from around here and southerners who have forgotten they are from around here. For example, their kids have no idea what it means to have manners. They would rather die than say "Yes ma'am," "No ma'am,"or "Thank you, sir." No, that's not right. They don't use manners because they haven't been taught them. Indeed, as your mama would say, "They's ain't been raised right."


And here's another thing that just chaps my ass. Recently, I began an exercise program which involves walking through the neighborhood. Some of the road has sidewalks, a lot of it doesn't. Drivers around here think there is some kind of sport in seeing just how close they can come to you in their SUVs and Lexuses (Lexi?) and BMWs without actually hitting you as they approach the speed of light. On the other hand, these same people will stop and patiently wait for five minutes while a flock of Canadian geese waddle down and across the street. I don't get it.


Okay, you're asking, how does this relate to food? Well, some time during the last century I lived in north Florida and I had occasion to need the shingles on the roof of my house replaced. I hired a guy, Jerry Wayne, to do the job. He was from a very rural area called Madison and he was salt of the earth, poor as a church mouse, cracker. He had some of his teeth, more tattoos than skin and a fine looking mullet hairdo. He was long and lanky, wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves ripped off, with washed out, hole riddled Levi's long before they became a fashion statement. He made Joe Dirt look suave and debonair. One day, while Jerry Wayne was on the roof in triple-digit Florida sun, I was out in the yard lamenting what to do about the fire ants that had overtaken the place. Jerry Wayne saw me and decided to see what I was up to. He lumbered over to where I was swatting and cussing fire ants for all I was worth. "Grits," he said. "Huh? Sum-bitch piss ants!" I said as fifty of the little bastards attacked my left ankle. "Grits. Yep, grits will get rid of them piss ants. Them ants will eat grits and then the grits will swell up in they's bellies and make 'em explode. You know, grits is just little taters, and when them piss ants eat 'em, well you know, they's just gone explode." Well, I'll be a biscuit eating, egg sucking dog, I thought, how do you argue with that?

On the whole, I would rather spend a month with Jerry Wayne than thirty seconds with an East Snobber.

Bless Her Heart, She Can't Help It (That She's a Yankee)

Carol and I just got back from a visit to her home town out on the eastern end of Long Island. We were up there for her high school reunion. The number evades me right now, but it is more than five years since she graduated from Greenport High School. There were sixty-four seniors in her graduating class and I have to hand it to them, they do a pretty good job of getting together for their reunions every five years. This year the food was catered by a (relatively recently) married couple in the class. Mary Ann Sledjeski Costello's father owned and operated Porky's Restaurant so she and her husband Tom put together an amazing array of finger foods and hors d'oevres including a fillet mignon on a slice of toasted french bread, crabmeat with dill sauce and poached salmon with cucumber. But my favorite was a dried apricot with walnut and blue cheese topping that was to die for--yummy!

The actual reunion party was held on Friday evening at Founders Landing in Southold overlooking Peconic Bay. It was a long evening as the outsider spouse whose lack of "history" was sometimes painfully obvious. I am sure that anyone who has attended a spouse's reunion can identify with me...the things we do for marital harmony. On the other hand, it is fun to allow yourself to just be the almost invisible and completely insignificant afterthought you are and observe the "process". Here are a few of my observations: Cliques that existed in high school don't go away. Sometimes there are late bloomers that no matter how hard you tried, you could not have predicted how great these people would have turned out and some of the ones who had the world by the ass in high school just haven't been able to do anything with it. And here is the big aha--life happens. Yep, profound ain't it. Good and bad events occur in life that are neither predictable nor preventable, and they make us who we are.

But wait, here is what I really wanted to address in this blog: in a couple of weeks the Cutchogue Volunteer Fire Department is having their annual barbeque chicken dinner fund raiser. According to one of Carol's classmates, they have a world famous "secret" recipe for their barbeque marinade. I understand that Martha Stewart attended the festivities last year, but was not able to get them to share their secret marinade recipe with her. This was said with an absolute straight face, more than a little bit of pride, and complete and total ignorance to the fact that there was a son of the South standing right there in their midst. This is where it gets tricky because no matter how hard I try, I cannot reconcile those two diametrically opposed terms and put them in the same sentence--Yankee and barbeque. Think about it for a minute. See what I mean? The only way I can do it is to say, "Yankees don't know nothing 'bout no barbeque." Chowder? No problem. Pasta? Ok, it works for me. But barbeque? Pllleeeaaassseeee.

The World's Best Brunswick Stew

When I was a kid the senior class at our high school would always have a barbeque fundraiser to help pay for the annual senior trip to Washington, D. C. The menu was always the same year after year for as far back as I can remember--barbeque pork and Brunswick stew with a side of chips and sweet pickles, and of course, white loaf bread. It stayed that way until I was a senior when a fancy pants new teacher came along from some Alabama school like Troy State where she thought she was hot stuff and she knew better than we simpletons from a mill town. She decided a spaghetti dinner would be a better than "a silly ole bbq, who eats that trash anyway", but all she did was ruin a tradition, and cost each senior an extra hundred dollars for the trip to make up for the fiasco of a flop she served up as a senior dinner. We won't get into how she also ruined our yearbook, too. She was the first woman I ever knew who richly deserved to be called a bitch.

But I digress. The overnight ritual of cooking barbeque involved tending to huge wash pots full of a mysterious concoction that as the sun rose in the eastern sky over the Sportman's Club would somehow evolve into Brunswick stew. It was the job of the boys in the senior class, and anybody else they could recruit, to serve as laborers whose primary job it was to stir those pots containing the stew. Being young and stupid, (a dangerous combination, but not uncommon as adolescent boys go) we were thrilled at the chance to participate in the action. I must say, the first ten minutes or so of standing over a pot with a boat paddle to stir the mixture was shear delight. One would be so filled with such excitement and genuine pride at the idea of being part of the team, it sometimes took twelve or fifteen minutes for reality to set in and to realize how long a night could be and a whole lot of stirring was going to be required. Thank goodness there was always enough boys on hand to pass the paddle off. Still, this was an all-nighter that seemed to last a week.

The guru of stew was Mr. Jackson. Ed was his first name, I believe, but don't hold me to it. His recipe for Brunswick stew, as far as I am concerned, set the gold standard for what stew is supposed to taste like. Decades of experience has taught me that what makes a certain food taste good is what you were raised on. Barbeque and Brunswick stew are two of those foods.

Every summer, Southern Living magazine publishes its annual barbeque edition which is a compilation from around the south on what each region considers their best fare. From the Carolinas to Texas, from Kentucky to Florida and all points in between there are articles on different meats, cooking techniques, sauces and side dishes. To be sure, each is convinced his is the best what ever was. If you don't believe them, why hell, they have a trailer full of trophies to prove it! When you see what these folks try to pass off as legitimate southern cuisine, sometimes it's almost laughable. For the record, let's be perfectly clear: brisket (or anything else from a cow), lamb, goat, sheep, deer, 'possum, squirrel, shunk, armadillo, etc. is NOT barbeque. Barbeque is pork. Period. And Brunswick stew does not have potatoes, orka, beans or beef in it. To be legitimate, honest to God, Brunswick stew, it will be ground in a meat grinder and will contain corn, chicken, pork, tomatoes, and onions (with a few secret ingredients).

Enough said. Let me get to the point of this post: A couple of years ago my brother, Tim, gave me his recipe for stew. He told me it was the same one that Mr. Jackson used. I don't actually know if it is or not, but it sure does taste like real stew, the way God intended for it to taste. As a disclaimer, be forewarned; you can't make a little bit of Brunswick stew. If you do this recipe as it is written, you will have close to four gallons--enough to give all your relatives and neighbors and still have some left over for your own. Hope you enjoy it.

Uncle Tim’s Old Family Secret Recipe Brunswick Stew
(The way God meant for it to be)
Ingredients:

1 pork shoulder (8-10 lbs)

2 chicken broilers (4-5 lbs ea)
8 (15 oz) cans of whole kernel corn

4 (15 oz) cans of creamed corn
12 (14.5 oz) cans diced tomatoes

3 (64 oz) bottles ketchup
3 medium sweet onions

2 sticks butter
2 ± cups chicken broth

Black pepper—to taste
Cayenne pepper—go ahead, fire it up

Salt to taste
Tabasco sauce—see above

Secret herbs and spices

Cooking directions:
In separate pots, boil the pork shoulder and chickens until done. Reserve the chicken broth. Meanwhile, to occupy your time, run the corn, onions, and tomatoes through the grinder attachment to the Kitchenaide mixer (Don’t have a mixer with grinder attachment? Go get one--can’t do this without one if you want to learn to make good stew!). As you pass the veggies through the grinder, be careful not to push too hard or too fast. Don’t believe me? Go ahead, smart-ass, give that first can of tomatoes a good shove down the grinder mouth and redecorate the kitchen walls. My brother, Tim, whose basic recipe this is, taught me to run all the ingredients through the grinder twice, but it is a matter of personal preference. After squishing in the grinder, put into a large, and I do mean large, pot—a cast-iron wash pot works best (clothes removed from pot, of course). After the meats have fully cooked, remove from the bone, cool, and cut into cubes before passing through the grinder. After grinding, place meat into the pot and add ketchup and first dose of black and red peppers. Go light on the ketchup at first; you can always add more later on as the stew brews, but you can’t take it away if you put too much in.
At this point you can turn on the heat, somewhere between simmer and low, and start stirring. I suppose it is time to tell you the real secret to good stew—elbow grease. That’s right, work. From the time you put the heat on, until it is finished and ready to eat, you will not leave the sight of this concoction. The last thing you want to have happen is for the stew to stick to the bottom of the pot, and believe me it will, unless you stir. Nothing ruins good stew faster than black wads of scorched stew that tells the whole damn world you were too lazy to stir a pot for a little while. So don’t be a slacker.
As the stew warms up, add one stick of softened butter and a cup of chicken broth. Now, here is your opportunity to be a little original—add Tabasco sauce, another stick of softened butter, a little more broth, black pepper and red cayenne pepper, and salt to suit your taste. The stew will cook slowly. The key is the flavor of the onions which will evolve from a predominate taste, and then it will melt into the stew and become almost imperceptible as it blends in with all the other ingredients. If you want to make good stew, be patient and take lots of time, cook low and slow, and stir often. You won’t be disappointed.

Footnote: Because it takes so long to cook this recipe, over time I have learned the best technique is to cook the meat, and grind the veggies and meat and put it in the icebox overnight and then cook the stew the next day.

As a rule, I half this recipe and it makes enough stew for an after-church Sunday dinner gathering and still send the preacher home with a covered dish for later.

Thanksgiving is coming!

We had a few chilly days in the past week and when I went to bed last night, the cold sheets reminded me of spending the night at my grandparents' house back in the fifties. It was colder in those days than it is now partly because I was a kid with not an ounce of fat to insulate my skinny frame, but mostly because the house had no insulation whatsoever and was drafty enough to blow out a candle inside a hurricane globe sitting on the coffee table. When we kids laid in bed we could see the stars shining through the cracks in the ceiling and roof of the rackety old, long neglected house. I swear it was actually colder inside the house sometimes than it was outside.

Life for my grandparents was basic, very basic, even by the meager standards of rural Georgia back in those days. Uncovered light bulbs hung from a single electrical cord in the middle of the room. There was no running water which meant there was no inside toilet. The only source of heat came from the coal fireplace in each room, but no one ever had a fire in more than one room of the house no matter how much frost there was on the pumpkins outside. In the kitchen there was an ice box, a wash stand and an electric stove. The coal stove was over in the corner. The dinner table sat in the center of the room and served multiple purposes from food preparation to consumption, then afterward as the entertainment center for adult gossip sessions, for arguments and children playing games.

As we approach Thanksgiving, there are those memories that stimulate the five senses and can almost put us right back there in that same place and time. Sweet potato pie is one of them...so here is my recipe taken from an old family recipe. Hope you like it. If you do, remember the words of Paul "Bear" Bryant, "Why don't you call yo mama, I sure wish I could call mine." If your mama is still around, give her a call.

Sweet Potato Pie*

1 ½ cups sugar
3 eggs
1 ½ cups smashed sweet potatoes
1+ tspn vanilla extract
½ cup milk
1 uncooked pie crust

Directions:

Peel sweet potatoes; cover with water in a Dutch oven and cook until soft.
Mix sugar and eggs, then add in the potatoes and vanilla extract, and finally add milk.
After mixing thoroughly, pour mixture into the uncooked pie shell and bake in a preheated oven @ 350° F for one hour.

* This is a sweet potato pie, not a pumpkin pie. It should taste like sweet potatoes, not pumpkin, nutmeg, or allspice.

Introduction

Well, here I am about to start a new activity that I have no idea of what I am doing. First, I thought I wanted to write about being southern, food, cooking (especially outside), and growing things (again, outside). Second, I also wanted to know if I could be humorous...of course, I think I have a good sense of humor, but communicating that to someone else isn't always very easy to do. My mamma always said I was a little "funny", especially after getting hit in the head with the hammer, but I don't think she meant funny, funny??! Third, I want to know if I can simply write. You know, put a noun and a verb together with some modifiers, then repeat that several times until there is a paragraph, and then repeat that a few times and see if it is worth anything. I guess you will be the judge of that. (Be nice, I am very sensitive and I wear my heart on my sleeve.)
OK, so there you have it. A blog about southern-ness, food, gardening and funny stuff--and anything else that is interesting, inspiring, or just plain needs saying.

P.S. The thing about the hammer is true. My brother and I were building a tree house. He was about to come down out of the tree and he yelled down for me to get out of the way so he could throw down the hammer. I took three steps to the left just in time to cushion the fall of the hammer with the back part of my head. I don't remember how much it bled or hurt. In fact, I don't rememeber too much about that afternoon at all, come to think of it.