A Southern Gallimaufry
These bobs are made from ground turkey (a recommendation) but you can use beef, pork, or chicken. Season lightly with salt and an Italian blend, form into balls, skewer with onion/pepper, and place in the freezer for at least an hour. Brush with garlic and black pepper oil before grilling or broiling.
1⁄4 cup mung peas
1⁄4 cup azuki peas
1⁄4 cup lentils and/or split peas Cranberry beans – enough to
cover bottom of kettle
1⁄2 bunch celery
1 lb. carrots
4 large yellow onions.
1 bunch bok choy
1⁄2 cup chard
1 medium potato
Any vegetable to taste – solid ones first, leafy ones last
1 tomato
4 lb. sliced mushrooms
2 cubes of beef or chicken bouillon
1-2 cups red wine (any cheap, dry red goofy)
Grated Parmesan cheese
Use a large kettle (can be picked up for about a quarter at most thrift shops) of 1 gallon or more capacity. Put enough water in the kettle to reach 2-3 inches up the sides. Pour in cranberry beans and other beans and peas, I sliced onion, and 3 stalks chopped celery, including leafy part.
Season with liberal/radical amounts of salt, black pepper, celery salt, thyme, oregano.
Season conservatively with bay leaves, allspice.
Season fascistically with cayenne or curry powder.
Season piggishly with chili powder.
1. Let this first part cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour. As it comes to boil, stir occasionally.
2. Now during the first hour of cooking, get away from the stove, sit down, roll one, have some tea, look out the window-relax.
3. After one hour begin adding vegetables-hard ones first-celery, carrots, potato, etc.
4. Put in leafy vegetables after the second hour.
5. Add mushrooms and tomato in the last 20 minutes, wine in the last 5 minutes. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese before serving.
The Louisiana satsuma crop ripens from October until late November, and they’re the sweetest citrus you’re going to get all winter. Use satsumas like oranges, and if you’re feeling really froggy, here’s an ambitious recipe from “Louisiana Cookin.”
Satsuma Upside-Down Cake
3¾ cups sugar, divided
4 cups water
24 (¼-inch-thick) sliced satsumas
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup yellow cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup whole milk
1 teaspoon satsuma zest
½ cup fresh satsuma juice
Preheat oven to 350°. Line the bottom of a 9-inch spring-form pan with parchment paper, and prep with baking spray with flour. Sprinkle ¼ cup sugar in bottom of pan.
In a large skillet, stir together 1½ cups sugar and 4 cups water. Add satsuma slices, bring to a boil, then turn off heat. After 15 minutes, remove fruit with a slotted spoon, and place on a wire rack to drain. Reserve the syrup. After 30 minutes or so, place slices in prepared pan, overlapping slightly.
In a large bowl, beat butter and remaining 2 cups sugar with a mixer at medium speed until fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes, stopping to scrape sides of bowl. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt; in a small bowl, whisk together milk, zest, and juice. Gradually blend flour and butter mixtures alternately with milk, beginning and ending with flour, beating just until combined after each addition.
Gently spoon batter over satsuma slices, cover with foil, and bake until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Let cool in pan for 15 minutes. Loosen edges with a knife, invert cake onto a serving plate, and remove parchment paper. Drizzle with ¼ cup syrup before serving.
Many gardeners in Mississippi are familiar with Jewels of Opar, though with varying degrees of fondness. While the plant—native to tropical America—isn’t a noxious invader, Talinum paniculatum seeds lavishly, and once established persists.
The plant was discovered on the “sea cliffs of Martinique and Santo Domingo” by Dutch botanist Baron Joseph von Jacquin during his travels to the Americas in the mid-18th century. Jacquin described the flowers as “small, numerous, red, and odorless,” likely the source of its common name in other parts of the world, “flame flower,” which brings us to our riddle. How did this modest little flower acquire a name so closely associated with one of literature’s greatest adventure heroes, Tarzan of the Apes?
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916) is a novel by American author Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fifth in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. As conceived by Burroughs, Opar is a lost colony of Atlantis located deep in the jungles of Africa, in which incredible riches have been stockpiled down through the ages. Tarzan first visits Opar in Burroughs’ second Tarzan novel, The Return of Tarzan (1913), and returns to the city time and again to replenish his personal wealth, for the second time in The Jewels of Opar, again in Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923) and Tarzan the Invincible (1930).
If Burroughs had described the jewels of the lost kingdom of Opar as “small, numerous, and red” we would have a more substantial link with the plant in my garden, but, alas, he only writes that Tarzan saw only as “a great tray of brilliant stones.” No mention of color, no mention of size, though he does say that some were cut, some not. Perhaps an enterprising nurseryman out to sell dozens and dozens of delicate little flowers that came up in his greenhouses just happened to be a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and bestowed the exotic name on them in an effort to make them more appealing to gardeners. Such things are known to happen.
I hope that the reason an insignificant flower collected on the volcanic slopes of Martinique became named for a “tray full of brilliant stones” from a fabled Atlantean kingdom remains rich for speculation.
The early October morning was warm; the afternoon was going to be hot. On the left of the produce stand piles of pumpkins, gourds, corn stalks and hay bales were somewhat artfully arranged in a semi-circle stretching across the parking lot. The bins were stocked full of peas, beans, squash, corn, and other fresh vegetables. People wandered to-and-fro, poking, picking, sacking, and asking questions of the woman in the center behind a register. When I reached the stand, my eye caught a basket of round, ruby-red, fuzzy fruit.
“Hey, Brenda!” I called out. “Where’d you get these late peaches?”
“Idaho!” She said. I couldn’t help staring.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she said. “I asked Rupert if he had any Carolina peaches left and he said, no, but I have some from Idaho, and I said I didn’t think they even knew what a peach is in Idaho and he just said take or leave, so I bought them because I wanted some peaches, and they’re better than nothing.”
“How are they?” I asked.
“Well, they’re peaches,” she said. “They ain’t the best I’ve had by far, but they’re probably not the worst. They’re peaches, take or leave.”
So I bought a half a dozen Idaho peaches, more for the sake of novelty than for any other reason. And they’re not the best, by any means, but firm and sweet nonetheless, with a deep yellow flesh around a blood-red center.
As I was checking out, Brenda pointed at a table of rattlesnake watermelons and said, “You’ll never guess where those are from”
“So tell me,” I said.
She rang up my total and said, “Nebraska.”
Larry Wayne Thomas breezed into my life on a random wind, and we sailed together on fair seas for many years.
We first met in April, 1976. I was a freshman at Ole Miss, where L.W. was teaching English. My roommate, a dissolute mental lightweight who went on to serve two spectacularly disgraceful terms in the Mississippi legislature, was his student. He paid me to write his term paper for L.W.’s class. Not only did I write it, but I was prevailed upon to deliver it to his teacher’s office at the last minute. L.W., a handsome young man in a tiny office in Bondurant, received the paper and my lame excuse about the roommate being called home due to a family emergency with undisguised ill-humor. The paper got an “A”, the roommate passed the class with a “C” and I walked away with thirty bucks. When I finally got around to telling L.W. this over twenty years later, he said, “I knew that idiot couldn’t have written that paper.”
We came to know each other well during the intervening years, seeing one another around town, mostly at watering holes such as the Rose, the Gin, or Ireland’s, among many mutual friends such as George Kehoe, Jere and Joe Allen, and his future bride, Jean Tatum.
L.W. began working at the Warehouse about that time while I bounced from one ill-fated restaurant to another. After the failure of Audie Michael’s, I found myself unemployed. Shortly after that, L.W. came to my apartment and offered me a job at the Warehouse. I don’t know whose idea it was, his, Frank Odom’s or Don Carlisle’s, but of course I took the job and for years he and I worked in what at that time was Oxford’s best and best-known restaurant.
L.W. was my immediate boss, the primary liaison between the kitchen and the floor, a job that’s bound to make anyone a nervous wreck, and L.W. was no exception; busy nights reduced him to fussing, fretting, and, inevitably, intoxication. My job, as I saw it, was to keep the kitchen working smoothly, which involved a minimum amount of interference from management. L.W. and I had our disagreements mostly about how to cook, where in the final court of authority I had more standing, but after the last tables were served, everything was copacetic. Outside the kitchen doors, with his droll wit and unfailing good humor, L.W. was the most congenial, amiable restaurant host possible. He knew everybody and everybody knew him, and (for the most part) their knowledge of one another was infused with warmth.
L.W. traveled in higher social circles, but we often found one another bellied up to a bar, and we’d bend elbows together. L.W. Thomas was smart as a whip, funny, a joy to be around, and I basked in his company, never failing to take away strings of bon mots and slews of piercing observations about the state of mankind in Lafayette County, Mississippi and beyond. Anybody who knew him will tell you however eccentric his behavior, L.W.’s intelligence transcended the blocky populace he usually found himself mired among, as he often demonstrated with his salty asides.
The morning after the Warehouse burned, February 16, 1983 we met one another on the northeast corner of the Square and walked east on Jackson Avenue. We barely spoke until we got to the smoking ruins of Country Village. We stood there for a moment, and L.W. gave voice to what was running through both of our minds: “It didn’t start in our kitchen.”
We both moved away after that; me to Florida, L.W. to Colorado. I returned to Oxford after four years and re-entered Ole Miss, but I got L.W.’s address from a mutual friend and wrote to him, saying how much I missed him and half-jokingly urging him to move back. Well, he did, and though I have a feeling that he was just as miserable in Colorado as I was in Florida and my plea was just added incentive, he later told me on more than one occasion that my letter made him so homesick he just had to return.
Not long afterwards I moved from Oxford again. To my everlasting regret, I missed his wedding to Jean, and as fate would have it, I never saw L.W.. again. I wish I could write him another letter.
