Get Your Okra On, Y'all!

This isn't going to be a cookbook review, so much as it will be a review of the author and the fun event I attended not long ago at Odyssey Bookshop. It's no secret that I'm Southern, and it's also no secret that until recently, okra was a vegetable that was rather hard to come by up here in the Kingdom of the Yankee. Thankfully that is about to change, and I think we can all be grateful to Virginia Willis, author of the new cookbook and cultural/culinary history, Okra. Her new book is getting all kinds of accolades, she is also a displaced Southerner living in my own town, and Virginia has precisely the right kind of persuasive and upbeat disposition to talk our local farm stand into growing more okra.

All the fixin's for an okra martini, including
locally made vodka and pickled okra garnish

My husband and I were already planning on attending the Okra event, but once we heard that Virginia would be pouring okra martinis and serving up some food for us, we were able to enlist some friends to attend, too.  She also demonstrated how to make pickled okra and the little fried okra cornmeal cakes that were delicious.  Better than hushpuppies or cornbread by far, and nothing's better than food served hot off the skillet!

Virginia is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef who loves to incorporate French techniques into traditional Southern cuisine, but for this book, she did research on the cultural history of okra around the world and modified recipes from West Africa, India, the Caribbean, as well as the American south to include in the book.

Seriously, I cannot tell you how good these were.

I've been eating okra for most of my life now, but it wasn't until Virginia's event that I ever sampled it raw, and I just might be a convert.  I like the crunch of raw vegetables, but I've never cared much for their flavor, but okra is pretty mild, and it has a crispness factor similar to sugar snap peas or sweet bell pepper. If it weren't so expensive to buy up here, I might snack on it regularly during the summer months.

Did I mention that she's adorable?

Lots of people don't like okra because of the slimy (or mucilaginous, if you prefer) output that results when it's cut open, but there are ways to avoid it if you wish.  Like deep frying it, which is obviously the best way to eat okra.  OBVIOUSLY. Some dishes, like a traditional gumbo, depend on that same mucilaginous texture to thicken the stew.  I also learned from Virginia that for every culture around the world that grows okra, there's a recipe that pairs tomato with the okra, for the acidity in the tomato cuts down on the slime output. Food science.  It's nifty.

Well, that went down with tolerable ease

I'm not much of a cook myself, but I will do what I can to coax my DH to prepare some of the recipes in this book.  Especially since Virginia gave us the tip to shop at the Asian market in Hadley to find fresh okra year-round!  So basically I'm saying, eat okra, y'all.  It's yummy, it has a venerable tradition, and if you start now, you'll be ahead of the curve.  Okra is gonna be the new arugula and/or the new squash blossoms of 2016.  I can just feel it.

NB: This book was published as part of the Savor the South series from the University of North Carolina Press and DH and I each purchased our own copy to support the author and the event. 

Ode to Everything Nashville

The Parthenon  

Did y'all know that Nashville has its very own Parthenon?  The first time I visited the city (maybe seven or eight years ago), this came as a complete surprise to me. Since the original Parthenon has been shattered by ordnance and the ravages of time, the Nashville replica stands proud.  It may not have all of the architectural wonders and illusions of the original, but at least it does offer visitors a sense of scope.

I mention this because last week my husband I visited Nashville at the behest of Vanderbilt University, whose library had purchased a large collection of my DH's work (alas, not from us but at auction!), and so we journeyed south for a few days. DH taught a couple of micro classes and visited with students in the special collections and in the divinity school, and then he gave a couple of talks, including one in conversation with Ann Patchett.

The view from our hotel room. Too bad we're not football fans! 

Because our schedule was largely driven by our hosts, I really only had a few hours of free time to call my own;  a nasty headcold, in conjunction with the unseasonably cold and rainy weather, contrived to make me want to nap my free time away.  I managed to explore a little, including a visit to Patchett's wonderful bookstore, Parnassus, and a quick stop at an old Union fort from the Civil War.

Parnassus is beautiful, and like all of the best spaces, it combines new and old elements for a timeless and comfortable feel. You'd never guess that the bookstore has only been in place for about three years. It also has hundreds of personal touches, so that even though the store is part of a strip mall, once you step inside, you're a world away from that box-store feel.  I particularly liked the memorial benches down the center of the store: obviously for sitting and reading, but also firmly anchoring this space in a local community.

The memorial benches down the center of the store

One bench was in memory of a loving dog. I just loved that.

Or this piano, which is used to good effect for creating displays in the music section, but is also played during some events--or whenever a small child simply cannot resist the urge.

In the tradition of Narnia, Oz, and Wonderland, the children's department at Parnassus has a special child-sized access point.  I love how it also evokes both the local icon of the Parthenon and the store's own eponym:

Of course I ducked through here

And what bookstore would be complete without a four-legged mascot?

I also love the way that the bookstore augments the standard overhead lighting with unexpected bits of whimsy:

Stars for the children's department

Or these bird fixtures in a non-fiction alcove

Parnassus also offers a small selection of cards.  Most of them are beautifully printed by letterpress, and thus on the pricier side ($5 and up). I was reminded once again that I was in the South when I saw  two rows of cards like these:

I didn't even know they made cards for this!

My visit to Parnassus wouldn't be complete without mentioning the fun staff they had there and my opportunity to chat with Karen Hayes, Patchett's co-owner. I knew her from my days as a bookseller at Lemuria, lo, these many years ago, so we had a late lunch talking books, shop, and travel.  It was also the occasion of my first bento box, so naturally I had to take a picture.

Isn't it beautiful?  And it was only $8.95!

By then there was just time enough for me to take a quick tour of Fort Negley before heading back to the hotel before the lecture that night. I wish I could say that it was amazing, but it wasn't. I suppose I could say it was at least worth the price of admission (it was FREE). I've visited a few forts before, all of which were much older that Ft Negley (by a couple hundred years), so I was definitely expecting more.  Once you've seen any of the old forts in the Caribbean, particularly the two excellent ones in Old San Juan, I suppose most others would be a disappointment.

What I got was a small hill, a view to downtown and a baseball stadium, some crumbly walls that I mostly couldn't get near, and some boardwalks. Oh, and lots of wind and some intermittent drizzle.

Visitors must stick to the paved paths or boardwalks at all times.

A distant stone wall

I think these trees are actually more interesting than the fort itself

In one direction you could semi-visualize what the view might have been like for the Union soldiers defending the fort:

But mostly the fort is encroached on all sides by the city of Nashville.  There's one building in particular that looks like it would be better suited to Gotham:

Can't you just imagine the bat signal emanating from there?

Still, I learned a little bit of history and took a walk that I otherwise wouldn't have taken, so that's a victory in the face of my inherent laziness.

By 3:00, though, my cold was getting the better of me, so I went back to the hotel to get my nap on before dressing for the big lecture that night.  Not much to tell about that, other than it was very entertaining to hear Ann and my DH in conversation about books, reading, e-readers, bookstores, writers, reviewers, publishing, working, discipline, the myth of writers block, and just about any other subject related to the production of a book.

The rest of our time in Nashville was either taken up with university stuff or with family, but DH and I had one evening free for dinner together just the two of us.  Thanks to the help of the Nashville forum on TripAdvisor, we were lucky enough to get a next-day reservation for an early dinner at Chateau West, just up the road from our hotel. We chose wisely, for although the ambience at this new restaurant wasn't a match for Tin Angel, where we had dined with one of the deans earlier in the week, the food was better.

It had been a long time since we had partaken of a full-on French meal, so we made a pact to eat lightly all day on Friday so that we'd have belly room to appreciate the various courses. For an appetizer, DH ordered the escargot and I chose the charcuterie platter because it featured one of my favorite cheeses, St. Andre.  But when our plates arrived, I was promptly filled with food envy: his snails were served in puff pastry.  My charcuterie was good--it could have benefitted from some flatbread or crackers--but the escargot were fabulous:

For our main courses, we had trouble making up our minds but DH eventually settled on the coquilles St. Jacques while I decided on the duck Chambord. Both were dreamy.  His scallops were huge and tender and came with a sweet potato soufflé. The sauce, unlike every other sample of that dish we've had, was not at all heavy (but no doubt still very calorie-laden).  I don't order duck very frequently but I basically did that night because I was skeptical of how Chambord would work with it.  It was amazing.  The potatoes added an earthiness that balanced the sweetness of the sauce perfectly.  I was surprised that I didn't love the sweet potato cake, which was actually too dense to be rightfully called a soufflé, and it was overburdened with nutmeg, a spice I normally love.

Coquilles St Jacques

Duck Chambord

The dessert menu was the piece de resistance. I love dessert and while I will eat almost anything sweet, I will laugh in your face if your restaurant puts on airs about its desserts for offering a cheesecake, a creme brûlée, and a variation of Death By Chocolate.  Puh-leeze. Those are so pedestrian that every major chain restaurant offers those. No, if you want to impress me, you have to do a little better than that.  Chateau West impressed me. We selected a strawberry mille feuille and a hazelnut Paris-Brest.  The former was quite good, and beautiful to boot.  But the latter? It was pure heaven. I'd never heard of a Paris-Brest dessert, but it's a puff pastry with hazelnut cream and it was one of the best things I've ever eaten in my life.

The strawberry mille feuille

The Paris-Brest

I reckon that concludes my trip to Nashville.  I hope I get to visit again with more time to spare, for seeing more sites, eating more good food, and maybe going to hear some live music, which we didn't do at all on this trip.  And, of course, I'd love to have more time for visiting family & friends in the area!

Book Review: The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

I'm not sure why, but when I heard last year that Sue Monk Kidd would be publishing her novel in January of this year, I wasn't especially excited about it.  I'd read The Secret Life of Bees and liked it pretty well, so I'm uncertain where this feeling of disinterest stemmed from, other than after dissecting Kathryn Stockett's book, The Help,  I was a little leery of another one of those Southern novels where white women become the heroes in the story of black women's struggle. (Full disclosure: I loved The Help but I was fully aware after reading just how much the author had appropriated someone else's story in a not-so-nice way.)

But then I read a review of The Invention of Wings on Alice's blog, Reading Rambo, and it totally changed my mind about this book. For starters, Alice gave me a better understanding of what the book was about--I'd no idea, for example, that the Grimke sisters in this book were actual historical figures of great import in the abolitionist and proto-feminist movements. The thing is, these Grimke sisters did some pretty kick-ass things, so how is it that I'd never heard of them before reading Alice's review and then reading this book? In fact, I'm pretty sure my review here is mostly just gonna be a summary of the story and how much I liked it, so please read Alice's review to get a better sense of things. She's way funnier than I am and you'll enjoy it more. She's basically already said everything I want to say anyway, including excerpting one of the same passages that I'm going to use and commenting on how the Australian book cover is infinitely superior to the US one.

So, The Invention of Wings opens in Charleston in 1803 and is told in alternating points of view from Sarah Grimke, a daughter of one of the city's most prominent families, and Hetty/Handful, the little slave girl who is given to Sarah on her eleventh birthday. I don't know if it's white guilt, or our contemporary inability to truly grasp the horrors of slavery, or the general disinclination of writers to describe terrible things happening to children, but Sue Monk Kidd avoids the temptations to backpedal that other writers before have succumbed to.

In other words, she doesn't simplify the relationship between Sarah and Handful, even when they are children. In their own words:

Handful: "It was hard to know where things stood. People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn't know for sure whether Miss Sarah's feelings came from love or guilt. I didn't know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It was never a simple thing (54)."

 Sarah: "I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it (115)."

Sarah's first act of defiance is to try to free Handful on the first night she's been given to her, but her family, who owned seventeen slaves in their Charleston house alone, not counting the ones working on their Low Country plantation, will not hear of it. Her second act of defiance is teaching Handful how to read, and these bold courses of action as a girl lay the groundwork for the woman she eventually becomes.

Handful, on the other hand, keeps a weather eye out for Sarah's mother, a rather harsh mistress, and learns at her mauma Charlotte's right hand how to sew and how to channel the feelings of rage and impotence that are a slave's birthright into something productive: making a story quilt and secreting money away to buy their freedom. Charlotte, clever and talented in equal measure, gets up to her own acts of defiance until one day she's caught, with truly terrible consequences.

Sarah's and Handful's chapters alternate seamlessly, and Kidd serves both voices well. Eventually both girls grow up and their lives take on radically different directions; Sarah's to the North, where she falls in with the Quakers, and Handful's to the new, radical African Methodist Episcopal church where both slaves and free blacks secretly work to create an uprising in Charleston.  Both moves turn out to be disastrous until each woman decides, with a certain grim determination, on the course of action she must take.

The book ends in 1838, twenty-five years before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law, and by the time Kidd concludes her story, there have already been many inroads made against slavery in the United States, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of one Sarah Grimke, upon whom half of this novel is based. While I wouldn't say that The Invention of Wings is particularly literary, it does exactly what literature is supposed to do: inform, entertain, disturb, and engulf the reader in a story that is not the reader's own. I loved this book and found it nearly impossible to put down. I unreservedly recommend it to anybody who likes historical fiction, novels with strong female characters, and stories with a true emotional heft.

NB: Viking published this book in January 2014 and I read an advance reading copy that was sent to me at the publisher's initiative.

Book Review: Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick

I admit up front that I was not a fan of Robert Goolrick's previous novel The Reliable Wife, so I was a little reluctant to pick up his new one called Heading Out to Wonderful.  Luckily I had a little prompting from Craig "Call me Peaches" Popelars at Algonquin, who told me that he thought I'd love it. As usual, he was right. Damn his eyes.

If you read enough books or watch enough movies, after a while you develop certain expectations built into certain plot points. Thus, in chapter one when a mysterious drifter rolls into a small Southern town with nothing but his truck and two suitcases, and when those two suitcases are filled with nothing but cash and a set of the sharpest butcher knives anyone has ever seen, you know that by the last chapter there's no way that everything can end well.  Just a fact of fictional life.

That's essentially what happens in Goolrick's book, but he does stand certain of the reader's expectations on their heads, and that's what makes for an intense but heartfelt read.  You know something bad is going to happen, but it's not precisely clear at first just what path the badness is going to take: will somebody end up butchered & barbecued, a la Fried Green Tomatoes? Will the evil spring from the handsome stranger, or will it be exacted upon him by the small, xenophobic town? Is the handsome stranger's intense relationship with the young boy more insidious than it appears on the surface or is it completely innocent?

Add in a curious five year-old narrator, a small town full of busybodies, a racial divide, old time religion, a near-death resuscitation, and a man who's so rich and so mean, he has to buy himself a pretty young mountain girl for a wife, and you've got the makings of a pretty great story. 

The opening paragraphs are some of the best meditations on memory that I have ever read. The book is narrated by Sam, who is an old man looking back on what happened when the drifter came to town and his family took him in:

The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things where you can pinpoint the day, the hour, and the minute. When you think about it, though, those things mostly seem to happen to other people.

This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I'm going to tell it to you.  It's a true story, as much as six decades of remembering and telling can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don't always get everything right. You remember a little thing clear as a bell...while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than some of the big things....I'm  not young any more, so sometimes I can't tell what things are the things I remember and what things are just things that other people told me They tell me things I did, and a lot of them I don't remember, but most people around here aren't liars, so I just go on and believe them, until it seems that I actually do remember the things they say.

This is not exactly a Southern gothic tale, but it has elements of that.  But mostly it's the story of mountain people after the war, who are on the cusp of modernity and who know their quiet, charmed way of life won't last forever.  It's the story of otherwise good people who choose to let evil into their hearts, and the blinding love of a small boy for a man he calls Beebo, who instinctively knows something about protection but is too innocent to understand what happens around him. I highly recommend it.

Old Friends, Good times

Sunset over Boone

Last weekend I made a quick trip down to Boone, North Carolina, to visit my oldest friend in the world.  Tracie was the first friend I made when I moved to Mississippi from Wisconsin in the fifth grade, back when that new world I'd landed in felt quite alien to me, but perhaps not quite as alien as I seemed to my new classmates.  We drifted apart after college, but thanks to Facebook, we reconnected a few years ago and now when we get together, it seems as if no real time has passed.  You're lucky when you have friends with whom you pick back up where you left off, and Tracie is one of them for me.

I hopped a little USAirways nonstop flight from Hartford, CT, to Charlotte, NC, where my whirlwind weekend began.  I lived in North Carolina for two years while pursuing my master's degree in English at Wake Forest University, and I've visited Asheville a couple of times for work, but I'd never visited as deep into Appalachia as Boone before.  It's a staggeringly pretty part of the world, and it's easy to see why the city of Boone is such a mecca: it's a university town, with all of the grand funkiness and variety that that moniker implies, but it's also a a cultural center and a liberal oasis among the sea of conservatism that marks most of the rest of the state.

This is the view from Tracie & Rene's back deck.  I know, right? Pretty shabby.

Tracie and I had a grand old time reminiscing about the town of Petal, MS, where we had grown up.  Though I didn't graduate from Petal, I was very interested in learning everything about my former classmates and where the are now, and as Tracie was part of the planning committee for the 20th reunion last spring, she was armed with information and happy to comply.

At baseball practice

I also had the great pleasure of meeting Tracie's two adorable children and getting to know her husband a bit more (I had met him once, about 15 years ago, over a quick lunch). I spend quite a bit of time en famille, eating dinner, baseball practice, playing Matchbox, reading books, blowing bubbles, and just limin'. The rest of the time we were on the go, driving around to see the scenery, checking out Grandfather Mountain and its many enticements, and even meeting up with another friend from grade school who lives in eastern Tennessee for breakfast one morning.

Bob's Dairyland doesn't look too promising from the outside (that is, if you're in the market for some breakfast, not bbq), but it delivered. We chose it because it was approximately halfway between Boone and where Kristi lives in TN.  I ordered a chicken & egg biscuit and that biscuit was *amazing*.   There are many things I miss about the South, and food is definitely one of them.

Kristi & Tracie loaded up on grits and other Southern breakfast delicacies.  I kinda blew it by ordering coffee, which was nothing special, instead of getting sweet tea.  The three of us spent a good bit of time catching up and chatting about our former embarrassing moments with boys, etc, and then it was time for us to part ways.  Kristi had to get back to her family, and Grandfather Mountain was calling our names.  Tracie's daughter "helped" by taking our photo outside Bob's Dairyland so that we could all have a memento of our time there, but I'm afraid that she missed our faces altogether.

I can't recall the height of Grandfather Mountain at its absolute summit, but there's a suspension cable bridge atop it that is one mile high, and that's where we ended up that day.  I never thought I'd feel vertigo or anything like that while crossing it, so it surprised me when I was a little bit nervous when I was out in the middle of it. 

The Singing Bridge on Grandfather

More of Tracie's daughter's camerawork!

I stayed here while Tracie and Co went onward to explore

We spent some time admiring the view and then made our way homeward to get ready for dinner preps that evening.  Tracie & Rene were getting ready to regale me with some good old-fashioned NC barbecue with MS side dishes, and they didn't disappoint!  Before dinner I read books with the kids to keep them occupied 'cause goodness knows I'm no help at all in the kitchen.  Before long we were sitting down to a supper with ribs, pulled pork, fried green tomatoes, potato salad, homemade pickles, and more. Which made my husband jealous in the retelling, but what he envied most was our after-dinner beverage.  You see, Tracie has these connections.  And with these connections she traded some of her yummy homemade pickles for some peach shine.  It was a little rough at first but it smoothed out enough after a few tentative sips to finish it.  Tracie assures me that she will let it age a bit in her freezer and that she'll bring some with her on her next visit to New England. 

We stayed up that night poring over old yearbooks and watching an extremely dated video of the Junior Miss pageant for the class of '91.  Holy cow, but did we ever make some misguided sartorial choices! Not that I was in the pageant, mind you, but I can attest to the fact that at the time I deeply admired what all of the contestants wore. Ahh, the early nineties.  Good times.

I woke up the next morning to another gorgeous day, so after packing up my suitcase, we downed a quick breakfast and spent some time outdoors: big wheels, weeding, and hoeing were on the agenda, but then we settled down to blow a bubble or two, as Tracie's son demonstrates:

After that we made a quick trip into town for lunch and for one or two more photo ops in Boone before having to head back to the airport.  Boone is definitely a wonderful town that needs further exploration, and I was sad to be heading back to New England. If I had but world enough and time.  You know?

Local legend Doc Watson, encased in carbonite like Han Solo.  Or maybe this is just a bronze statue...

Okay, I loved this general store.  There were three row of barrels filled with old-fashioned candies.

I guess they don't call these the Blue Ridge Mountains for nothing