True Grits

My pal Wallis is cooking up a new venture. He’s a displaced southern boy living in man’s body in Michigan… and he yearns for the flavors of his youth. That yearning has benefits for the rest of us. Robby and I, for example, usually get a breakfast or two a year out of his valiant attempts at recreating the perfect southern brunch… These magical meals bring about platters of thick bacon, flaky biscuits, savory sausagey gravy, perfectly fried eggs (it is the only time I’ve ever seen Robby dig into fried eggs. He shuns them everywhere else in life– but there, at Wallis’ table, he tucks into them as though they are his favorite food…)– and always, always, there are grits.

I love grits. I came to them via my parents and grandparents– all of us bonifide northern-midwesterners. My mother’s father called them mush and I couldn’t ever decide which I liked better– the first morning’s version with yellow pools of butter and great lashings of maple syrup– or the second morning’s version where the left overs were fried into cakes with crispy edges.

My parents were big on grits, too. Years ago, before The Cracker Barrel restaurants made it this far north, my father would announce, late on a Friday night, “Let’s drive to Kentucky for breakfast”– and we would. Kentucky, being a border state, didn’t shudder at my request for maple syrup. And TCB had enchantingly tiny glass bottles of maple syrup that made it all the more fun…

For years I ate my grits with maple syrup. The same way I ate my Cream of Wheat and Cream of Rice. My mother rotated the Quaker Quick grits with the aforementioned cereals on winter mornings. The bowls, if left unrinsed, would have a ring of steely grit to them.

And then, in college, I met Wallis. And his utter horror that I would slander his good grits with syrup nearly undone any good I’d managed to do with words in our poetry class. I learned to butter and salt my grits. Pepper them even. And ate them this way ever after.

I don’t make grits often. I relish the servings that I get at Wally’s table and the bowls of cheesy grit goodness that our Georgian Uncle Pope makes when we visit. I have, in my fridge door, a tin of really good grits– the kind they use at Zingermans and very, very rarely, I’ll go to the trouble of making them myself but I usually end up with a scorched pan.

Last week we had a grits feast courtesy of Wallis. We did an un-blind taste test with several different varieties. Most of them impressive in their pettigree. Words like stone ground, organic, milled were thrown about while we sniffed and poked and tasted. Really, it was almost as obnoxious as those wine snobs you encounter occasionally. Each of us straining to detect and pronounce the nuance of each speciman.

The results were hilarious. We all liked one variety with almost identical scores. We pronounced the winning grits to be “creamy” and “consistent”… and yet those were the 5-minute Quick ones.

For me, this makes sense. I grew up on the Quick varieties. It’s all that was available above the Mason/Dixon in the 1970s.. but it was funny to see the shocked look on the face of my southern pal Christy– it didn’t seem right to her or me.

On the other flavors we were divided. I learned that I am not a good focus group panelist. I get swayed by worrying out that I will offend the person next or across me if I disagree with their answer. And I second guess myself. I also should have scored my grits based on how I would actually eat them– with butter and salt– and not how they are “naked.” This is why I always score terribly on standardized tests. In all earnesty I start to feel bad for the wrong answers and figure out a way to justify using them. (And yet I don’t have this same level of empathy for, say, some of my boneheaded coworkers…)

By the fourth bowl of grits I was sick wondering whether or not I would like the last one or this one better with bacon or eggs or toast or on the side of a really good steak… Again. Put me on the packaging panel. Or the marketing brainstorming– where I can’t do damage. (By the way– I think “True Grits” would make a really good name. But that’s just me.)

We had, in the end, a marvelous time– as we always do at Wally’s table. Katie’s pots of tea and Wally’s pans of grits combined in our bellies to leave us sated and fat and sloshy. And happy.

Regardless of the grits you choose– make sure they have the proper accompaniments– excellent company and a great deal of laughter. It’s the only real way to enjoy them.

Insomnia

Can’t sleep tonight.

I’ve done all the stuff to welcome sleep– drank some milk, took a bath, read some, facebooked some… but it’s no use. I’m wide awake.

So here are some random thoughts:

1. Read any good books lately? I just finished Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book. It’s good. Not as good as her Year of Wonders but good. I wonder why her stuff isn’t optioned for movies.

2. I’m down to my last box of Mallomars. And I’m getting nervous about it. My Mother-in-Law gave me two cases of them for Christmas. There’s nothing like a good Mallomar and orange juice.  A little chocolate, a little marshmallow, a little juice– ah, bliss. My bliss, unfortunately is about to run out.  Stupid midwest.

3. I’m wanderlusty lately. I want to pack us all up and go someplace for a few days or weeks. Live out of a well-packed suitcase and eat new things, see new places, return home sated.

4. On Sunday night, also unable to sleep (stupid time change?) I found Mark & Olly on television. Two british men who go off on tangent adventures because they can. The series has them living with an Amazon tribe in some far part of Peru. I watched two and a half episodes that night– this is how I fell into the trap of loving Deadliest Catch, too– but it’s interesting TV.

5. Jack’s vocabulary has exploded again. This time it’s all the funny little in-between words… adjectives and adverbs and the ilk. He used the word “also” today. It broke me up. He’s delighted in our recognition of his new words. And he’s a great mimic. He’ll try out phrases he hears from us or his movies. This week we’ve watched A Charlie Brown Christmas a few times so there is a lot of Linus, Charlie, and Snoopy coming out.

6. I can’t beat Robby in Scrabble. Or Lexulous rather. We play it on Facebook. It’s disconcerting to lose to him when it is a matter of words and not numbers… but he’s a much better strategist than I am. My problem is I get so delighted in discovering a word I forget to pay attention to what might be more advantageous. Sometimes the two letter words get more points than the 7 letter words. It’s frustrating, too, because Lexulous circumvents the rules of Scrabble. I grew up on the rules of Scrabble– my grandmother was unyielding when it came to those rules. And there was no use of the Official Scrabble Dictionary unless there was a challenge thrown– you had to rely on the words you knew and could defend– not thumbing through the dictionary to find a word that incorporated the tiles in front of you. You can cheat quite a bit in Lexulous against those rules– it takes a lot of the fun out of it.
And it makes me a crabby opponent. The other day Robby started a new game (which irritated me– the loser gets to do that, not the reigning champ) and played a word that I didn’t know.
“Oooh! A new word! What’s it mean?” asked me earnestly.
“I don’t know,” came my husband’s hesitant reply.
“Yeah, then we’re done with this game then, aren’t we?”

7. To do: Learn the Kitchener Stitch so I can finish up two pairs of socks. Sew Jack’s teddy a little cape so that he can be “Super Georgia.” Drag Robby to IKEA to look at ideas for the kitchen and dining room (we’ll pay the Swedes in lingonberries). Paint a family tree on the upstairs hallway wall for Jack. Clean the basement. Get Robby to do his Charo impression again.

8. I need to come up with a fun treat for Friday at Jack’s preschool. I like bringing in the treat. It’s fun to try to find something that all 20 kids will eat.

Okay.  This hasn’t helped. I’m still not sleepy.

And now I want a Mallomar.

Hold, please.

Oprah keeps telling us all that this is our Wake Up Call.

Consider me hitting the snooze button. Sleeping in. Taking the phone off the hook.

I’m tired of all the doom and gloom and blathering on about the economy. Blahdittyblahblahblah.

Monday morning was my first Monday morning in months of not driving to work. Nearly every Monday since September I’ve gone into work early to knock off press releases and the ilk while Jack and Robby negotiate the school day preparations. This Monday we sent Daddy off to work and Jack and I went through the rituals of cereal, clothes, and backpack. I dropped off the little rabbit then drove to the park and willed myself to walk around the 1.3 mile trail twice.

It had seemed like a good idea the week before. Unfortunately the temperature was hovering just over 20 degrees with a biting wind. I looked ridiculous– layers of old ski clothes and my Pakistani Freedom Fighter Hat. (It’s really just an odd shade of green and simple wool hat but it’s made in Pakistan and we’ve always called it that.) I kicked myself for not buying an iPod before the reality of semi-unemployment hit. The first lap went okay. I moved fast enough to stay warm and two sides of the walk really weren’t so bad. The other two sides– were the wind came sheering across the open fields was a bit cruel. Apparently Mother Nature thinks I haven’t been kicked around enough.

On the second lap there was a creepy man hovering in a white van. The kind of van without windows in the back that will be easy enough for the producers on Oprah to find when they are doing the reenactment of my disappearance footage. I walked the long way around it– avoiding the side door and then spotted another creepy man with a backpack who, the closer I walked to him, slowed his gait. We would intersect at the one point in our park where there is no visibility from the road. A stretch through the frozen swamp where the chunks of my body would be found in about 6 weeks when the ground thaws. I turned on my heel and walked back the other way. There are very few incidences in my life where I’ve regretted being born a girl– this would be one of them. Stupid creepy men and their vans and backpacks.

I walked again on Wednesday– this time I ran for 100 steps, walked for 100 steps on the first lap. Again– an iPod would have improved my lot. At least it was well above freezing. I lapped an old lady. (She had an iPod, by the way.) Today the price of all my good intentions is a flare up of plantar facsiitis… Mother Nature could care less whether or not I’m healthier. (And she probably has a freakin’ iPod, too.)

Tomorrow I’m walking with my mother-in-law. She’s better than an iPod. We’ll mock the super serious healthy people together.

We’ll see what the next weeks hold. In the meantime call the front desk and tell them to hold my calls.