White Sangria on the Beach

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

 

It has really been hot lately—in the mid-90’s—with still, thick air that sits close to your skin. While this may not seem so hot to those of you in the American South, or the Mediterranean, or the Tropics, here in my grandmother’s house it is stifling. There is no air conditioning, and only a few electric fans so old you worry as much about sparks as sweat.

Zen and the Art of Savory Cakes

I’ve had a stressful week. I won’t go into full details here, but suffice to say it involves being an absentee landlord dealing with money disputes and general high drama. At the same time, I have started a new summer job waiting tables in a fine dining restaurant. While I’m enjoying my new physical role, I haven’t quite broken in my feet to doing laps around a dining room 8 hours a night. It’s not the same as working in a cushy publishing office. My feet and I are tired.

How to Make Buttermilk

You might assume that being a Southerner I grew up soaking last night’s cornbread in this morning’s cold buttermilk for breakfast, while Pa was already hard at work in the peanut fields. But the reality of my Georgia childhood was not that cliché. Despite the name of this blog, I haven’t had much experience with buttermilk. I grew up in the ‘burbs. We lived in a strip-mall wasteland, where I ate instant oatmeal from packets while my Dad sat in gridlock on his way to downtown Atlanta each day. My mother was from New Jersey, and the closest thing we had to buttermilk biscuits was Bis-quick.