After entertaining guests from Nebraska and France, as well as meeting other people outside of the south, I must tell you about the unique foods here.

At first, Ty was very excited about all of the catfish. He still is, and if he could, he’d order it twice a week. Being from Nebraska, the only way we’d have fish was lightly breaded and pan fried, but the cornmeal breading brings a whole new level to golden brown and delicious.

There were some unexpected turns, too. If traveling in the south, be sure to order an “unsweetened iced tea,” otherwise you’ll get something close to lemonade without the lemons.

The vegetable selection really impressed us. We needed a field guide when trying out the “home cooking” places to identify purple hull peas, turnip greens, mashed squash stuffing, green tomato relish, fried green tomatoes, fried squash, fried okra, speckled butter beans, black-eyed peas, and buttered turnips. The turnip greens were a wonderful find. They are somewhat bitter, but they serve a hot pepper sauce on the side that peps them up. As a leafy green vegetable, it is also an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acid.

We ate at Lucinda’s BBQ between Hendrix College and downtown Conway, and they had buttered turnips as a daily special on the menu. We’ve been pretty adventurous with our ordering, so we decided to get them.

It was like forgetting to ask for unsweetened tea all over again. Yes they were warm and buttered, but they were sweet! Where was the savory bitterness of the greens? I’ve looked up some recipes on the internet, and none of them contain sugar, either.

Good news though, the okra is fresh and in season!

We’re back from the Catskills and the Cape. Started crocheting the fillet mesh cropped cardigan from Debbie Stoller’s _Happy_Hooker_ crochet book. Also started a crocheted recycled plastic bag for our friends in Chicago. More on those later!

To show for crafting: Before we left, I finally got the scrapbook done for the whole “engagement” point in time. Here are some fun shots…

I normally don’t condone scrap booking…It seems like an excuse to be a pack rat and collect all of these very specific cutting tools and acid-free papers, but I guess it is no different than any hobby. No pictures go into this scrap book, just mostly poetry, maps, sketches, receipts, ticket stubs. I realized Tyrone and I both keep these things around, we may as well centralize them. Easier for the NSA to tag us someday, I suppose.

Started this bag this weekend:

Using a size J hook, as I have four of those and no size K’s. I tend to crochet loose anyway, so all will be well. I worked on this at the horse races on Saturday. Tyrone and I biked 6.5 miles from home to bet on the Preakness. I didn’t fare as well as the Kentucky Derby, but Tyrone was hitting his bets all night.

Friday night was Ruth’s bachelorette party. We made her a sash, and a “cootie-catcher” bar selector. At the weirdest bar on the list, Christo’s, they had “live karaoke with a drum machine. Ruth really got into that.

Little did we know, that during one of our anthemic performances, the groom was walking by saying, “with those sounds, why would I ever want to go into that bar?”* or something like that.

Not sure of the make or model of this rusted out truck, but that log in the bumper? Yeah it isn’t there to support anything, it is there because it grew there.

Believe It….Or Not!