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​people + places   |   eats + things

meatetarian eats the masters >> an illusion of simplicity

4/11/2019

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For 30 years, nearly every time I introduced myself as Dallas, I was asked if I was from Dallas or Texas.

“Nope, I’m from around Augusta, Georgia.”

“Oh! Augusta! That’s where the Masters is, right? Do you golf?”

I do not. I barely Putt-Putt, and I never found myself caught up in the hubbub of the golf tournament that calls my hometown its own. Growing up, Masters Week was also our spring break, so though I’d occasionally watch the final hole with my family, it’s never been the sport I drop everything I’m doing to put on TV {read: Georgia games}. But when you grow up surrounded by something like that, that even non-golf fans know about and think is a big deal, it’s hard to escape the lore of the course.
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Even our local baseball team is called the Augusta Greenjackets — a play on the prestigious green jackets that winners of the Masters earn and that are also worn by members of the Augusta National. No one but members know how to become members, and most of the membership list is hush-hush (although I did find this 2015 one on Bloomberg), so it’s kind of like the Masons … except with significantly fewer really cool movies, books, History Channel documentaries and an order to protect the Holy Grail. 
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my personal favorite (and now retired) logo for the augusta greenjackets, found via google.
But there are some pretty legendary things associated with the Augusta National: the beauty of the course, particularly when all the azaleas are blooming; its awesome history as a peach orchard; the amount of exclusivity and experience given to patrons, even we peasants who aren’t members; and, of course, the food.
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I would be 100 percent surprised if this is the first time you’ve ever read anything about the food at Masters Week tournaments. More than anything, given that golf is not my favorite sport, I wanted to go to the course for the crème de la crème of US sporting events cuisine. 
​
This year, I was lucky enough to be able to, thanks to my parents winning the coveted ticket 
lottery for the first-ever Augusta National Women’s Amateur tournament. The first few days of the tournament were held at another area golf course, Champion’s Retreat, but the final was held at the Augusta National. JE and I were given the tickets as part of my 30thbirthday present, and I could not wait to get my hands on a pin for my collection … and my mouth on pimento cheese and egg salad sandwiches.

The recipes for these, especially the pimento cheese, remain 1) an actual mystery and 2) a closely guarded secret. A man named Nick Rangos created the recipes for these two sandwiches and made the pimento cheese mixture himself. In the early 2000s, Augusta National executives decided to have the local restaurant Wife Saver {personal note: I promise I’ll write about this place too; it’s a hometown favorite} make the sandwiches. Well … Wife Saver makes some damn good fried chicken and sides, but its initial pimento cheese sandwich was not up to par — hey look! A golf pun! -- with Rangos’ original recipe. Rangos wasn’t tellin’ nobody his secret recipe, especially the owner of the business that now had his business, so the Wife Saver folks spent a hot minute getting things right. Rangos passed away, and his original pimento cheese recipe died with him. According to Newsweek, the National eventually moved all concession-creation in-house, so I cannot be sure how accurate this year’s sandwich was to the one Nick Rangos developed more than 40 years ago. 
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But I am very accurate when I say it was good. Like, went back and got seconds good. Rivals my Nanny’s pimento cheese good.
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stacks on stacks of souvenir sandwiches, pimento cheese and egg salad, from the augusta national. note the impeccable and on-trend modern branding on the sandwich bags. yes y'all, i brought sandwiches home for photos since cameras are not allowed on the course during tournament days.
There was a tense moment when JE claimed he liked a particular brand of store-bought pimento cheese better, but I think that’s sacrilege. Personally, I think I have more expertise than he does in this situation, because I have tried numerous pimento cheeses over my 30 years and this is top three, for absolute certain. No. 1 is my Nanny’s, the No. 2 spot belongs to Proper Pepper out of Sandersville, Georgia. 

Pimento cheese, for all intents and purposes, is a blend of mayonnaise, cheeses, pimiento peppers and seasonings. Fun fact though, a lot of commercially made pimento cheeses use red bell peppers, not pimiento peppers, in their mixtures because it’s cheaper. Lame sauce, y’all. You gotta have the real thing. Improperly made pimento cheese can also be overly creamy and mushy, so having the right ratio of mayonnaise-to-cheese is muy importante. Especially when enjoyed in sandwich form, a soppy and liquid-y pimento cheese mixture can seep into the bread and cause it to be as great as that PB&J that got squished at the bottom of your lunch box that one day in first grade. The other way improper way pimento cheese can be made is too dry, either because there wasn’t enough mayonnaise to balance the cheese, or the cheese itself was poor quality and winds up with a mealy texture. Gross.

Whether it was Rangos’, Wife Saver’s or some sweetheart in the Augusta National kitchen’s recipe that was lovingly spread between two slices of soft white bread this Saturday, it was the perfect balance of all ingredients. There was texture from the cheeses — definitely some type of cheddar involved, and possibly a white cheese as well; my palate is sadly not that distinctive yet — but it was still creamy and light. The peppers themselves had a nice bite to them too, and the flavor wasn’t exactly spicy, but you could tell there was seasoning added other than salt. 
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Oh, and did I mention these bad boys are like, less than two bucks each? Yeah. Not a joke. That’s less than half the price of a bottle of water at a Georgia football game.
Picture
james edward and i at the founders circle photo op during the augusta national women's amateur this weekend.
The egg salad sandwiches, of which I may or may not have had three {stop giving me that judge-y look!}, were equally satisfying. Egg salad is a mixture of chopped or diced hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, seasoning and in some cases, spices or pickle relish. Maybe some mustard, too. There wasn’t any pickle relish in the egg salad sandwich at the Augusta National, and the egg salad was seasoned very lightly. What impressed me most about the mixture here was the texture. It almost seemed whipped, it was so airy! 

Neither sandwich seeped too far into the bread slices, and I swear whoever they had quality-controlling the bread here deserves a trophy too. The most magnificent part of these sandwiches is their simplicity: only a few ingredients, reminiscent of things most Southern 
mamas and cooks make on the reg; and there’s nothing pretentious about them, even though they’re sold at one of the most exclusive sporting event in the world. But the simplicity is almost an illusion.
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Think about it. Pimento cheese and egg salad are two very Southern things that you can find in a gazillion places and a basquillion different forms anywhere below the Mason-Dixon. The Augusta National could have hired the freakin’ Kroger across the street to commercially produce enough egg salad and pimento cheese to spread on enough Wonderbread slices for a cheap-enough price for multiple thousands of people to enjoy. Instead, they found a local man, then a local restauranteur, then their own staff to create, re-create and re-re-create Southern classics using ingredients so pristine and perfectly balanced that it adds to the grandeur of the experience of being one of the Chosen Ones to attend an event during Masters Week. I bet there’s not a stale piece of bread within three miles of Washington Road the week leading up to and the week of Masters.
The food is about where the simplicity ends at the Augusta National. Outside of the concession shops, where the most expensive thing is a souvenir cup of beer at five whole dollars, you’re in a different world. Perhaps you’ve been year after year, but this being my first time (and also, this being my website, lol) I’d like to indulge those who’ve never had the opportunity. 

You do not have to like golf to be part of the tournament. Golf on TV? B O R I N G. Golf when you’re there, when Anna Redding’s ball lands in the spectator area behind you in Amen Corner so you’re like five feet from one of the most amazing collegiate athletes, is definitely not boring. You get caught up in the tenseness of a shot. The hush of the crowd, the whistle of a ball flying through the air. The shock of the woman next to you hissing, “She marked it!” and you have no idea what that means, but apparently it’s important to what happened 
Picture
mom's post-tournament photo of us with our souvenirs, and of course my fur-sister ami dale. behind us are my parents' azaleas, similar to those we saw on the course.
between Jennifer Kupcho and Maria Fassi, the two leaders going into the tournament final. And you get caught up in the beauty of the course, the pinks and magentas and fuchsias of the azalaeas contrasting with the taupe sand-traps and perfect shades of green grass. Even, as my daddy pointed out, the pinestraw is manicured. You get caught up in clapping when everyone else does and gasping when everyone else does, and you wonder to yourself, “Is this what a football game is like for non-football fans and way too many freshman girls?”
​
If you have the chance to go, go. Don’t scalp your tickets, those coveted passes that grant you entrance through the heavily guarded gates. Do eat the sandwiches, and the peach ice cream sandwiches they ran out of, and maybe the barbecue too.

​And if you think about it, make a dumb nerd joke about whether or not there are sarlaccs at the bottom of those pesky sand traps. 
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meatetarian eats >> A Homemade Supper

4/4/2019

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​Remember how when I wrote about Chops & Hops I said it was something I’d been meaning to do for ages, just didn’t prioritize?

WELL. Here we are again, this time a few miles away at a little place called home.made.

I’d been meaning to go in here for absolute ages, and if you don’t follow them on Instagram, you’re missing out on some seriously good food photos. It says a lot about a place’s social media when that’s what entices a complete stranger so much to come in and check it out, so props to whoever runs that.

My chance to dine here came about a week ago when I was invited to join an exclusive outing and celebration for my skincare + cosmetics business. After a jaunt through the new Children’s Garden at the Botanical Garden of Georgia — which is really fun even if you are not a “children” — we traipsed to home.made for supper.

There are a few things that the word “supper” brings to mind. Supper is when your whole family is gathered around the table, you say the blessing together and you enjoy a home-cooked meal. I was fortunate to grow up with a mama who loves to cook, so it was rare that our supper wasn’t actually home-cooked in some form or fashion, and for the most part what we ate was influenced by our Southern roots. Ingredients are fresh. They’re local {we do lots of farmers market shopping in our family}. They’re hearty and filling and … truth be told … not always the healthiest thing on the planet, but Southern food is the envy of chefs everywhere.
​
home.made meets every single one of these expectations when I think about the word “supper.”
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the new orleans style hot chicken at home.made comes with fried chicken, pickled okra and beignets.
The atmosphere is low-light and rustic. I adored the shutters decorating the far side wall. The décor is tasteful and simple.

Some restaurants that have the caliber of plating that home.made does have a tendency to be pretentious about what’s on your plate, but not this place. I ordered the New Orleans Hot Chicken Beignets, along with a side of tomato pie, and whoa Betty y’all, I was enamored. The presentation of the dishes are thoughtful and beautiful without being ostentatious. 
​
I will say that I kind of expected my beignets to be stuffed with the hot chicken, but other than that minor hiccup I wanted an entrée size of this meal after I scarfed it down. 
Now, y’all probably heard of Nashville hot chicken, so before I wrote this post I did a little bit of research 
into what the difference is … because I hadn’t had either of them. I know, shame on me, I went to Nashville last weekend and didn’t have hot chicken. Guess I’ll have to make a return trip, OK? Per the ONE non-Wikipedia page I found that wasn’t a rating site or some obscure travel recommendation where the “best restaurants” are the ones that paid for ad placement … there are some key components to make a traditional hot chicken.
  1. Really salty, spicy, tender fried chicken, preferably seasoned to have a slow, lingering burn
  2. Pickles — dill pickles, specifically, if we’re talking Nashville-style
  3. Bread
I do not know this to be true, but upon this investigation I’m inclined to think that home.made called this dish “New Orleans” because of what constitutes the pickles and the bread here. Let me explain.

Hot chicken is to Nashville as beignets are to Nawlins.
​
The most famous beignets are found at Café Du Monde in the French Quarter. Introduced to the state of Louisiana by the Acadians, these delicacies are square pieces of choux pastry dough fried to the perfect light golden brown and covered with powdered sugar. I have never had these beignets, but my mama has, and she raves about them to this day and also gets mail-order coffee from the shop. 
We have the fried chicken — strips curled up in the fryer, dredged in a spicy breading and coated with a buffalo-style sauce. We have the bread component: two delicate beignets with a heavy hand of powdered sugar. Last, but certainly not least, we have the pickles.

Another what-I-infer-to-be-homage to New Orleans, the pickles here are pickled okra. Okra originated in Africa, and according to documents from the University of Arizona, it came to the Americas by way of the slave trade in Brazil, Dutch Guinea and New Orleans beginning in the 1600s. Okra was a staple of the diet of many enslaved Africans in the South, and became a staple in Louisiana gumbo and other dishes because of it.
​
Y’all, I LOVE okra in its fried and pickled forms, and I do not know what on earth kind magic happened at home.made, but this is the best pickled okra I’ve eaten in my life. It was crisp, it was vinegar-y, it had tang and brine. The gelatinous feel that stewed okra can get (fun fact, it’s called “mucilage”) wasn’t there. There was zero 
Picture
mama's photo of authentic beignets at cafe du monde in new orleans, 2018. used with her permission, kind of. (hi mom!)
Picture
a bite of tomato pie at home.made.
stringiness and even the seeds were pickled. I need a jar of these, stat.

My side dish of tomato pie wasn’t as picturesque, but it was everything good and homey that I needed it to be. I expected a slice and loved that it came instead in an individually-sized ramekin! 
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I have one regret, and it’s that I didn’t get the fried green tomato dessert. Yep, dessert. I mean, I’d already eaten some form of buffalo chicken with powdered sugar, so this sounded like the most logical next course, right? I promise I’ll go back for 
that one though and do a revisit!
​

In fact, I already have a plan for my edibles on my next visit. If you’re not already sick of me using the word “supper” in this post … home.made has a SUPPER CLUB Tuesdays through Saturdays from 5 to 6, and again Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 to 9! It differs week-to-week and includes a choice of starter and entrée. Which means clearly I’ll just have to finish things off with that fried green tomato crisp, right?
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of showers and sudoku

4/1/2019

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As a child, I assumed this had some obscure reference to the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. Like, these people escaped religious persecution, got on a boat called the Mayflower and in the month of April they weathered a lot of storms to land in North America. Not quite. I then figured the adage prophesized the month of April as the rainiest of the year, and thus all the flowers would bloom in May. This is probably closer to the actual origin of the saying.

Now at the ripe ol’ age of 30, I find “April showers bring May flowers” to have a different meaning. 

I was able to spend some time recently centering myself, which I am sure sounds hippie-dippie-trippy, but I’m being serious. March was, for whatever reason, not my best month in a lot of ways, particularly when it came to achieving some pretty lofty {but hear me, completely doable} goals in my skincare + cosmetics business. I had quite a few wins and high moments, but when March 31 rolled over to April 1 at midnight, I realized what Cinderella must have felt like as her glitter carriage morphed back into a pumpkin. On the plus side, I still had both shoes on my feet.

I digress.
One of the things I started doing to break my super-fun stress level is focus on something that isn’t related to working in any sense of the word. For a while I tried reading, but I discovered I was easily able to use reading as a distraction rather than a refocusing tool {“Just one more chapter, self! Then I promise I’ll go do XYZ. … Oh no, now it’s too late at night; guess I will have to wait until tomorrow.”} It’s sudoku, of all things. 

​​Unfamiliar with sudoku?
Picture
{thanks google for this image}
Let me explain. You’ll typically be able to find a weekly or daily sudoku puzzle in your local newspaper. There are nine big squares of nine little squares each, and the goal is for each of your nine big squares, each row and each column to contain the numbers one through nine once each. For most of my life I never bothered to try because I told myself the story that “I am bad with numbers.” Granted, math is not my strong suit, especially in the realm of a classroom, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. I also, fun fact, spent about 15 years calling it “soduku,” pronounced like Count Dooku. So I extra was telling myself a story here.

Tonight as I did my “focus practice” as I’ve been calling it, I pulled out a recent puzzle from the local Athens independent newspaper, Flagpole. My method is to examine each square in detail and see, based on the numbers that are already put there, which numbers could be in that square. I do this for every open square. Then I go back through: Is there any square that could onlybe one number? Over and over again, then crossing out possibilities in other squares. 
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I’m sure someone out there has a different way to do sudoku, but this is my way and I’m cool with it, so calm yourselves. 
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I fill one square in — yes! A win! Then spend a few minutes going back over the entire puzzle, looking for the next one. Crossing out the ones that won’t work. Back and forth, up and down, over and over until suddenly, YAAAS! All the pieces start coming together. One number goes in that clears four squares that clear six more and it keeps going and going until the puzzle is completed.  Such a feeling of accomplishment!

Isn’t it interesting how momentum builds, and then all of a sudden everything just comes together?

I could have easily put the puzzle away when it was frustrating. And trust me, when I have gone over rows and columns and squares and can’t seem to find either my error or the next clue, I want to ball the dang paper up and hurl it across the bathroom and open up a book. But because I focused, because I didn’t even let my very cute cats distract me, because I did the work to set the things up and I didn’t stop following up on my work until the thing was done, the thing got done. 

Y’all, I spent two straight days in March at a conference for my company and heard about a dozen entrepreneurs talk about building momentum, and it took a dang sudoku puzzle and a silly old wives tale to hit my mindshift. The teacher appears when the student is ready, amirite?

Last May through this March I was planting seeds. I wasn’t particularly focused about it all the time {hello, last August, October and this January and kind of March}, but I still trudged forward. And now that I’m aware of what a truly focused mindset looks like, I’m going to make it rain all over those seeds in April. That’s called momentum. 

And those showers? They’re going to bring May flowers.
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    • >> events + business
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