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. 

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.

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.

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.

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?”
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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. 

​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.
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home.made meets every single one of these expectations when I think about the word “supper.”

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.
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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. 

Chops & Hops is one of those places that I’ve been to at least a dozen times over the years, with every intention of writing about it … and it just never happened. Thus, I’ve got lots of different dishes I could write about. Some are on the menu. Some are not. Some I took photos of while learning how to properly plan and execute a beer dinner.

Everything I’ve had at Chops & Hops is spot-on, including the rare steaks {you don’t want to know what happens when you bring me a steak that’s anything more done than “bordering on medium-rare”}, fresh catch — a seafood special that changes often, the cocktails and the desserts. Given the name, it’s no surprise that there’s an extensive and rotating beer program, both on draft and off. But what I’m going to talk about today, now that I finally sat down to write this dayum thang, is a hamburger.

Shocking, I’m sure.

There are five burgers regularly on the Chops & Hops menu right now, including the Local Steakhouse burger. Per the menu, it features barbecue-glazed shallots, house steak sauce, an herbed cheese spread and ground beef from Watkinsville, Georgia, farm Pastures of Rose Creek. I happened to stop in on the restaurant’s ninth anniversary, when it hosted a $9 burger special, so I indulged in what would have been the most expensive burger on the menu for a few dollars off. 

That herbed goat cheese is divine. Every bite of this burger melted in my mouth, and the creaminess of this cheese just added to the effect. I haven’t had steak sauce in I couldn’t tell you how long, but my one critique of the burger is that I felt the barbecue sauce on the shallots and the steak sauce competed with each other. Perhaps you’ll love it; maybe it’s just that I tend to not like steak sauce.
That’s my take on the toppings. But the real star of this show is the beef. Holy Smoky Mountains, Batman … this beef.
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Pastures of Rose Creek raises Piedmontese beef, which is one you may not have heard of before. Honestly, the only reason I did is because I used to work for Georgia Cattlemen’s Association, and the Piedmontese producers would put an occasional ad in the Georgia Cattleman magazine I was in charge of. But there weren’t a whole lot of folks back then who produced Piedmontese beef in Georgia — and still don’t appear to be, according to my haphazard Google search just now. Most of our farmers here are Angus, Hereford, some cross thereof or commercial cattle, which is the industry term for cattle that aren’t purebred.

want to finish their cattle on grain or on grass. Now, I haven’t spoken with the owners of Pastures of Rose Creek, though I plan to for an upcoming local business feature, but grass-finished beef tends to have a deeper, more gamey flavor than the buttery taste of say, a Certified Angus or Certified Hereford animal, because of what the cattle eat up until harvest. In addition, because grain-finishing helps cattle put on fast fat and thus that buttery flavor, grass-finished beef tends to be naturally leaner. I once found out the hard way that means it cooks up faster and can have less moisture content. 
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Perhaps it’s the way these cattle are finished; perhaps it’s the breed itself; perhaps a bit of both; but whatever happened between calf being born and ground beef hitting the kitchen at Chops & Hops made this patty otherworldly.

growth in cattle. Piedmontese cattle have a mutation on this gene that causes a specific protein deletion, which leads to muscular hypertrophy {that’s a technical term for muscle growth}. They’re one of a few breeds that fall under the double-muscled cattle-gory, if you will. 

Per this article from Animals: an Open Access Journal, “carcasses of [double-muscled] animals are very lean, and intramuscular fat content is low.” 

Usually beef tenderness is indicated by the amount of intramuscular fat {think about those little white flecks in a raw steak}. But if a Piedmontese animal is lean, without a lot of that intramuscular fat … how did my burger get so melty-in-my-mouthy?! 

Well, also per that article, “collagen content of the meat is lower, so that meat from double-muscled animals is mostly more tender.” 

Oh. Well. That answers that.

Those conclusions — which in large part could be visual, and therefore more subjective than scientific — are further proven by the Warner-Bratzler Shear Force Test. AKA, animal scientists are awesome and came up with a way to measure just how tender meat is by measuring how easily it can be cut through. As you’d imagine, the less force it takes your knife to slice through your steak, the more tender it is. And according to the North American Piedmontese Association website, Piedmontese ranked as the most tender beef compared to other breeds.
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Though my mouth isn’t nearly as reliable as the steel blade that performs the shear force test … after destroying that burger in about five minutes, I must say, my dear Watson, I do concur.

Attention, Bulldogs — Athens. Has. A. Cheese. Market. This is NOT a drill!

Fritz Gibson, a Tifton, Georgia, native who grew up with Extension agent parents, spent years in Vermont and Chicago exploring the culinary world, and he kept ending up working with cheeses. When he and his wife, who works in wine, moved back to the Classic City, they’d already created the idea for Half-Shepherd. The timing was kismet: he said about three months after they moved back and discovered this space off Prince Avenue in the Normaltown neighborhood, the space came up for grabs and they nabbed it.

Several years ago, when I lived in the Virginia Highland neighborhood of Atlanta, I lived within walking distance of this incredible neighborhood market that had sandwiches, a bakery, dry goods, wine and a cheese display to swoon over, which was (wo)manned by a real-life cheesemonger. 

To my knowledge, at least during college and in the year since I returned, Athens didn’t have anything of the sort. Most of the larger grocery stores amped up their “fancy” cheese selection during the past few years, but I mean … it’s a grocery store. You go in, you play bumper-buggy with about 6,431 fellow shoppers all vying for the same half-pint of heavy cream. The store might be clean, but when you’re on a time crunch to get back home and cook a meal/take the dog to doggie daycare, it’s hard to achieve cookery zen when you’ve been waiting in the self-checkout line for 17 minutes.

This is why I love local markets, especially local markets that market other local stuff. Half-Shepherd takes things up a notch though: “Local foodies, I see your farmer’s market vibe and I raise you sandwich café.”

Yes, y’all, I counted: 24 mustards, additional cheeses, meats and spreads to pick from. I added the prosciutto and apple & onion jam, though in hindsight I’ll request Dijon mustard as well next time. The Old World has comte, an Alpine cheese I’d never heard of; gouda and brie, which is one of my not-so-guilty cheese pleasures; all on sourdough bread from Atlanta’s H&F Bread Co.

“If you ever tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich with an aged cheese, it kind of breaks apart when you heat it up and it gets oily,” Gibson said. “The trick is to mix in some less-aged cheeses with more moisture in them. With both [the Old World and Old School] sandwiches, we try to do one fairly aged cheese, one moderately aged cheese and one fresher cheese.”

For the Old World, the brie is the fresher, the comte a moderately aged melting cheese and the 30-month gouda the more aged.
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My taste buds aren’t refined enough (… yet) to distinguish the difference between all three cheeses, but I can tell you that the blend of the three was a delicate blend of creamy, mild and nuttiness. Prosciutto is a paper-thin sliced Italian dry-cured ham. It is divine. Since it’s cured, it has a pronounced salty flavor, which to me just enhanced how mild the cheeses are. 

I visited Half-Shepherd for its ribbon-cutting ceremony with the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce, and as part of that was able to enjoy kind of a two-fer. The owners put out samples of their Cubanesque sandwich as well, and that will definitely be what I get full-size next time. The roasted pork fell apart in my mouth, and the chow-chow gave a nice crunch and vinegar-y tang. Gibson said he puts the comte cheese — that moderately aged, nutty Alpine cheese on my sandwich — on this one as well. We uncultured (ooh, cheese pun!) Americans have a tendency to think of Swiss cheese as ivory slices with holes in them, but there is a much broader category of Alpine cheeses like comte that Half-Shepherd can now introduce us to.

For a while now, I saw friends from my hometown post about going to this new coffeeshop called Rooted Coffeehouse. It looked absotively, posilutely Instagrammable: the drinks were beautiful and dressed with care; the decor had all the muted, neutral tones that are so modern and "in" right now; its actual Instagram account is straight-up eye candy and to be honest I am heavily inspired by the way they shoot their drinks, so hey, I'm going to copy that cat at some point for future stylings, I'm sure. But what I did not realize was that Rooted is much, much more than a coffeeshop.

vibe. No offense to Starbucks, of course, but y'all know I have a penchant for supporting local businesses and people. I'm as basic as they come (not pictured is the "You had me at Pumpkin Spice Latte" T-shirt I was wearing while visiting Rooted), but what I found when it comes to working from home is that you often need a change of pace. Or, well, place.

And truth be told, when I'm visiting my family, there are not a lot of options in the Evans and Grovetown areas for locally-owned restaurants that have an atmosphere I find both inspirational and able to focus in. Usually the music or the people are too loud; the lighting blows (have you ever tried digitally editing photos or video in the dark with your computer brightness up for full color clarity? If you haven't, don't; your eyes will thank you); there are distractions; it doesn't have WiFi; you get the drift. The difficulty of finding such a place that's not a minimum 30-minute drive from my parents' house was a tad annoying. 

I was so, so excited when I realized that having to come to Evans for dreary duty — oops, I mean "jury duty" — meant that I finally had an excuse to check out Rooted myself. My mom, who's a retired educator and published author, and who happens to be working on a couple writing projects already for 2019, walked in and the first words out of her mouth were, "This would be a great place to come write!" BAM, y'all! And that was before we did so much as get our drinks and food.

Oh, yes. Food. That's right. I don't know how I missed the memo, but Rooted has breakfast sandwiches, lunch-ish sandwiches (it's open until 6 on weekdays and 4 on weekends), Millennial-approved toasts, oatmeal and those purple bowls of fruits and berries. Mom, Daddy and my uncle Abram indulged in "The Classic," which was a breakfast sandwich of egg, cheese, bacon and spinach on ciabatta, and let me tell ya, the breakfast sandwiches are hearty helpings. I should've snapped a photo (ugh, #hindsight) to demo just how big they are! 

At most places I've been with picturesque atmospheres like Rooted, a $5 breakfast sandwich is a weensy lil' English muffin that has maybe a tablespoon of filling and the thought of a piece of bacon. Not. At. Rooted. Be prepared to bring your appetite if you order one of the sandwiches. The price is ridiculously reasonable for what is brought out on your plate.

On top of the avocado mash was a pile of microgreens, which not too long ago became a bit of a favorite of mine. Microgreens are the edible shoots of salad greens or flowers, picked just after the first leaves show up. I'm not sure which microgreens made up the mix on my toast this morning, but they have a lovely light, almost nutty flavor to them. The avocado was sprinkled with Himalayan salt, red pepper flakes, black pepper and hemp seeds. I didn't get much from the hemp seeds in terms of flavor, but overall the combination led to a gentle blend that had a subtle kick to it. Avocado by itself doesn't have much flavor to it — somewhere between a roasted cashew and unsalted butter? — so it takes seasonings very well, especially ones that are salty or spicy. I was not disappointed at all with this kind of breakfast, and it far outshines my own attempts at making avocado toast.

Obviously it is difficult to visit a coffeeshop and not purchase a beverage of some sort, and since the seasonal menu was still available, I partook in a cinnamon white mocha (made with the house-produced cinnamon syrup). It was really sweet, so if you like coffee-flavored-coffee, this one may not be for you. Being that I like quality coffee seasoned with quality creamer, this was a great treat! I love how it was presented — kind of hard to see in the above photo, but it came out in a tallboy glass topped with whipped cream and powdered with cinnamon. I felt so fancy taking it to the table! Bonus points go to Rooted for its custom cup-grips that say "spread joy," which I got when I poured the rest of my cinnamon white mocha in a to-go cup.

I'm quite excited about this new place to work, and also excited for what seems like such a positive addition to the Evans area. Not only is it a locally owned business, but it supports fellow locals as well. Some of its coffee mugs are made by Tire City Potters, located in downtown Augusta, and during the holiday season it started a series of craft, music and community events. I'm bummed I missed out on them and hope that I'll be able to make it back for future ones!

Now, if you need Mom or me any time in the next few days ... we'll likely be sitting on one of the Rooted couches, writing up our latest stories.