Here’s something you’ve never seen before. Few have. I produced these vignettes in 1997, why I can no longer remember. I am pretty sure that whatever the reason, they were never used. One of my favorite files (using that word very loosely!) contains such art; there isn’t as much as you might imagine. I’ve never been the kind of compulsive sketcher that most cartoonists seem to be. I’ve always taken that as a sign I missed my calling, as a sign I am not a born cartoonist. Please! I’m not saying I’m not good at it. I think I’ve done rather well. However, it has never come easy, and it can seem suspiciously like work at times, albeit not very strenuous work. Now, where was I going with all this? Well, if I remember, I’ll get back to it tomorrow.
Scenes from the Morgue
By Jimmy Johnson
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105 responses to “Scenes from the Morgue”
Lilyblack, some potatoes are best when baked, such as Idaho and Russet. Others, such as the white and red rose potatoes are best when boiled. You’ll probably have much better luck with your stews or pot roasts if you don’t use bakers. (My mother was a great cook, but this is one lesson she never learned; she always used bakers for everything.)
There are always rutabagas at Lutheran church lutefisk suppers here. Rutabagas taste > turnips > turnips do. I love ’em, and put gravy from the Swedish meatballs on mashed bagas and pass on the potatoes. Some who hate lutefisk come anyway, for the company and also the meatballs. First local LF. supper was last Th., next is day after tomorrow. Same synod, but this one’s a big church in town, with two full-house services each Sun. Both $15 / adult ticket, all-you-can-eat, but I rarely do seconds. Another, also ELCA, will prob do theirs after TG. Also a large church, +/- new bldg., s. of town. Also, rounds of lefse, a thin potato bread.
Well, Jackie, it’s not much of a recipe. First, you need to find a bag of stone ground white corn meal (I use medium ground) because I don’t know if any other kind would work. There are several companies that sell it here in NC. Basically, you pour some corn meal in a bowl, add some salt and pepper, and then pour on enough water (while working the water in with your hand) until it reaches the consistency of a not too soggy mud pie. It needs to be patted into flat rounds (think mud pie again) no larger than the palm of your hand. Be sure they are plenty moist all the way through, if too dry, they may disintegrate. You can use them in just about any boiled meal – beef stew, green beans, collards. They absorb the flavor of the pot “likker” and add substance to a pot of vegetables. You generally put them in towards the end of the cooking time, after the other food is about done, and there has to be enough liquid in the pot that the dumplings will be submerged. I’ve never timed it, but I would allow about 20 minutes for them to cook and don’t boil them too hard or they make break up before they cook.
My preferred corn meal, white and yellow, is Shawnee Best, about which Jackie may know. Wonder if it would work.
sideburns, as I have said, when we make pot roast we boil potatoes on the side. Works well with russets and redskins. But they don’t get to go to bed with the pot roast
Good morning Villagers…
Tis a brisk morning here….
GR 😉 Finger is still be held together with strips. Dr.’s office gave me some others to put on, but these have not come off yet.
Lily, can I take them off and put on the new ones?
OK…going to have pot roast for this weekend. Ya’ll made me hungry.
Babysat a two year old last night…thank the Lord he fell asleep at 8, and I went to bed not too long afterwards. He does like to be read to. So, we did some reading and he rode the tricycle around, well he tried using the peddles, so he pushed it around with his little toes. Cute.
ya’ll have a blessed day.
I survived the trip from Indiana to Atlanta, Georgia. My awesome friend bought us tickets to the Paul McCartney concert. She and I go back to college days, and we were up half the night, catching up. Now, we are trying to convince ourselves to do something interesting instead of sleeping the day away. Later!
Granny Carol, I suspected as much- it is similar to hot water cornbread, which my grandmother was excellent at. No recipe, it is all done visually and by touch!
Hot water cornbread is like a giant cornmeal flat patty that is fried on a well aged iron (heavy iron) flat griddle and flipped like flapjacks, crispy on outsides and moist and gooey on inside. Eaten hot it is like crisp ambrosia. Still good cold.
Well, grandmother who raised me wasn’t that good at this, it was my step grandmother, who also fried the best chicken I ever ate.
She had lived in a log cabin with no stove, cooked in fireplace most of her life. Kept the cleanest house you ever saw, obsessive but she was pretty old when she got one, so she treasured it! My step dad and uncle moved parents to town and a house in 1950’s.
Far move, it was about 120 miles from hill country to the Delta, a million miles in traditions and customs.
By the way, I love regional cooking but lutfish (spelling?) is one of the items I draw the line at! Rest of it, I would love.
Love, Jackie
Granny Carol, I forgot to say my maiden name is actually Hodgson. The famous Hodgson Mill products are actually done by a distant cousin whom I do not know but have eaten their grains and meals forever.
The Shawnee Mills products are also my favorites now, Ghost.
My family used to grind a lot of their own grains, my great grandfather and grandfather had their own grist mills and did stone ground meals for the farm workers and family, didn’t sell it.
Unfortunately this had ended by my lifetime, along with the syrup production from sorghum grains, although apparently they did cane syrups also, used mules to power.
I keep saying the family loaded themselves and all their kith and kin into wagons right after the American Revolution, headed west from the Piedmont and stopped in Louisiana hills about 1800 where they felt at home apparently. It is a pocket of little Carolinas in customs and traditions.
Love, Jackie
Good morning, Villagers. Great run this morning, surgery and hospital rounds went well. We are back in The Office Is My Life in plenty of time, which puts the Front Office Girlz in a good mood, for a change 😀
Jackie, I don’t know how to bake and don’t really want to learn. I will admit an occasional twinge to learn how to bake bread, though. My family pretty much used Aunt Jemima and Jiffy mix.
Oh, and my aunt assures me that our family migrated from Prussia to East Texas in the 1840s following the failure of the Revolution of 1848 in Germany, and here we still are. Not much in the way of cooking traditions except for potato pancakes, which I only indulge in during family reunions. Butter and applesauce, no syrup
jackie, oh yeah. sorghum syrup beats the watery corn syrup types hands down. i always liked the buckwheat pancakes too, but nobody makes them anymore. more flavor and more filling than the standard type.
on todays strip, my mom worked for a while in my elementary school lunchroom. workers got to take leftovers home so we had hand-me-down food but didnt mind. this was in the ’60’s when they were allowed to cook for taste and not just to a federal chart of allowed foods.
OF live webcam isn’t. Peace, emb
TIP shows “Cleopatra Testing Poisons On Condemned Prisoners” by Alexandre Cabanel. That is on the cover of our copy of “The October Horse” with the prisoners cropped out. Silly me, I thought it had been painted for that book.
I’ve seen the lineage of our surname traced back to Germany and hence, via England, to America in pre-Revolutionary days. (One direct ancestor served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, so I guess I could be a member of the Sons of the Revolution). I guess you’d say we are pretty well Americanized by now.
Dressing, thank you, not stuffing. Stuffing is EVIL! (Thank you, Alton Brown.)
My late mother in law cooked collard greens with ham hocks for dinner every New Year’s Day, and they were delicious! Now that she’s gone I won’t get any more collards because she and I were the only ones that ate them. sigh…
I do occasionally make a roasted vegetable dish with potatoes, carrots, onions or leeks, beets, turnips, and portobello mushrooms for covered-dish get togethers that is very popular.
eMb, I lived in Sioux Falls South Dakota for two years in another lifetime, and managed to miss lutefisk completely. When I asked about it the family I lived with only said it was awful and no-one should ever eat it. I have since come to the conclusion that it was not the fault of the lutefisk, but that the lady who cooked was just a poor cook.
Granny Carol, thanks for the dumpling recipe! One of our favorite meals here is chicken and dumplings, for which I use a standard biscuit recipe. The difference is, some days I make rolled dumplings, and others I make drop dumplings. I’ve never tried cornmeal dumplings, though. I’ll bet they’d be really good in chili!
My favorite mashed potato recipe (recipe? for mashed potatoes? HA!) includes russets, red creamers, and Yukon golds along with lots of butter and cream. Yum!
No mashed potatoes ever served here. Closest we come is “Shook Potatoes,” thin-skinned red potatoes boiled an hour, drained, shaken vigorously, and then apply butter, salt and pepper. The Boy In My Life likes them so well he cooks them for snacks
Poor Meg. I wonder she’s going to feel about eating hand-me-down Galettes and Crepes, Quenelle de Brochet, Cassoulet, Bouillabaisse, and Choucroute Garnie?
Her friends didn’t seem to mind the leftover Étouffée :p
Cooking term of the day: ” Maillard reaction”
We often cooked potatoes at supper time, the evening meal many of you would call dinner. Anyway, if the occasion was special we’d have mashed potatoes, but a regular family meal they would just be boiled, and everyone was expected to mash them up on their plate, with their fork. Usually there would be something to go on top of them, like stew with gravy, or creamed chicken. Or we could just put butter on them. When our son’s girlfriend (now wife) stayed for supper she thought this mashing with a fork was awfully peculiar; her family had more formal customs and *always* fixed mashed potatoes if they were serving them.
Ghost, thanks for asking. I look at this page faithfully every day but seldom have anything to add to the conversation!
About turnip greens, I looked up Bok Choy once on Wikipedia because I wondered what the heck it is really. Well, it’s turnip greens! You can read it yourselves if you want. This Asian variety is grown for the leaves and not the root. I plan to cook some but haven’t yet. This discussion is sure giving me a push in the direction of turnips!
Buckwheat pancakes are still made at some breakfast chains. We go to such places rarely but I do order them now and then. The Bruce’s yam folks make an excellent sweet potato pancake mix which is what we usually use when making pancakes at home. I used to have to buy it at Kroger when I was visiting in-laws in Georgia but saw it recently at a Fresh Market in central Florida.
You can still buy grains like buckwheat at Whole Foods and I imagine Fresh Market and other natural foods stores. My problem with buckwheat is it will turn rancid, so I have to store it in freezer or fridge. I used to make a lot of pancakes with Whole Foods multigrain mix which is really good for you. Bruces does a good sweet potato pancake mix, I agree.
But all whole wheat and other flours has same problem, rancidity if not refrigerated. Or used up quickly.
I didn’t mention the wooden mortar and pestle, grinding stump, I have from an ancestor. It is a big chunk of tree and the grains were put into it and ground by hand with another big chunk of tree.
Love, Jackie
The frisbee one would be a good t-shirt, assuming it was colored, or otherwise adjusted so the highlight in Janis’s hair doesn’t look like an angry eyebrow.
You know, that could be an angry eyebrow! Arlo is playing keep away with her Frisbee.