Quelle Shlep

I've put that gorgeous photo of sunrise at Seabrook Island to remind myself of what a fantastic place it is, and how much I love being there. Because, man, from where I sit today - the onerous shlep from Baltimore to Seabrook (or vice versa) just about sucks all the joy out of being there.

On the way down, the dog and I made the trip over two days. We left on New Year's Eve and spent it in the Marriott Residence Inn in Fayetteville, NC - which we had calculated to be roughly halfway between Baltimore and Seabrook. That made the trip roughly 5 hours on each day. The husband of course went bombing through the whole trip in a single day and I have to admit I was a bit jealous that he did so. But when we planned the return trip, he planned again to make it in a single day and I planned to go over two days, this time stopping in Wilson, NC, which a fellow Baltimoron who'd been transplanted to Seabrook told us was the exact midpoint.

The husband left on Tuesday and walked in the front door of our house in Bmore on Tuesday night. The dog and I left on Wednesday, planning to get home on Thursday. However, because the dog woke me up at 430 AM on Wednesday, we were on the road by 530 AM, and there was no traffic and we were making great time. We were to Wilson, NC by 1030 AM and I thought, "Really? Stop here at 1030 AM?" No, I thought, we are just going to keep on truckin and get home today.

So we did. However, the heavens chose that particular day to open up and rain like monsoon season in India, so that made the traffic pretty slow. And as well-behaved as my dog is, and as good a rider as she is, after about 8 hours of being cooped up in the back seat, wedged between piles of clothes and more piles of clothes, the dog began to puke. And she puked all over the clean clothes in the back seat. Not her fault. But we were stopped dead in traffic on the Capital Beltway (D.C. Beltway), the rain was pouring down, and the car reeked of dog vomit. And my rear end had completely turned to stone by that point.

The final reward for all that shlepping was the joy of unpacking the car (dodging the dog vomit as much as possible) and piling everything downstairs in the dining room as a staging area. Three days later, most of the piles are still there.

We did have the foresight to leave our bikes at Seabrook, as well as the dogs' crates. Frankly, I don't know how we would ever have been able to haul all that stuff as well as our clothing and the two dogs on the next journey back. I recognize these are all, as my daughter would say, "first world complaints." But still.

Well, THAT was easy!

Just when it appeared that we were about to pack up our stuff and return home without having taken the real estate leap here at Seabrook... we bought a house! (I say "we bought a house" although we haven't closed on it yet, so there's still time for things to get screwed up, but barring unforeseen difficulties, we have bought a house.)

And it was not easy.

We had looked at just about every house for sale on the island - big houses, small houses, condos, townhouses, houses being sold at distressed prices by banks, houses being sold at ridiculously inflated houses by unrealistic owners, you name it, we looked at it. And we had found another house that we liked, the price was right, the house was small and furnished well (and being sold furnished), and we made an offer and it was accepted. Except that house, being 30 years old and residing not far from the ocean, flunked the home inspection and needed a ton of repairs for which the owners were not willing to pay. And the owners of House #1 (which had a sign over its door announcing itself as the "Love Shack") arrogantly assumed they were sitting on a gold mine of a house, and refused to compromise or accept the reality that their house was in pretty bad shape or that prospective buyers would walk away from it, but we did just that: we walked away.

And then we nearly gave up, but my relentless trolling of the Internet real estate sites turned up a couple of new prospects that we hadn't seen in the many weeks of our being here. And just like that, mirabile dictu, we found three houses that we loved nearly in equal measure to each other. One was a house with a great marsh view, but it had a water tower impinging on that marsh view, and so we eliminated it from consideration; the second was a traditional house with a center hallway, hardwood floors and an elevator, and it remained in contention until the end; and the third was the house we chose, a very beach-y little cottage literally within walking distance of the ocean. It too was being sold furnished, and while the furnishings aren't anything I'd pick if I were starting anew, I can certainly manage to live with them. 

We are leaving our new toy in just a few days, to go back home, where we "really" live. I am already trying to plot how soon we can return. The husband has been back home a few times since we've decamped here, and has even stayed overnight in our house and slept in our bed. I asked him how it felt to be back there without me or the dog and he said "weird." I am wondering how I will feel being back there, even with everyone around me: will I still be fully emotionally connected to my hometown, my neighborhood, my house? 

For their part the relatives and friends are doing what comes naturally - trying to get in line for visitation rights to the beach house. I guess we'll be newly popular among them. I am trying to figure out what to do about my garden at home, whether I should bother to plant a victory garden this year, and who will mow the grass and water things during the blistering heat of a Baltimore summer, if we are not there to do it ourselves. All good questions. 

This is what passes for "adventure" when you're middle-aged!

Fantastic Spot

I can't say enough superlatives about The Fat Hen: unpretentious, hip, friendly, and delicious - it's all those things and even more. From the dusty parking lot to the painted chicken tracks on the floorboards, The Fat Hen dishes up fabulous, fresh, locally-sourced food to a packed house that includes tough guys  wearing NASCAR shirts and ladies wearing sequins. The service is speedy without being rushed, and thoroughly professional. We cannot wait to go back.

The husband chose a specialty cocktail that was a Manhattan made with bacon-infused sweet tea bourbon, and believe me when I tell you that when I put that glass to my lips, all I could smell was pig. Liquid pig is not my idea of a good time - but he loved it. I stuck with a blackberry slurry topped with champagne, stirred with a sprig of rosemary. Did I mention all this takes place over top of a dirt parking lot? On the decidedly-less-than-trendy Johns Island? (between Charleston proper and Kiawah/Seabrook).

Some nights there's live music and there's brunch on Sundays. This place is so much fun that it's almost beyond description. THE FAT HEN! GO!

The Fat Hen is located at 3140 Maybank Highway, Johns Island, South Carolina.

The Resultant Cookies

Here are some pix of the pimiento cheese cookies I was raving about yesterday; today I baked them.

After chilling the dough thoroughly (I let it chill overnight), remove it from the fridge and let it soften up a bit. Then roll it out pretty thin (bearing in mind that you will be eating two thicknesses of dough with each bite, so you want the dough pretty thin lest you get a mouthful of chewy cooked flour as you tuck in) and cut it into rounds. You could vary this technique of making tops and bottoms of cookies by making larger rounds, putting the jelly down the middle, and folding the dough over on itself, like a taco or a pierogi, but the tops-and-bottoms method is probably easier for the casual baker, and is the method advocated in the original Southern Living recipe. The cookies do not spread when baking, so you can place them pretty close together on the cookie sheet. Put as many rounds on the cookie sheet as you want to bake in a single batch.

Next, using a teaspoon, put a tiny amount of strawberry jam dead in the middle of each round. The jam will spread as the cookies are baked, and you don't want it leaking out the sides of the cookies, so just use a tiny bit for each one.

Roll and cut out the rounds for the cookie tops, and place one round on top of the strawberry-covered bottoms, pushing lightly around the edges as you put the tops on the cookies.

Crimp the edges to seal. I use the tines of a dinner fork to do this. Try to be sure when crimping that you are piercing both the top and bottom cookie layers, so that the two layers will adhere and make a nice little pocket for the jam.

Bake until golden. Let the cookies rest on the sheet for about 10 minutes to cool before removing them to drying racks to finish. This allows the cheese to reset and the jam to calm down, making it less likely that the cookies will break when transferred to the drying racks.

Let the cookies cool on drying racks until they are at room temp to the touch, and there is no visible sign of greasiness on the bottom of the cookies.

Absolutely delicious, the cookies are the perfect marriage of sweet and savory. Each bite yields butter, pimiento cheese, strawberry jam, and ground pecans. The perfect thing for a tailgate, a Super Bowl party, or any time when pigging out is the order of the day.

You can find the recipe here.

Something that the South has ALL OVER the Rest of the Planet: PIMIENTO CHEESE

One of the things I was really looking forward to about coming South for the winter was the chance to eat real, authentic Lowcountry cooking - not what they feed the tourists at tourist traps, but the real deal. We made some inroads into that at the SeeWee Restaurant, but, really, that's just a fried seafood emporium (with belly-busting desserts); and on a previous trip I sank into the authentic glorious depths of Jestine's Kitchen in downtown Charleston.  But it was in our local grocery store that I really struck paydirt with the discovery of the mannah from heaven that is pimiento cheese.

I had never even heard of pimiento cheese before coming here, and in truth I don't much care for pimientos. So when the husband brought home a plastic vat of day-glo orange paste and called it "pimiento cheese" I was not instantly won over.

Until I tasted it.

And now...I want to put it on everything. I mean, everything.

So what is pimiento cheese, anyway? It's a very healthful concoction that primary consists of shredded cheddar, mayonnaise, and chopped pimientos. Variants include bacon pimiento cheese and jalapeno pimiento cheese, the latter of which I am enjoying mightily in the morning slathered on a toasted bagel. And as luck would have it, this month's Southern Living magazine had a featured article on pimiento cheese, including recipes using this nectar of the gods!

So for this week's Super Bowl party, which is being held here on Seabrook for about 70 or so people, I'm baking and taking pimiento cheese cookies, and boy do they sound exciting! I've made a dough out of pimiento cheese, flour, and ground pecans, and the dough is chilling in the fridge. Later I'll roll it out and cut it into rounds for baking. A scant little spoonful of strawberry preserves goes in the middle of each bottom round, then the bottom rounds are covered with tops, and the edges crimped to seal before baking. Sounds like the perfect combination of savory and sweet to me. I'll bet they'll get gobbled up at the party. Here's the recipe.

Baking in someone else's kitchen has proven a bit challenging, because as a professional amateur avid home baker I am really super-picky about my gear. This house has a very nice professional-grade Kitchen Aid stand mixer, which is great; but the cookie sheets are flimsy and the oven is electric, not gas. So my cooking times have been a bit off as I've tried to bake things down here. There was no rolling pin, and although I have roughly 8 or 9 rolling pins at home, I didn't bring any here; so I had to break down and buy one at the local Ace Hardware store, now bringing my rolling pin tally to 9 or 10. But the hardest thing to find has been a biscuit cutter - there don't seem to be any for sale anywhere close to where we are staying, and this kitchen, oddly, didn't have one. So I improvised and bought some sort of small plumbing fixture at Ace Hardware, which amounts to something like a small, round white piece of plastic piping, and I'm going to use it to cut out my cookies. It cost all of 79 cents and I felt like a genius when I bought it!

The dog is in favor....

Look Out, Gallbladder!

It's Fried Everything Day at the SeeWee Restaurant in Awendaw, South Carolina - although as nearly as I can tell, every day is Fried Everything Day at the See Wee. And God bless 'em for it, because if you and your alimentary canal can withstand it, the fried everythings at the SeeWee are absolutely finger-lickin' delicious. The basket of hushpuppies is on the house and brought to your table without your having to ask, just to tantalize you while you're perusing the menu.

Here was my lunch:

That's fried catfish, French fries, and fried okra. You could also have had fried green tomatoes and fried pickles, just about any kind of seafood fried, and a fried gallbladder on the side. And then there's this:

Truly one of the best red velvet cakes I've ever had, with 3 layers of light, barely-chocolatey cake and honest-to-goodness fluffy cream cheese icing. I couldn't even finish it. I would have taken a picture of the hubster's warm bread pudding with caramel sauce but he demolished it before I could even pull the camera out of the bag.

I say with love and respect that the SeeWee is pretty much a roadside dump, by which I mean that it is very down-home and unpretentious and the bathroom, which is a 1-holer, is outside and around the back of the place. It's a bit more of an adventure than I'd like to have when needing a ladies' room, but that's how it is. I think there are around 20 choices every day from the "sides" and the desserts are just ridiculously amazing. The waitstaff is young and incredibly cheerful, including our server who told us when he brought the condiments that "the 'c' is for cocktail sauce and the 'k' is for ketchup and that's as complicated as it gets around here."

Gotta love that.

Getting to the SeeWee is a bit of a pain, because Highway 17 appears to be under 50-odd miles of traffic-choking congestion, so if you plan to go, you may need to pack some emergency snacks for the drive. On the good side, that part of Highway 17 is called "Sweetgrass Basket Alley" or something like that because both sides of the highway are dotted with little shacks where people sit weaving sweetgrass baskets for sale to the tourists. You will have plenty of time to admire their handiwork and even to make comparisons among the artisans since you'll be sitting in traffic before getting to the SeeWee. But it's all part of the adventure of getting there.

From Seabrook, we had to drive to Charleston, then over the big bridge to Mt Pleasant, and then 11 more miles or so to Awendaw. So it was a bit of a schlep. But I was aiming for something authentically low-country and un-touristy, and on both those scores, plus on the deliciousness meter, the SeeWee was a home run.

Newtered!

The state of South Carolina, my putative adopted new home, has officially been Newtered. Yesterday Gingrich slaughtered Romney in the Republican presidential primary. Which makes me wonder: what the hell is wrong with these people?

So I am an unapologetic left-wing liberal Democrat, and I think everyone should be, but unlike the right wing I do not attempt to impose my ideology on anyone else. (I just think they're wrong, but I keep it to myself. Except for blog posts.) But even allowing for differences in people's political views, I have to say that I totally do not get it with Gingrich's "appeal." He is a gasbag, a hypocrite who led the charge against Bill Clinton for philandering while he himself was philandering in a Major Way, an elitist and, in my opinion, a racist. He wants to put underprivileged children to work as janitors in public buildings. The only good thing I can say about him is that he likes zoos and dinosaurs.

But good for you, South Carolina. And good for you, Republican party. Go ahead and anoint Newt as your nominee. I think this only makes President Obama's path to reelection easier.