I was introduced to funeral potatoes by my Wisconsonian husband, Simon. Growing up Lebanese in St. Louis, we eat anything remotely similar. As for gumbo, tho....I got that at a very young age and didn't realize how lucky I was until I was older. It's mardi gras season in StL and I'm already planning the menu. I'm so excited. The cold snap up here helps with that....
It's cold here, too — for New Orleans! Though I saw STL got a bona fide snow day. : ) Gumbo really is an art. I do love dishes that can travel (like funeral potatoes) and it's fun to see what each region does to make a dish their own. But there's nothing like a food/bev that can't be grown/made/cooked elsewhere. I know there are lots of jokes about Utah's liquor laws, but there's a brewery there that makes one of the collest beers ever, a special, short-run brew with wild hop plant material, rather than hop pellets. (I didn't realize brewers *used* hop pellets till last year, actually.) The brewer said it really did change the flavor quite a bit, and you can only try it for a very small window of time in the fall - they never know how much they'll have till they harvest the hops. My hope is that people will come down to NOLA to eat gumbo, and at the same time, champion all of the plants/animals/food that are peculiar to their part of the world.
I’m really chewing on (ha!) this “grits is/are us” conundrum. Like, you just never hear of a singular grit, ya know? Add the sorority-adjacent layer of the southern clothing/lifestyle line “G.R.I.T.S.” (Girls Raised in the South) 🙋🏼♀️ and I just really don’t know.
The only time I've heard "grit" is in Utah — "fetch" is a stand-in for the F-bomb and sometimes pepole say "son of a grit" instead of "son of a bitch." Not sure if the people who use that bit of regional dialect really have a deep understanding of grits, though?
I was introduced to funeral potatoes by my Wisconsonian husband, Simon. Growing up Lebanese in St. Louis, we eat anything remotely similar. As for gumbo, tho....I got that at a very young age and didn't realize how lucky I was until I was older. It's mardi gras season in StL and I'm already planning the menu. I'm so excited. The cold snap up here helps with that....
It's cold here, too — for New Orleans! Though I saw STL got a bona fide snow day. : ) Gumbo really is an art. I do love dishes that can travel (like funeral potatoes) and it's fun to see what each region does to make a dish their own. But there's nothing like a food/bev that can't be grown/made/cooked elsewhere. I know there are lots of jokes about Utah's liquor laws, but there's a brewery there that makes one of the collest beers ever, a special, short-run brew with wild hop plant material, rather than hop pellets. (I didn't realize brewers *used* hop pellets till last year, actually.) The brewer said it really did change the flavor quite a bit, and you can only try it for a very small window of time in the fall - they never know how much they'll have till they harvest the hops. My hope is that people will come down to NOLA to eat gumbo, and at the same time, champion all of the plants/animals/food that are peculiar to their part of the world.
I’m really chewing on (ha!) this “grits is/are us” conundrum. Like, you just never hear of a singular grit, ya know? Add the sorority-adjacent layer of the southern clothing/lifestyle line “G.R.I.T.S.” (Girls Raised in the South) 🙋🏼♀️ and I just really don’t know.
The only time I've heard "grit" is in Utah — "fetch" is a stand-in for the F-bomb and sometimes pepole say "son of a grit" instead of "son of a bitch." Not sure if the people who use that bit of regional dialect really have a deep understanding of grits, though?