Nashville's Hot Chicken Festival

Every year on July 4th for the past 10 years Nashville has held a Hot Chicken Festival. Bill Purcell, Nashville’s mayor at the time, started the festival in 2007 in order to pay homage to one of his favorite local dishes. He created the event as a way to help market this unique food and to help establish Nashville as the place of origin.

For those of you outside of Music City, the legend of Nashville Hot Chicken started with Prince’s. The story begins with an unfaithful man and a woman’s quest for revenge when the cheating rascal returned. Instead of cooking his favorite fried chicken, she doused the bird in some very serious quantities of cayenne pepper and waited for the fireworks of her retribution to take hold. The problem was that Thornton Prince loved this new chicken recipe and after sharing it with a few friends he decided to open a restaurant. You can read a more detailed description about the history of hot chicken here.  There's also a Time article on Nashville hot chicken as well as a piece on the Nashville Public Radio's website.

While Prince’s was the first hot chicken shack to appear, there are now hot chicken restaurants all over Nashville. The dish has grown in popularity since the inception of the hot chicken festival and even upscale restaurants now have hot chicken appetizers or dishes on the menu. I've even had hot chicken tacos (click this link and scroll down the menu).

If you attend the Hot Chicken festival, be aware that the lines are often long, so it’s not as easy as one would think to sample all the different restaurants side-by-side (a dream of mine that has yet to become a reality). However, it’s not unusual for the lines inside the actual restaurants to be long, also. So don't let the wait dissuade you. It's worth it.

Advice for attending Nashville's Hot Chicken festival:

1. Take a cab, Lyft, or Uber. Traffic and parking are both congested near East Park during the festival.
2. Bring at least some cash - not all vendors accept cards (note: if you visit Prince's actual restaurant, they don't accept cards there, either.)
3. The weather and the chicken are both too hot for pets. Leave them at home in the AC with the TV tuned to their favorite station or send them to a spa.
4. Hot chicken comes in various degrees of hotness, but one vendors "XX Hot" may be another vendor's "Medium." Assume that even medium will have some heat and that the most extreme level of heat is "native Thai" or beyond.
5. Related to the above, I like to sample different levels of heat from the same vendor because the flavor of the chicken changes with the heat.
6. Get a dipping sauce - it not only adds flavor, but it can assist in cooling your taste buds, if needed.
7. There is no wrong way to eat hot chicken. You can alternate with bites of bread and pickle, you can make a sandwich, or you can just eat the chicken. Experiment and find what you like.
8. Check out the Hot Chicken Festival website for more information.

 Below are a few pictures of my pet gargoyle attending the festival. Yes, he loves hot chicken, too. After all, he is "Nashville’s Finest Gargoyle" - why wouldn’t he love Nashville’s finest food?

A Girl and Her Gargoyle ... at The Cookery

Newton and I recently had lunch at The Cookery, a new restaurant in Nashville. If you haven’t been to this place yet, you need to check it out. This restaurant is owned by Brett Swayn and Terry Kemper and is one of my new favorite places to visit. There are a number of things that make this place extraordinary.

The Food

There are so many incredible dishes, and Newton and I will be going back to try them all. The menu selections provide a nice variety and include salads like the Rockin Moroccan Chicken Salad. It had tender pieces of juicy chicken browned in Moroccan spices and served with an almond relish and fresh oranges mixed in with the greens. Even the dressing was freshly made and delicious. We also tried the Down Under Blunder burger which is incredible with or without the grilled Pineapple. For those of you on a low carb diet there are lettuce wraps, such as cajun whitefish lettuce wraps (which I’m going to try next). They also serve coffee and smoothies if you're just looking for a snack or a place to hold a casual business meeting. The desserts look awesome, too.

The People

The staff are extremely friendly and personable. It’s not unusual for the chef to come out and talk with customers to share the story of how this restaurant came to be. It’s a beautiful story, too.

The Purpose

This is related to Brett’s story. The Cookery is part of Lambscroft Ministries and is a training facility for teaching culinary skills to the homeless. The program works with these individuals to help them off the street. As he will tell you if you go there, Brett spent four months on the street and eventually recovered his life when he was given a job at Fleming’s Steak House. Eventually Brett trained, became a sous chef and went on to train other chefs for Fleming's. If you have a moment, take the time to read more about Brett’s story on the website — or better yet, visit The Cookery and listen to him tell it himself. The passage below is from their website and describes their purpose:

"Our aim, however, is to re-establish identity and sense of purpose and destiny. If we can help break cycles of hopelessness, bad choices and regret, while loving and teaching… we may have students who will not only secure jobs, but also be confident to enter relationships with their communities once again."

The Atmosphere.

The Cookery has a very positive atmosphere. As soon as you walk in the door you feel surrounded by hope. Brett believes in miracles and saw many of them while he was on the streets of Nashville. The Cookery is a place of hope. What’s more important is that these things are real at The Cookery.

Newton’s Assessment

There’s not much evil to hunt down at The Cookery, which is okay because not having to work frees up a gargoyle’s time so that he can spend more of it eating. Newton is, after all, a foodie who enjoys a good meal. Newton also reports that while the Lion in the picture below is a pleasant chap, he’s not much of a conversationalist.

Read more about the story of the Cookery here.

And follow them on Facebook here.

Generating Ideas for Stripper Names

I’m not sure what this says about our culture, but I’ve noticed that a number of popular kids’ foods would make great stripper names. So if you’re writing a book and need a good name for a character who works as a stripper or porn star, I suggest you take a look at some of these. It can at least help generate some ideas.

Ginger Kitty

Pop Tart (works better for a man, but you could also feminize the name to “Poppi Tart”)

Hostess Twinkie

Hostess Cupcake

Hostess Ho Hos

Pretty much anything Hostess makes ...

Glo Balls (I really hope  never have to witness this performance)

Tootsie Pop

The Jolly Rancher

Sugar Daddy and Slo Poke

Teddy Graham (possibly an elderly lingerie model?)

This is just the beginning. There are a lot more out there — and notice that most of these are snack foods or sweets. So, perhaps if you think about this long enough it will help you with that diet you’ve been planning ...

Suggested Laws

It’s an election year and the debates are taking place concerning a wide range of topics. Most of us are tired of partisan issues and want to see some general improvements in government that make our general quality of life better. With this in mind, I’ve put together a few laws that I think we could all get behind.

1.) Any activity on a deck will require beer.  This extends the current law requiring beer during boring activities such as pressure washing, carpentry, staining your deck, or using power tools. The new law will also mandate beer during simple activities, such as family BBQs. (Note: we’ll attach a clause to allow wine or hard liquor as an acceptable alternative for those of us who don’t drink beer. The point is that decks were made for drinking.).

2.) People who drive slow in the left lane should be kidnapped by aliens and used for experiments. What? They already do this? Well, maybe they could be probed more slowly to get the point across that slow is not always the best way to go.

3.) Lift kits should be banned and hefty fines imposed upon those who violate this law. These are the source of many unsightly freakish accidents that can cause nightmares or require therapy. By the way, I’m not talking about the ones used on cars and trucks, I’m talking about the ones used by people with sagging skin who wind up with faces that look like an image stretched out on silly putty. Don’t hurt the ones you love by forcing them to look at your distorted collagen features.

Well, these are my initial ideas. I'm sure there are a lot more and you're welcome to share them in the comments section.

Pizza Is The Best Medicine

Charlie Chapman (guitarist and instructor at Berklee College of Music in Boston) gave one of the most memorable guitar lessons and it wasn’t about the guitar. He said that there would be days where nothing seems to go right and you just feel like you’re running into walls no matter what you do. The solution? Pizza. And lots of it.

He advised his students that times like these call for a pizza with everything on it. Everything. Don’t worry about whether it’s what you usually like. The point is that the usual routine isn’t working, so you need a break from it. Next, you get a six pack of beer and a bad movie. Eat the whole pizza, drink the beer and watch the movie.

This has become a ritual in my household and it really works. So whenever things go so terribly wrong that it looks like some evil force has planned your day for you, it’s time for a pizza break. Don’t worry about your diet, getting behind schedule in your work, or about anything else - because pizza is the best medicine in times like these.

Sadly, Charlie passed away from cancer not too long ago. But we think about him every time we have a bad day and decide to order pizza to cure it. It works every time. Now when we think back on all those bad days, we only remember the beer, pizza, and laughing at a film so terrible that you can’t believe people put their real names in the credits. Most of the time we don’t even remember what made the day so bad in the first place.

God bless you, Charlie.

I’ll have a Mar-Go-Rita

It’s been a very hot summer.  Record breaking heat. It’s time for someone to cash in on this heat wave and this is why I’ve come up with a great new business idea.

Every summer when the heat kicks up, the ice cream truck comes around and both kids and adults rush into the street to buy a refreshing treat (or, in some cases, a stale but frosty snack that has the illusion of being a treat because of the novel situation that someone drove it to your neighborhood in a musical vehicle). In any event, it’s a summer ritual for many of us.

But what do most adults really want? Booze. What if there was a truck that drove around playing polka music that sold frosty mugs of beer?  How much faster would you run out of your house to get something like that - even if you’re still in your bathrobe? Or better yet, stay in the AC and send the kids out to the curb with your ID and a twenty and tell them that there’s an extra five in it for them if they don’t spill the brew.

There could be other trucks.  My personal favorite is the Mar-Go-Rita truck that sells margaritas (either frozen or on the rocks) as well as tequila shots for people who still have to go back to work in the afternoon and need something to get them through that next meeting. If you decide to implement this idea, might I also suggest that you have a friend drive the Fajita Nacho Truck right behind you? Because I’m going to want a snack with my Mar-Go-Rita and I may not be in any condition to drive out to get one (if you’re making them correctly).

This is a potential goldmine for the right person. Not to mention that it would solve the problem of drinking and driving because we no longer have to drive to get our drinks. Our drinks would come to us.

I’ve done my job by planting the seed of the idea. Now I’m just waiting for the right entrepreneur to implement this in my neighborhood. I’ll be on the porch waiting.

What Kids Really Learn at School

Today as I was driving the kids to school I discovered where they find the real gems of knowledge within their education: the janitor.

Apparently, the janitor has been espousing wisdom all year, but his latest bit of education has really impressed the kids.  He said that if you cut a shape into baloney and leave it on a car overnight, the baloney will fade the paint on the car and the image will stay there even when the rancid baloney is removed.  I went to Snopes.com and found out there there is some truth to this: any food that uses phosphoric acid as a preservative will have this effect (crafters note for success: heat will speed up the process). Do you see the potential here?  So did my kids.  Here are a few of their designs:

I don’t know about you, but if baloney rips the finish off a car, I’m not sure that I want to be eating it.  I’ll save it for an act of revenge which, like baloney, is a dish best served cold.

In any event, it just goes to show you that we can always learn something from other people, regardless of their age or station in life.  And I thought that school only existed to dull kids’ brains with things like Algebra and Trigonometry so that I can get them to eat spinach at dinner time.

Happy Friday the Thirteenth!

Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number thirteen. I spelled it instead of writing the number here, just in case anyone reading this blog has this fear.

Wikipedia says that it comes from the Greek tris meaning "3", kai meaning "and", deka meaning "10" and phobia meaning "fear" or "morbid fear."  I’ve actually studied Greek, so I know that this translation is accurate (for you skeptics).

Paraskevidekatriaphobia is fear of Friday the thirteenth.  That’s today.

Triscuit-a-phobia is fear of Triscuits. It stems from the belief that excess fiber takes out your intelligence as it cleanses your colon. Or it could be related to the fear that crunchy food snacks may take over the world.

If you have Triskaidekaphobia and Triscuit-a-phobia don’t look at the photo below.  It could make you panic. If you also have Paraskevidekatriaphobia, then definitely don’t look at it today.

As for me, I’m off to buy my lottery ticket.  If everyone else is having bad luck today, then there must be a ton of good luck out there searching for someone who is fearless.

P.S. Thanks to my friend Craig Sullivan for giving me the idea for this post.

One Ring to Rule them All

People who know me also know that I’m health conscious. I exercise 6 days a week and usually eat a low fat/ high fiber diet.  However, last weekend my husband and I decided to take a day off from our good behaviors.  This is when I suddenly discovered the magical powers of onion rings.

First of all, onion rings are naturally formed in the shape of a circle: the symbol of perfection.  It shows the past connecting with the future.  Like a wedding ring, the onion ring is a symbol of the eternal nature of things, such as cholesterol.

Secondly, onion rings are golden: the color of wealth and prosperity.  This further connotes the regal nature of the food and enhances the connection between eating onion rings and getting rich.  How do you think Burger King became king when he has no kingdom?  Hint: they sell onion rings there.  McDonald’s doesn’t sell them and Ronald is just a clown.  Coincidence?  Probably not.

Lastly, onions are a vegetable.  This makes them healthy.  Further, they are often eaten with ketchup, which is another vegetable.  Double healthy!  In fact, people who eat onion rings may live longer than people who think they’re too good to eat onion rings.  Plus, if you eat enough onion rings your breath will knock out potential attackers and kill just about any germ.  Added bonus. 

So from where I sit, there really is only one ring to rule them all.  And it is beer batter fried.