Around the table in just 12 months

Opinion

June 16, 2012

Around the table in just 12 months

By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Sat Jun 16, 2012, 07:44 PM CDT

FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss. — I thought about John Prine this morning first thing when, to paraphrase Prine, a bowl of Shredded Wheat tried to stare me down. And won.

I’ve been on the road for pretty much a year, and that entailed a lot of pigging out along the way. Nothing allays boredom on the road like stopping to eat, or planning the next meal. How can you drive past a brisket joint in Texas when the cook is outside turning ribs on a grill?

Now it is time to pay the piper or buy new clothes, bigger ones. Nothing sumptuous for me for a few weeks. I’m fighting my way back to my fighting weight.

Yet I don’t regret a single meal from this year of living dangerously. To recall those calories is almost as good as digesting them.

How could I not remember with fondness a giant burrito at Amanda’s Fonda in Old Colorado City? We sat by Fountain Creek in the shadow of Pike’s Peak and watched the mule deer grazing a stone’s throw away. Pass the margarita pitcher.

And I won’t begin my regrets with Jack Dempsey’s in New Orleans, where seafood is fried the way nature intended, and the waitresses are seasoned and hennaed, not pierced and tattooed. They look like their names should be Loretta and Thelma, and they bump doors open with their hips. To them all customers are “Boo” or “Honey,” and they bring extra everything whether you ask for it or not.

Nope, I am not sorry about going there, and I might have to make it back before the Mayan Calendar brings the world to an end.

I did a lot of substantial eating in Falls Church, Va., where my most loyal friend Betty Douglass lives and works. She knows all the good eateries with exotic fare that’s not readily available at the Piggly Wiggly in my hometown. My favorite is an Indian restaurant near her house, where the bread is flat and called nan and melts in your mouth. I’ll dream of it while limiting myself to dry rye.

I spent three weeks in France, and the rabbit in mustard sauce at Chez Denise in Paris is the kind of meal that inspires odes and love sonnets. The night I ate there, about 20 of us crowded around a table meant for six, merrier because we were more, and sampled one another’s meals the way the French always do.

And better yet were those weekly markets in every village in the French countryside, their streets for a few hours magically filled with cheese and baguettes and pastries beneath a sea of umbrellas the color of rainbows. I ate my weight in good bread.

One recent night in Biloxi, Miss., my good friend Tony Salmon threw crawfish and shrimp fresh from the Gulf into a big boiling pot. Then he dumped the pink results onto brown grocery bags spread on his dining-room table. Four of us sat and ate and talked while a heavy rain hammered the roof and Hank Williams sang away pain. That might have been the best meal of all.

They say that dieting only serves to make you hungry, makes you think about food all the time. If that’s the case, and I believe it may be, then at least I’ve a lot of good memories to serve up and savor.

(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)

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Opinion

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
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