If you're going to be watching this weekend's Kentucky Derby but Mint Juleps aren't your drink of choice, why not pay homage to another traditional Kentucky delight? The Philadelphia Inquirer's Craig LaBan visited Lynn's Paradise Cafe in Louisville and came away with Lynn's recipe for her Bourbon Ball Milkshake, a treat made with walnuts, bourbon and chocolate chips that's like "sipping a cold ice cream truffle through a straw, sweet but deceptively potent."
As part of their ongoing Southern Recipe Restoration Project, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently asked its readers to send in their family custard recipes. Chef Anne Quatrano chose a recipe sent in by Peter Gordy, an Atlanta marketing consultant from Toadsuck, Arkansas; here's the story behind Mabel's Boiled Custard That Isn't Boiled:
For as long as I can remember, a woman named Mabel worked for my Aunt Eula [Dunaway], one of those great Southern ladies you never saw in pants and [who] always wore a big hat whenever she worked in the garden.
Mabel had no trouble disciplining my cousin Nancy, who lived across the street, or any of us that played on the block. But if we were good and didn't wake Aunt Eula during her afternoon nap, Mabel would make us kids boiled custard. She said her grandmother taught her how to make it. The custard was never boiled, and she served it cold over sliced bananas. And always with a sprinkle of nutmeg. Heaven in a bowl.
I didn't grow up eating custard, boiled or otherwise, but boy do I love it now—my custard delivery method of choice is banana pudding, but really a good custard is delicious no matter how you eat it or what you eat it with.
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
The US government introduced kudzu into the South in the 1930s for erosion control and paid for fields of it to be planted. Kudzu goes dormant in the winter in its native Japan, but the South's heat and humidity proved to be ideal year-round growing conditions making this already naturally fast-growing plant spread so rapidly that it begun to smother crops, bridges, houses, powerlines—anything that stood in its way.
Almost 80 years later, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent each year trying to destroy it, but Tanya Bricking Leach of the AP has found people who've decided to just eat the vine that's eating the South: "Nancy Basket, a part-Cherokee artist and basket maker in Walhalla, S.C., may not be getting rich off kudzu, but she does enjoy eating it. She says her heritage prompted her to treat kudzu with respect, rather than as a menace. Now she hosts kudzu luncheons where guests feast on kudzu quiche with a rice crust or kudzu pasta. "People just don't know how to use it," she says. "We need to use something in our back yard instead of making fun of it and calling it names."
If you live somewhere kudzu grows, Juanitta Baldwin has written a cookbook you might want to pick up called
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