My visit to New York for the Bluegrass dinner at the James Beard House was the first of three this summer. The second came in early May. We had been nominated again for an award  and so, sisters in tow, I returned to the Colonial House Inn in Chelsea. We had the same room, it’s windows thrown open to catch the breezes and to better view the big, gothic Lutheran church across the street. With a salsa station on the radio and the occasional PBR tallboy from the corner store I would have been quite content to just camp for a day or two. But we had other obligations. There was the Chefs’ Night Out Gala hosted by Bon Apetit. There was  lunch at Butter for the Southern Foodways Alliance and a lovely cocktail party given by the French Culinary Institute in an apartment 56 floors up overlooking Lincoln Center. It was there that I was introduced to Jacque Pepin. Then on to the awards. Sean Brock of McCready’s in Charleston won in our category. I was happy to see friends Jessica Harris and Leah Chase honored for their career achievements. It was great to see lots of old friends at the party afterward, but it is such a mob scene that we soon retreated back to Chelsea for cheeseburgers and nachos at Trailer Park. The real show was a month away.

I’ve come to Mississippi to teach a couple of classes at the Viking Range Cooking School in Greenwood. First stop: The Big Apple Inn in Jackson, home of the pigs’ ear sandwich. Also some killer Mississippi-style tamales. I heard about this place when I was at the Southern Foodways Alliance Fall Symposium last October. Gene Lee the present proprietor was presented with a Keeper of the Flame award. Check out this really wonderful short video by friend Joe York for a tour of the place. My sister and I were so taken with it that we ran back by for lunch today on our way out of town.

Last night, on the advice of folks from Lemuria Books we had dinner at Walker’s Drive In, near our hotel. Lively, fun and good food, too. I had Red Fish Anna, named I’m guessing, for the pommes de terre on which it was nestled. Outside the streets of downtown Jackson seemed strangely quiet, but this place was packed. This evening we have arrived at the Alluvian Hotel in Greenwood. Tomorrow is for classes but tonight we were guests at both a reception and then a dinner party at Giardina’s, the restaurant at the hotel. At the reception, the hor d’oeuvres were all variations of stuff from my book. Included was that green tomato relish that I got from Leslie Jackson’s mother. They served it with strips of fried catfish. Chef Jeff Seabergh, a local boy, prepared us a lovely dinner with lots of local ingredients. It was interesting to watch my sister encounter “goat two ways”.

*****

Our lunch class today was taken mostly from things I’ve learned from my staff. Those banana leaf tamales from Oaxaca, mango salad, chicken pozole. The people in the class were delightful, and remained so even after I talked for two hours straight. We finished off with Donna Florio’s buttermilk sherbet- the pineapple version.

Dinner started with chicken liver mousse, a very quick hors d’oeuvre, good for a crowd as long as every one likes liver. These folks did. I use this recipe a lot for demonstrations since it is so quick and people often need a little something right at the beginning of these sessions. We followed with brussels sprout and blue cheese salad, salt cured duck with an aigre-doux with fresh grapefruit. Sides were garlic mashed potatoes and sauteed leeks and cabbage. For dessert- frozen mint juleps. This was a really cordial class and lots of people stuck around to talk and visit afterward. Then afterward, drinks and a little more to eat with some of the school’s staff. A word about them. I have known and liked Elizabeth Heiskell, the director for a while. It was a real pleasure to work with her and her very competent crew.

On our way home, we had just enough of a layover in Atlanta to have supper at One Flew South, Jerry Slater and Duane Nutter’s new restaurant in the international terminal. I have to say, that when I heard that someone was going to open a nice restaurant in an airport, I thought it sounded crazy. But when we got there, it was full and I was really glad to be there.

I’ve been coming to Quebec for almost thirty years and for probably half that time I’ve stayed at the Hotel Cap Diamant on the Boulevard Ste-Genevieve, just behind the Chateau Frontenac and an easy walk to anywhere in the old city. I can’t remember, but think I just picked it out of a guide book. Over the years, little by little, Mme. Guillot has made constant improvements to the hotel. She is always very proud of each new addition. One year I arrived to find a newly remodeled reception hall. Another time, she had added a breakfast room that overlooks the tiny back garden. Once on a summer trip I was given a wonderful room in the newly acquired annex next door. It had big windows that could be opened to let in the breezes and looked out over the city.

The first time I came, it was in a particularly cold January. The radio was warning even Quebecois to only go out side when necessary. My room had a zinc framed bed and in such cold weather it could deliver quite a shock if you slid in or out wrong. That room has become part of the breakfast parlor now, and I have never encountered that bed again, but it is an example of the quirky way that Madame has furnished the hotel. Every possible type of antique filigreed chest, table or whatnot stand can be found there. All wood, be it floor or furniture is polished to within an inch of its life. There are doilies everywhere. The walls are covered with pictures and mirrors.

Walls in Quebec are built thick to keep out the cold. This provides wide window sills for elbows or plants. Madame has hung both gauzy sheers and thick drapes at each one. The hotel is heated still with large ornate radiators. I think that this is common in the old city. I’ve always liked this kind of heating. I had it when I lived in New York. All the piping within the walls assures that you are never ever cold, and like as not the same system provides the hot water for the building, so you are never out. I’ve often remarked to myself on the splendid showers, tubs and water pressure at the Cap Diamant. When you come indoors in winter you must leave your shoes in the red cupboard by the front door so a not to track salt and mud through the house. She provides a basket slippers to wear by the door.

I did a lot of the initial work on my cook book at the Cap Diamant, and the year I brought Madame a copy, she refused to let me pay for my room. In early January there are rarely many guests. Things will pick up again at Carnival, which is Quebec’s Mardi Gras. Since it follows the holidays by only a month, the Christmas lights are generally left up. Each morning, Madame puts out breakfast- cakes and rolls, butter and jams, fruit and yogurt, coffee of course. This year she added something that is typical of Quebec, but new to the hotel- graisse. It is sort of like rillet, but with almost no meat. I was introduced to this in a youth hostel (indicating how long ago this was) in the Gaspe. It was brought out with the bread at dinner. Everyone was eating it, but I couldn’t tell what it was. When I asked, I thought to myself “I’m sure that means grease, but that can’t be true.” Even back then I would eat anything. So I did. And it was.

I’m on the train from Montreal to Quebec. It’s winter and I feel like Dr. Zhivago. The train is cozy and has coffee and wi-fi. In fact everything is cozy here in winter. I have seen more snow than this, but it is nonetheless very cold. The trip takes about three hours, much of it through Christmas card countryside. I got into Montreal at midday yesterday. New security concerns required me to be at the airport at four in the morning for a six o’clock flight. I get off work around midnight so I decide to just stay up. The result was a sort of jet lag without leaving one’s own time zone. It’s good to get back to my old haunts. Last night I was back at Le Conciergerie, a bed and breakfast on St-Hubert in what may have been the best bed on earth. No time for breakfast though since I’m taking the earliest train. As is often the case in places with a French tradition, in both Montreal and Quebec one can expect to find good food. When I come here, I come with the intention of deliberate excess. Last night I tried a new place called DSens on the rue Ste-Catherine. I was drawn in by one of the plats du jour which promised both veal kidneys and sweetbreads in a fricassee. It was delicious as were the dozen raw oysters from Prince Edward Island that preceded them.

I’ve been coming to Quebec for a long time and I have a lot of history here. I wrote the first draft of my cookbook in the breakfast room of Le Conciergerie and in the basement apartment of the Hotel Cap Diamant in Quebec City where I’ll be staying tonight. This is a great place to quickly get over a broken heart or to wallow in one, depending on your mood. It is old fashioned as well as modern at the same time, a pairing that I like very much. People can be surprisingly chic, given how they have to dress to go outside in winter. I remember being startled one January in the village of Baie St-Paul by the tiny black cocktail dresses in a shop window. Everyone on the street was wearing parkas and mukluks. I was once told that designers try out new ideas in Montreal because it’s sensibility is halfway between New York and Paris. As for the winter, people go about their business just as they do the rest of the year. Systems are in place to help you get on with things. Still, I have to think that the first winter must have been something of a shock to the first settlers. Right now, it’s ten degrees Fahrenheit.

I come to Quebec in winter to eat big French meals as I watch it snow outside. This never fails to be a pleasant past time. Without fail at least one of those meals will be at the Cafe St-Malo, in the lower city on the rue St-Paul. Chances are they will have veal brains in beurre noisette. They also make that breton style of soupe de poisson than has no tomatoes and therefore is a dark grey color. I love this. Enough chatter. The city awaits.

A very busy Fall has kept me away from my writing. November, in fact, almost did me in. Although business slows a little during the holidays, the requests for appearances, fundraisers and special events increase. Cooking is a little more complicated as well. We introduced beef stew, a simple dish but with lots of steps. Our duck arrives on your plate from two different cooking directions. Neither difficult, if that’s all you are doing but cooks must always be doing ten things at once. Then there’s cheese pork. We go through tons of the stuff now. Its local legend status has reached critical mass.

This Fall’s extracurriculars included another painting for Art From The Heart, a fund raiser for the Chapel Hill Museum. You will eventually be able to see my painting of a pile of boiled shrimp on their website. The auction for all the paintings will be held in February.

Every year, starting around Thanksgiving, people start calling me up to see if I will sell them gravy. Or, they call up while they are standing over the stove, for instructions on how to make their own gravy. I mentioned this to Marilyn Markel the director of the cooking school at A Southern Season so this year I taught a class on gravy making for the holiday. We used chickens instead of turkeys. We wanted to demonstrate several kinds of sauce and three turkeys would have been way too much. The process is the same. There was traditional Thanksgiving gravy, a milk gravy that had all the giblets, and a French style white wine sauce for good measure. I loved teaching this class. Dinner for my students that night was a couple of chicken thighs, a pile of mashed potatoes and three ramekins of gravy. And oh yes, a simple green salad to clear the mind. Moreton Neal and I will be teaching a class together there in April. I think we’re going to give a hat tip to Julia Child with a kick out the stops bouillabaisse.

Yet another event in November was Tyler Florence’s Music To Your Mouth Food and Wine Festival at Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina. My task was to cook corned hams for 500 people, no small feat, except that the staff at the inn there did most of the work. All I really had to do was run my mouth when I wasn’t eating crispy pork fat crust. One highlight was getting to share the stage with old friend Robert Stelling of Charleston’s Hominy Grill .

So, Hector came to work yesterday with a take out container of brown green beans. You remember them, of course. They were the first things we learned to make fun of when cooking began to refine itself in this country in the 1970s. I hadn’t tasted them in years. They were delicious. It got me thinking. I love rare lamb, but I also love the roasted leg of lamb that Grandmother used to fix that was crunchy on the outside and falling off the bone done. They are like two different foods, each one delicious in its own way. I wonder if this old way of cooking was dismissed too quickly. It might be a good way to use those big tough late season beans that turn up about now. On the other hand, I doubt that even I am bold enough to reintroduce Grandmother’s green beans just yet.

The end of September also means the end of a murderous fall schedule. I once again found myself exhausted with a big pile of unread New Yorkers. In my garden there is a four o’clock plant that a friend gave me two years ago. I’ve always loved theses flowers. They flourish without much care and every afternoon at around four o’clock the flower buds bloom. They last only one evening. All month I looked forward to sitting a minute to admire them. Never once during the month that they were in bloom did I have a free afternoon. For the rest of the year I’m limiting myself to one or two extracurricular activities per month. Having complained so, I would now like to quickly add that the projects I took on were individually enjoyable. On a Monday night when we were closed, I held a class in Crook’s kitchen whose proceeds went to benefit the Lucy Daniels Foundation. Another was a reprise of the class that Marilyn Markel and I did at A Southern Season with the Kitchen Sisters. Once again we did tamales in banana leaves and that wonderful stuffed corned ham from eastern Maryland. A third was another fund-raiser for WUNC Radio, our NPR affiliate (left, courtesy of Jim Shaw Photography) . This October I’ve only signed up for two things: The Pittsboro Pepper Festival and the fall symposium of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Readers will recall that when attending these symposiums I claim to be at work while I behave as if I were at a cocktail party.

Even though August was sort of dry, we had an embarrassment of fall produce this year. The fig season has been very long and I’ve been able to serve both Figs Bellevue and fresh fig ice cream on and off for months. Persimmons are coming in the back door by the wheel barrow full. Last Wednesday alone, Mrs. Andrews showed up with 34 pounds. Pudding galore. Beverly Dixon brings chestnuts almost every week. We’ve had a really wonderful chestnut and onion soup. If I ever have time I have a few desserts I’d like to try with them as well as well. Finally, I ended up with so many scuppernong grapes that I had to give some away. I have made delicious scuppernong sorbet and an utterly vile grape hull pie. We didn’t serve the pie.

My brother and his friend Kevin, come east every August from Los Angeles for our father’s birthday. It’s a nicer time to travel than the winter holidays. I’ve been extremely busy this summer, so I didn’t have the time I would have liked but we I did manage a few days down east. My task was crab stew for forty. I grew up cleaning fish and crabs. I dress hundreds of softshells every season at work. But sixty live, large hard blue crabs were a different kettle of fish as it were. As my sisters watched from the porch asking questions like “isn’t that mean?”, I went out into the back yard to tackle the cardboard box full of angry sea creatures. An hour and a half later I was filthy and drenched with sweat. Crabs that large are very strong. I ruined a pair on my mother’s gardening gloves and I kept knocking over my beer.

These big stew dinners are a tradition in coastal North Carolina. They are very messy, so often people eat outside on picnic tables covered with newspaper. My mother had decided that we should eat inside in spite of this because of the mosquitoes. So the dining room was lined in newspaper. Neighbors and relatives brought all the sides. I made the stew and two batches of ice cream- one peach and one vanilla. It was quite a party, although, I was the last to find out, it wasn’t really for my father’s birthday. No cake, no gifts. That was three days later. This was just a wingding for neighbors, people from church and work and relatives who were free on a Wednesday afternoon.

As usual, the house looked like a restaurant. It had been a long time since I had made one of these stews. It was really good, but we still picked over it afterwards comparing it to what we remembered. I thought it needed more bacon. It wasn’t smoky enough. I had used all we had but I didn’t want to make yet another trip to the store. My Aunt Margaret thought it needed more hot pepper. I agreed, but I had deliberately held back on that not realizing that the craving for ever spicier food had even reached into eastern North Carolina. My Aunt Mary Catherine wanted more potatoes. Right again. They had mostly cooked away, which is good, but I should have added more later in the cooking to provide some chunks. Making this after such a long time was almost like never having done it at all. But, now I have my mental notes. Perhaps we’ll do one again at Christmas.

As always, we took a minute to run down the street to Tryon Palace Seafood for take out fried and oysters and shrimp. It is so wonderful to have such a place within smelling distance. Also, after a day trip to Fort Macon, we made a stop at another old favorite- El’s in Morehead City. Sometimes these places leave me at a loss for words.

In Spain the word mora refers to mulberries, but in Mexico it has transferred over to the blackberry. This gives us one of my favorite Spanish words- morado, meaning purple, the color of blackberries. It comes up often in pop ballads because it describes the color of the bruises that love can leave on the heart. My hands have been morado as well lately because we are having one of the biggest blackberries seasons that I can remember. You may recall that last summer I went on at length about the swath of them that follows the railroad track through the middle of town. It’s about a hundred yards from my kitchen door so I’m able to pick them almost every day. It’s high season for everything now and it seemed to come upon us so suddenly that I haven’t even had time to put fried okra on the menu yet.

Tomatoes , corn, beans, cucumbers and every kind of herb have returned to their traditional places on our summer menu. The cold fried chicken has caused it usual stampede. The tomato and watermelon salad is back as well, but everyone around here makes their own now so it’s less of a big deal. It pleases me, though, that so many people have taken this recipe into their home repertoires. Someone brought me some of those Sea Island red peas from Anson Mills and when I tasted them I was reminded of something my great grandmother used to make using peas and corn so a new salad may show up soon. That is if I have time. I can’t decide if I’m slowing down with age, but it sometimes seems to take all my time just to keep the basics on the menu.