Parade of Pans Part Two

Okay. We'll get back to the yams in a minute! Y'all are flooding me with comments and opinions about what makes a yam a yam, and seeing as I yam what I yam, as the pop-eyed sailor said, I'm loving it, but now it's time for the Parade of Pans. We now have some comments and entries in the contest, but mostly comments not entries because some of ya'll either don't want to or don't know how to put up pictures of your pans.

I'll be fair with you: that burns me up. But I got over my mad and decided not to hold it against you because I guess you have other things to do with your time, especially right here at Christmas, and I wouldn't know how to do it either if I didn't have that girl who helps me out help me with it.

So here are some of the comments that came to me without pictures:

Amanda wrote me and said she was lame (her exact words, "Trixie, I am so lame") because she threw away her old pans and got new ones, but now she regretted it. I regret it too, Amanda, because I'm sure that you, like most everybody I've ever known, including me, have had some crummy pans in your past, which have now lost their chance for fame and glory. But most of all, I hate to think doing that has made you lame, honey. I'll let you borrow my walking stick any time.

But then Amanda said she knew of a man who took old cast iron skillets that had come to the end of their days and made clocks out of them. Now there's you a great gift idea.

Amanda didn't have a picture of a cast iron skillet clock, but there's one at the top. See? Amanda wrote me to tell me that it looks exactly like the clocks she was talking about. That particular clock is sold "with accessories" which means an iron spoon and fork, which might be hard to see in the picture. Since we all have times when we want to set our clocks without touching the hands, that fork and spoon would come in might handy for moving the hands around, I guess. Since that girl that helps me out stole the picture, I'll tell you that somebody I don't know or even ever heard of is selling that whole set for $20 and you can find that somebody right here: http://charlottesville.craigslist.org/hsh/954441874.html.

And then Karen wrote to tell me that she didn't have anything for our contest because she just had one little narrow shelf for her pots and pans, which told me she had her heart in the right place and not in a cabinet, and I praised her for it, and promised to withhold my stick from her behind for now.

You can read all about that in the comments in my first Parade of Pans post.

And then along came Jon who also had a tale to tell of once having pots and pans that he'd found a home for after he cleaned out his cabinets. He's a boy who claims he has never used his oven. He says other people don't believe him, but I've got a daughter-in-law who's never used her oven--or a dishrag--either, so I'll believe anything.

So thank all of y'all for the comments, but since you did not send me a picture you are not eligible for the prize, and I'm just sorry.

Next up: the pans in the running for the prize. I can't wait and neither can you.

Now Lou Ann and Terry Wayne are hauling me off to Piggy's and Harry's up in Hendersonville for the barbecue special, like we do every Friday. It would tickle me to run into some of you there.

Sweet potatoes or yams

I interrupt this talk about beat up and busted up baking pans and roasters because somebody all the way from California--a couple of sinners in want of savin', by the way, so y'all who've got good joints in your knees, get down and do your duty--has asked me what's the difference between a sweet potato and a yam.

Go on. I'm listening.

May your prayers be such that before the jury comes in, those two dear ones will get blinded by the light and will swoon and buckle before the Lord.

And I just found out that a real distingushed professor specializing in plants got ahold of the yam question and has offered to give us all his official definition about the difference between a sweet potato and a yam.

Stay tuned.

The Parade of Pans

Hey everybody. The Parade of Pans is a little contest I've been running once a year ever since I've been doing this blog, which has been going on almost two weeks now. That's my way of saying I've never done it but I think it would be a fun thing to do once a year. Everybody sends in pictures of their beat up cooking pans (that they still cook with) and whosever's is the worse gets a prize. If you can tell a good tale along with it, about who cooked what in it and when, well, that'll get you points, too.

I thought I'd get the ball rolling with a pan of my own. Here's a picture of an iron skillet that I fried chicken, pork chops, and chicken-fried steak in for six centuries.

Once a year I seasoned it with fat back. If you are from somewhere else, you might know it as salt pork.

A lot of chickens have laid in state in that iron skillet, and nobody in my family was ever low on iron.

Some of my baking pans and what not are really cruddy, but I didn't have one that was good and beat up enough to put in the Parade of Pans so I thought about getting one that was just grungy and going at it with a hammer, but then I thought why go to that much trouble at this time of night when I'm the one running the contest and can't win anyhow?

So I took a picture of this iron skillet that I used so many years, and I also took a picture of my daughter Lou Ann's grungy oven. It's not in the same category (the oven), but it's in the same spirit, and I'll share that with you soon as Lou Ann's husband gets back from bowling and shows me how to it put it up here on the internet. It's a special case.

Meanwhile, if you don't know what this is all about, go down to where I wrote about when I found Betty Feezor on the YouTube. Watch that little video of her and take a good, long look at the pan she roasted her turkey in, then showed it to WBTV viewers all across Metrolina and now the world.

Send in your pictures of your worst pans and you could win a prize. You can read all you need to know about the prize down there below the cat.

And we can all look forward to tomorrow when hopefully we'll see a whole lot of entries and also we'll at last see Arlene's husband's grandmother's magic garbage bowl.

Big day tomorrow! I'm going to run and get to bed right now to rest up for it.

See you in the morning, glories.

The Effect I Have On People's Cats

Well, I heard last night from Karen, who told me, "Trixie, reading what you wrote on the blog thing tickled me so bad and I laughed so hard, it scared my cats." Well, honey, don't blame your cats.

This is Delores next door's cat, and all I've got to do is walk into her kitchen door from her garage, and that cat cuts loose to cackling. I've studied over what it is, and I can only say it remains a mystery.

You just can't tell what it is that will move a cat to action.

Speaking of Karen, she wrote that she recognized that old beat up pan that Betty Feezor used thirty years ago to cook her turkey in. If you're curious about the pan--which I hope you are-- because there might be a little something in it for you--you go down below to where I wrote about Betty Feezor on the YouTube. You look at that little video and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I told Karen and I said honey, you've brought to my attention that now is the time for my Parade of Pans. And since you are such an all-fired good picture taker, (which y'all out there can see for yourself at http://acreekintheback.blogspot.com/) you ought to be in the running. The way it works is you all take a picture of the crustiest, most beat-up pan that you still use and send it (the picture, not the pan) to me and whichever one of you has the ugliest one and the best-told memories of what you cook with it, I'll reward you with what that girl that wrote that book about my life called THE DAYS BETWEEN THE YEARS, calls an "Advance Reader Copy."

It's not the real nice, solid hardcover book you can hold onto for years to come or use for a doorstop or knock your rambling man upside the head with, but it'll give you a peep inside my soul and tell you how when my kids pushed me too hard and laid down the law about me driving, I sneaked off on Christmas Eve and high-tailed it up the Saluda Grade in a snowstorm to the Laurel Terrace Assisted Living and got chased down the halls by a man.

So come on, y'all, and bring on the pans!

I'm still waiting on that picture of Arlene's magic garbage bowl, by the way.

Goforth and Crack Up

Good morning, glories! It's pouring rain here, and I hope with all my heart if it is raining where you are, you still have some sunshine in your soul. I'm tickled that Blog Hendersonville has plastered my name all over Henderson County by telling everybody out in blogland to "Goforth and Crack Up." If you don't believe me, look for yourself. Right here's where she said it, and I say bring on the fame to the both of us:

BLOG HENDERSONVILLE

I'll get back to myself in a minute, but I just wanted to say one more thing before I leave off talking about Betty Feezor, who I said a bunch about yesterday. She had a home-maker show on WBTV out of Charlotte for something like 25 years before she stepped out the kitchen door and walked away to Glory at the tender age of 53.

Just look at this picture of her, and you will see a woman who was not me. My hair never laid back in waves like that, no matter whether I used sponge rollers or spit curls. I never dressed up that nice to go to church, a wedding or a funeral, much less to beat up eggs in a bowl in the kitchen, and my kitchen didn't look that clean when the house was new and we hadn't moved in yet. Of course, that's not a picture of Betty Feezor at home. That's Betty Feezor on TV, and maybe her own kitchen was a mess. Maybe at home you could catch her with her hair looking like a Brillo soap pad. But what you see in that picture ought to give you an idea of what was the ideal woman of that time, and if you're young and think that doesn't matter to you, you just don't have much sense.

That was in the 1950s, when the saying "a woman's place is in the home" wasn't an insult but just a fact. Well, it might have been an insult, depending on who was saying it. Making a home was an art form, and Betty Feezor herself called it "home-making arts." If a woman was good at it--which I was in my own way, I guess--she was praised for it. And if she wasn't, she was ranked one notch above a street walker.

So young girls were brought up that how good you were was all tied up in how good of a home-maker you were. In my place and time, if a girl was called "smart" that meant she had eight arms. She could cook good and kept her house so clean a roach wouldn't even come looking. Girls my age--for most of you that would be your grandmother or great-grandmother--would put all she had in being what I've lately heard called "a domestic diva."

You had a commode so sparkling white you'd want to stand and stare in it. Your floor was so clean and waxed so smooth a fly would bust its A double S skidding across it. You could bake a cake that didn't sag in the middle, cookies that didn't burn. You could cut up a whole chicken and you could fry up that chicken with a crispy crust. You could wipe snotty noses and help your kids with their arithmetic.


And what was known but seldom said, was that you could do all that and still hop in bed and ride your man all night.

You were glad to do it. You were glad for your little house with its two or three little bedrooms and one bathroom with pink and black tile that was out of date. You were glad for your one station wagon that belonged to the whole family, and you didn't know anybody who didn't have to ask her husband if she could borrow the car to go to the store.

Then came the time when being a good home-maker was looked down on, all but the part about riding your man, anyhow. All of a sudden, women like me were supposed to "do something." "What do you do?" you got asked everywhere you went. Made you feel like a toad. And, truth be told, a lot of us wanted to do something. We'd had to take the men's jobs during WW II and we got a taste of what making our own money was like. I tell about this in that story of my life called The Days Between the Years. I tell how I learned to play Rosie the Riveter during the war only to get hustled right back to playing Betty Crocker after the war was over, stuck in the house all day long with Mr. Clean.

And some of us had to go out and work pitiful little jobs because we were married to bums or the good men we'd married had turned to scum. That was me. Also, right about that time, they started coming out with these new appliances that made housework easier. A lot of things changed right about then. You can do the Google and find out more than you'd ever want to know about that time.

But the main thing is women like me fell through the cracks. A lot of us didn't know what to do with ourselves and all those new freedoms and expectations.
I've two minds about all of this, not that anybody's asking.

For one thing, if you are a young woman and you aren't on your way to doing something where you can make your own living and take care of yourself, don't let me find out about it or I'll chase you down and beat you with a stick. You need to get to where a man is a nice thing to have, but optional, like an alligator pocketbook. Women back in my time didn't have that and a lot of them would have cut loose if they could.

But then again, I look back on the days when making a casserole or sewing up a scarf was looked at as an art, not because it gave me the big head, but because you can get a lot of pleasure out of doing those little things that might not make the headlines. Now, I'm always picking on Martha Stewart here on this blog thing. I do in that book, too. But even if you think she's a regular B-word and ought to have lived out her life in prison, you have to say she did a lot to make us think better of the little things in life.

When I look back on my life now, one of the things that stands out is the time I was into taking little packages of chewing gum and making little trains, using toothpicks and Lifesavers for the wheels and chocolate Kisses for the smokestacks. When I was all finished, I had the most darling little name card holders for the residents of the nursing homes. You could put one by the place where each resident was supposed to sit in the dining room. And the really good thing was when it got old or the wheels fell off you could eat it. Now, even though that stands out in my mind as a good memory, I've all but forgotten how to do it so if any of you know the recipe, write me, and I'll try to put it up here to share with others.

I'm real disappointed in Arlene for not sending me a picture of her husband's grandma's magic garbage bowl. I can't help but wonder how she'd feel if she came here one day and found that I'd flown to Glory. I've got a new friend, though, who collects mermaids. Her name is Marty, and I hope real soon to get her to share pictures with me. If she'll let me, I'll put up a little album of her pictures and call it "Marty's Mermaids," but maybe that's just a dream.

Until next time, "that's all folks," as the bunny said.

I Find Betty Feezor on YouTube

Okay. I'm back. I was doing something a while ago when I was tickled to death to find a little video about Betty Feezor! It was a clip from "The Betty Feezor Show" which was on this thing called the YouTube. What I found was a little clip from one of her TV shows--a little movie that I can watch right here on the computer screen, if that don't beat all!

I'm trying to recall what it was I was doing! It bothers me I can't remember. Looking up something or other, using the Google, I guess. I don't know. Lordy, I must have left my head in the pantry. Well, anyway, if you don't know who Betty Feezor was, then you are either (1) not old enough, (2) not from within a hundred miles of Charlotte, NC or (3) you don't have much sense.

Betty Feezor has been gone from us for over thirty years now and though her memory still burned in the back of my mind like a low-lit Christmas bulb, her light, due to my age and decreased brain capacity, had begun to flicker. And then I stumbled across a little piece of "The Betty Feezor Show" on the YouTube and there she was--right back in my living room! It was as if she had never gone! As if she had stepped right back into my little world, as she used to do so many years ago to help me find a way to sew a better seam or roast a better chicken or bake a better pie.

If you don't know, Betty Feezor had a home-maker show back in the 50s to the late 70s. She was on, I guess, about 25 years. I used to watch her all the time on WBTV out of Charlotte. She cooked and she sewed and made little crafts. She told you how to save money by making some peanut butter pudding for dessert when you might not have money in your weekly budget to make your family's favorite German Chocolate cake. She'd make a mess of a dress she was sewing and then go right on the air and admit it and rip out the seams to tell you what she had in mind to do to fix it.

She was, I guess, what you'd call elegant, but she had the common touch. I always felt like if I ran into her in the parking lot of Harris Teeter, putting her groceries in the car, she'd smile as if she knew me, start chatting away, and make sure I'd seen all the store specials. You know, time is a funny thing. Now that I've seen this YouTube of her show, I feel like she's not gone at all. I feel like I might turn the aisle at the Harris Teeter and catch her browsing the case of Holly Farm chickens.

An army of Martha Stewarts marched across the back of Betty Feezor to get where they are today. She died on the young side, 53, the same age as my daughter Lou Ann, and before she left, she told all of us out in TV Land to live our lives so that when we have gone, it will have mattered. In those days, Home Economics was considered a profession, and I found out by doing the Google that to this day, there's a scholarship in the name of Betty Feezor offered to a young person who wants a career in what they are now calling "family and consumer sciences." You can find out all about it by clicking right here: http://www.bettyfeezorscholarship.com/index.htm.

It makes me misty-eyed to think of Betty Feezor and that time right about the middle of the last century. I could say it was a simpler time, but I won't because it wasn't. It's true that everybody didn't have cell phones growing out of their ears like fungus the way they do now, but in some ways, it was more complicated. We didn't have the Google back then. You wanted to know anything, you had to look it up in the World Book Encyclopedia or just stay ignorant. I doubt many people back then had double ovens, even microwaves. A lot of people in Betty Feezor's viewing area didn't even have clothes dryers! I didn't. If clothes got dry, I had to hang them out on the line or they'd stay wet, but that wasn't the end of the world. The clothes, when you brought them in from the line, smelled like another world--anybody will tell you that--and there's a whole host of memories tied up with those days gone by.

I don't mean to get all mushy and misty on you.

Before you watch the show, let me point out some things: First, notice how Betty talks a double blue streak without a script. I bet you she didn't know what a cue card was. See how in that first part, where she's taking the turkey out of the oven and chirping about how lovely it is and how suitable for the holiday season, see how beat up and dark that pan is that she roasted her turkey in? Looks like it's been beat with a hammer and put through the fire. A pan like that would go for a quarter at the Goodwill. Can you see Martha Stewart using a pan like that? I can't. Or Rachel Ray, who markets her own fancy garbage bowl, for Pete's sake. Paula Deen might. I wouldn't put anything past her. But that was Betty Feezor. She knew who she was talking to out in TV Land, out there in that place they call Metrolina: ordinary women trying to make every day a little holiday for their families, knowing that you better enjoy every moment because it's later than you think.

And notice those curtains with the orange fringe in the window? Those are identical to my kitchen curtains in my little house here in Spindale!

And notice Betty Feezor says she bought that turkey for 39 cents a pound? At Harris Teeter, too. We've got Ingles all over the place here, but in Charlotte everybody knows "the store" means Harris Teeter. Here's how Betty says to make the turkey: Smear some butter on it, salt and pepper, put a tent of foil over it. Couldn't be easier. Back then you didn't hear much talk about smoking turkeys, brining turkeys, or deep frying turkeys. Betty kept it simple, and to borrow words from Martha Stewart, I say, "It's a good thing."

Be sure to look at the part where she rolls up comic papers and puts them in a potato chip can wrapped in Christmas paper to give as a gift. The best part of the whole show is the end where she's talking up this automatic bowl cleaner and says that at this time of the year, you don't have time to be thinking about cleaning out the commode. That by itself is worth the price of admission.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgFPJ0eGjvI