Faith, Folklore, and Friends

Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filet gumbo                   Cause tonight I'm gonna see my ma cher amio.                    Pick guitar fill fruit jar and be gay-o                                    Son of a gun we'll have big fun on the bayou. These are lyrics from Hank Williams' song, Jambalaya .  Where I came from, everybody loved Hank and for years thought his death had somehow cheated them.   Jambalaya was #1 on the Billboard country chart on September 6, 1952, not long before Hank's passing. We sang it for years afterwards. We didn't have a clue what those words (except fruit jar) meant; the bayou could have been on the moon as far as we knew. But we sang it anyway, just because it was a catchy tune and what was good enough for Hank was good enough for us. More than half a century...

Thankfully, we live in a world where fresh produce can be obtained all winter, but it wasn't always so.  My mom talked about how tired her family grew of canned vegetables with nothing fresh to eat.  Her family loved the first green vegetables of spring. She always planted early lettuce and onions for spring salads that we called wilted   lettuce .  It wasn't really spring until we had one.   We had wilted lettuce Tuesday for lunch.  Just in case you have forgotten how, this is the way I make mine. Bacon.  This just won't work without bacon.  The amount I use varies with how much I have in the refrigerator.  I usually use more than this, but I was in no mood to go to the grocery store Tuesday morning. Chop it up fine, then put in a skillet and cook it slow and low until it is crisp and there is a good amount of bacon fat. This is deer tongue lettuce from our garden.  We usually plant black-seeded Simpson lettuce, b...