My Mom makes the world’s best pies (don’t try to dispute it…) and she always makes us several varieties when we visit. Isaac has convinced her to bake a special pie whenever he comes. You see, he loves cherry flavoring but not the big old snot-like lumps (his words) of cherries in pie filling. Of course, in making the world’s best pie, one wouldn’t dream of buying canned pie filling. So, since my Mom makes her own, she is in a great position to filter out the cherries after making the syrup. That’s right, she makes cherry-juice pie for my son.

I have to admit, I prefer cherry-juice pie to cherry-snot pie any day. All the flavor remains but you never get the surprise loogie. Now, my boy likes to eat and he is all about cleaning up the last drop of cherry juice. He gets that from his mother who has a similar feeling about ice cream and apple pie. It’s cool though because we don’t have to wash their plates after they do their tongue-cleaning.

When we eat cherry-juice pie, we don’t talk.  It’s serious business, you see, eating the world’s best pie.  These pictures are taken over a 4 second period so the silence doesn’t last too long.  He devours pie!  So, have you ever had a juice pie or do you like the chunks (particularly in cherry pie)?

When we go to the beach, we have a pretty set routine…we get up around 8, grab a quick bite to eat and start applying sunscreen. Once properly lathered and slathered, we grab another bite to eat and head for the beach (with our coolers full of food). Beach tents have evolved and we have moved along with them. We carry our tent down and set it up (and maybe grab a bit of beef jerky or some peanuts) and head for the water. My immediate family body- surfs until noon at which time we grab a bite to eat and then back at it.

I sort of love the beach because we basically have no rules. For breakfast and lunch, Chips-Ahoy cookies are perfectly acceptable as the main course or as a side item. I drink pop by the two liter and am rarely caught without a handful of some sort of food that is ruining my bikini body. But it’s the beach you see so all rules are pretty much out the window.

So after a day full of eating at the house, we always go to some fancy (or at least expensive) seafood place where we eat far too much (and far too rich) fresh seafood. One place that is a ton of fun at Tybee Island is called the Crab Shack. The Crab Shack is certainly not a fancy place but it is expensive. It’s sort of hard to imagine why the prices are so high since all of the dining is either outside under the trees or inside a shack. By shack I don’t mean a quaint little restaurant building…I mean a shack. Cats crawl all over the place grabbing the bits of seafood that people drop and birds occasionally swoop in to snatch a piece of low country boil of a runaway shrimp.

In spite of its humble appearance, the food is really great. They specialize in “low country” food like low country boil, shrimp on grits, shrimp a-la-mode (channeling Bubba from Forest Gump here), etc. Everything is brought on a paper plate and the tables have holes cut in the middle where diners throw everything when finished. We eat everything with our fingers and garner the biggest smiles from the kids you can imagine!

Anyhow, an additional draw of the place is the alligator lagoon where a few dozen alligators reside. For $3, one can purchase 4 soft dogfood-like morsels to hang on the end of a bamboo pole to feed the gators. It is a blast although it appears that the gators eat well as they sometimes don’t want to play along with the “gator fishermen”. I suppose a cat might fall in here and there to satiate them, but generally, I think every patron must be feeding the gators ’til they are full. We were lucky to find a gator that put on a good show for the kids and ate everything we sent his way…must have been the runt of the group I guess.

Anyhow, we eat way too much every year and I generally gain 5-10 pounds in a week. It’s worth every calorie though as fresh seafood is hard to beat!

About 15 years ago, my Dad and I decided to make wine with a bumper crop of raspberries that we had harvested.  We had never tried making wine but we figured if Hank Jr said a country boy could do it, we needed to make sure we were up to snuff.  So we headed to the recycling place to snap up a few gallon jugs in which to ferment our hooch.  We made homemade “bubblers” to vent carbon dioxide from the fermentation and started along our way.  The internet was, of course, young, so online stores hadn’t cropped up.  Finding wine or champagne yeast was not a simple process so we started our fermentation with regular bread yeast.

In case you didn’t know, wine is made by adding fruit/flowers/sweat socks to a mixture of sugar and yeast.  If all goes well, the yeast feeds on the sugars and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide.  To prevent a mess, the carbon dioxide is vented off (without allowing new air or contaminates to enter the mixture) leaving the alcohol.  At some point (usually no more than 15% alcohol), the alcohol kills the yeast and fermentation stops.  Of course, if the yeast runs out of nutrients (i.e. sugar) before that point, fermentation also stops.  Our first batches of wine made from regular bread yeast were not as high in alcohol (and we sweeter than usual wine) since the yeast was not meant to tolerate full wine-level alcohol content.  They also didn’t taste quite as good as regularly fermented wine tasted, I suppose.  Still, they were dang drinkable and well worth our effort.  We eventually branched out and, quite successfully, made apple and grape and dandelion and all sorts of other types of wines as well.

As is typical, I recently got a wild hair and decided that it was time to once again get back into the wine making business.  It is legal for individuals to make homemade wine (thanks to the 21st Amendment).  In fact, one can make several hundred gallons of wine before there begins to be any problem (look it up on your own and with regard to your own local laws).  No one is allowed to sell homemade wine, however, without proper licenses, taxes, etc.  I don’t intend to make much wine, and certainly not hundreds of gallons so this operation will be well within legal limits.  

Anyhow, I ordered some real champagne yeast, nice bubblers and some other additives to make my own wine.  I still recycled my fermentation vessel like I did before as that worked perfectly well.  Later on this week I will tell you the specific sort of wine I am making (it ain’t boring old grape) and show you how I put it all together.  I suppose the wine we are making is one that is in line with what Hank had in mind for a country boy!