Roadtrip: Tuscaloosa, AL

The name is cool.

My next stop was really Jackson, MS, but I needed to stop for lunch somewhere and Tuscaloosa was conveniently located.  And also, I just like how the name rolls off your tongue.

Tuscaloosa is fairly small, with a clearly defined main street a couple blocks long, centered around the Amtrak station.

Amtrak Station Clock, Tuscaloosa

Theater in downtown Tuscaloosa

Between it and the highway, you pass some sizable, well-preserved antebellum mansions, such as the Jemison-Van de Graaf house:

Jemison-Van de Graaf mansion, Tuscaloosa

I didn’t have time to do more than drive by very slowly, but I did chow down on chicken and waffles at Five Bar, which apparently has jazz lunch with a live band on Sundays.   I was very pleased to find the place open, since in this region of the country, nearly everything shuts down for Sunday, but more on the problems that caused me when we get to Jackson).  That said, I had mixed feelings about the fried chicken, which had a wonderfully crispy skin, but in several places the fat under the skin hadn’t fully rendered out, so I bit into a couple unpleasantly greasy pockets (really great fried chicken manages to be heart attack full of fat without being greasy).  The waffles were light and fluffy, but the best part was the candied bacon, which didn’t actually come with my meal.  It’s a garnish for the place’s Bloody Mary special and they just have a big bowl of it on the bar.  I got a couple sans drinks from the friendly bartender because I was waiting at the bar for my food for a good half-hour (the place was crammed full, clearly the local pick for after-church-service hangouts).  It’s bacon cooked to chewy with a crunchy coating of paprika-spiked sugar.  The sugar is caramelized, which helps keep it from being a sweet bomb, but it’s really the paprika that elevated it, burning off the sweetness and accenting the smokiness of the bacon.  Yum.

Candied bacon, Five Bar

Chicken and waffles, Five Bar

Roadtrip: Birmingham, AL – Downtown

The basic shapes of a Southern city appear to be boulevards and low boxes.  I first noticed this when entropyenator and I visited Memphis, and Birmingham bears me out.  Streets start out broad and get even broader as you head towards the center, while the non-residential buildings crouch low to the ground.  Even the skyscrapers tend to be heavy and flattish, like cairns, as opposed to Chicago’s looming towers or the East Coast’s sleek needles, or the Midwest’s tall rectangles.  And there is a lot of old-fashioned, very ornate, but kind of childishly fanciful detailing on the buildings, less about imposing classical sculpture and more about picking out curlicues in paint.  It’s fun to look out, but modernist furniture me would probably hate to have to live with it.  But the roads, I could definitely love the roads.  Not being in danger of clipping your neighbor’s side-view mirror if you drift an inch over?  Yes.  And also, for an economically depressed area the roads are in much better shape than my current area of the East Coast.

That said, the breadth of the roads really brings to life how meaningful the bus strikes during the Civil Rights Movement were, and how much people were sacrificing.  These blocks are no joke, and I speak as a former Manhattanite who regularly walked that endless stretch between 8th and 9th Ave. up in the Theater District for awesome ramen at Totto Ramen.  Birmingham is not a very walkable city, despite the best efforts of the local tourism board (although the walking guide was handy in structuring my time).  I was also short on time–due to a delayed flight, I only really had a morning to explore Birmingham.  Fortunately, Cobb Lane B&B is located in the Five Points District, which had an eclectic cluster of buildings:

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You can also see the Vulcan statue (largest cast-iron statue in the world and a city symbol) from several places in Five Points.

Statue of Vulcan

I then drove to the other side of downtown Birmingham, where I checked out more funky buildings, and paid my respects to several Civil Rights Movement landmarks, including the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a KKK bomb killed four African-American girls in 1963.  It’s still an active church.

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Other interesting spots include a stretch along Morris Street, which has cobblestones and old-timely metal lamp-posts, and the Redmont Hotel, the oldest continuously operating hotel in town.

Sunday Night Dinner: Lasagna Rolls and Cake

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I don’t mind eating leftovers, so I usually cook up a big vat of something on Sunday to eat the rest of the week. But lately I’ve been in kind of a cooking rut, so I decided to try a new recipe.

I found this recipe last week and decided to give it a shot. I like lasagna, but it does have a habit of tending to sit like a bowling ball in the tum afterward, so this seemed like a nice, lighter alternative. I did the rolls as dictated, so it came out vegetarian, but I’m sure that you could tweak the recipe a bit to add ground beef if you wanted it more hearty. I think that it turned out quite good, except my pot is really too small to cook the long lasagna strips easily.

I also have some eggs that I have to use up, so I made a cake 🙂 My go to recipe is here (only halved, because this would make a huge cake), which I like because its very basic and you can add practically anything in it. This time I used brown sugar instead of white, almond extract instead of vanilla, and added dark chocolate powder (really left over cocoa mix). The chocolate must have a higher melting point than I thought because it didn’t actually mix in…instead you can still see the little granules, so it almost looks like a poppy cake at first. Still good though.