A little grits with that whine?

Is it just my curse that I have to listen to whiners ALL DAY LONG? Okay, sorry. I'm whining. Anyway, I spend my days in a high school classroom, then I come home to a tyrannical ten-year-old daughter. [insert eye-roll here] Kid for rent, cheap. Impossibly gripy and petulant.

Hey, I made some kickin' cheese grits tonight. I don't normally eat grits, having grown up in Oklahoma & Texas where oatmeal and Malt-O-Meal were more commonly found on breakfast tables. In fact, I never even heard of grits until I was in high school, but I still didn't know what they were until I was well into adulthood. [shrug] Call me sheltered, I dunno. I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, last weekend I was in Nashville, Tennessee at a writer's conference. The hotel (the Union Station in downtown Nashville -- UBER-COOL) serves the absolute best hotel breakfast you'll ever dream of eating. Monday morning I sat down to a plate of cheese grits, as well as some homemade baking-powder biscuits and gravy AND two slices of ultra-crispy bacon. YUM. The grits were so good I could hardly believe it. I personally make better sausage gravy, but that's to be expected -- my standard of sausage gravy is impossibly high. Theirs was certainly not inedible... I'm sure it would be nirvana to the unwashed. Nonetheless, I came home to Iowa with a craving for cheese grits, so tonight I made some for myself.

I love Nashville... especially the abundance of musicians playing live in every restaurant on every corner, hoping to get discovered by the music biz. Add in the fact that I have YET to have a bad meal in a restaurant there, and you've got the makings of a fab-OH vacation (or business junket). Places I ate this time around:

The Mellow Mushroom (in Franklin, south of Nashville)
Elliston Place Soda Shop
Swett's
Tabouli's

Cindy (my best pal) and I always eat at Elliston Place when we go to Nashville. This time, we're adding Swett's to our list of must-do restaurants every time we're in the neighborhood. Holy Cow, that food was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that we went twice. We went there for Sunday lunch; I had meat loaf, mashed potatoes and turnip greens, and a white roll. Cindy had the country fried steak, greens, taters, and the fried cornbread. On Monday at suppertime, right before we left town to head back to Iowa, we stopped there again. This time I had pork ribs and barbecue sauce (the sauce was home-made and incredible) (none of this ketchup crap you normally find), taters again, and green beans. The flat kind, like I always prefer, cooked with pork fat. And this time I got the fried cornbread because it was unbelievably awesome. I don't remember what Cindy got this time, except that she got the boiled cabbage and it was pure heaven. To top it off, their iced tea is smoooooooth, and their ice machine makes perfectly crunchy ice that's easy on the teeth for us ice-crunchers.

Someday I'm going to tell someone I'm blogging, but until then, I shall remain incognito. I still don't know for sure if this is going to fit into my life. I'll give it six more days.