Food by Jude   Eat well, live long and have more fun!

Garden Party Lemonade, Mississippi Mocha Balls, Old Kentucky Bourbon Balls, and Fiddle Dee Dee Iced Tea

Every area of the country has its great foods, traditions and style. But, when you hear the word “hospitality”, one region always comes to mind - the South.

Imagine a hot sultry day, banjo music and Scarlet or Blanche, serving tea and cookies on the veranda; the conversation genteel and the livin’ easy.

When musing about Southern Hospitality, fried chicken, grits and biscuits are at the top of the list. But there is more to southern cordiality than leaden, lipid-laden, (but finger-lickin’) lunches.

Manners are big in the South, and hospitality is taken very, very seriously. One of the cardinal rules of good hospitality – is to always make your guests feel comfortable and wanted. Serving up something delicious, but healthy, shows that you are really thinking about them.

This is sound advice. However, when they drop in unexpectedly, it can tax your patience and your pantry.

Summertime is such a time. And, when you live in an area where the fish are jumpin’ and the charm is high - you get guests.

Rather than rushing around like a hound dog with a mouth full of hush puppies and a chigger on his tail, be prepared!

The first thing your guests will want is something tall and cool to drink. This is easy of course, there is this thing called water. But, if you’d like to impress them at the get go, have some specially made iced tea or lemonade ready to pour.

They will then gaze at you with those soulful eyes, looking a lot like that hound dog, and hope you will get the message that they are hungry!

Sweets take the edge of hunger, and plateful of cookies will give you time to figure out how to either get rid of them, or get them to take you out for dinner.

You can offer them some fried moon pies or other commercial comestibles or stun them with homemade cookies.

Homemade cookies – when it’s hotter than a moon shiner’s feet running from the revenue man?

Relax, take Jude girl’s lead and cook up some no-bake cookies. These are really popular south of the Mason Dixon line, can be made in the cool of the morning or in the evening shade. If you are fixin’ to make some, make a big batch, they last for a week or more.

Y’all take it easy now and ‘member, if that dog don’t hunt, dance with the date that brung ya.

• Show me the recipes!

Better for you Bechamel Sauce, Chicken Breasts with Sweet & Sexy BBQ Sauce and Roasted Rosemary Garlic Potatoes

What do Tutankhamen, Marie Antoinette and Mr. Peanut have in common? Stumped? The answer is salt!

Salt has played a prominent role in world history, and not just because of its contribution to French fries and pretzels. It was the very first food preservative.

These days, salt (or sodium) is not looked upon with great favor; but for early man, it was the difference between life and starvation.

With no possible means of food preservation, and no knowledge of agriculture, crop cultivation, etc. they ate whatever they could catch, pick or dig up. With the addition of salt, early man could guarantee a food supply when the wild berries were gone and the herds and flocks had migrated elsewhere.

Soon, other uses for salt were discovered. The ancient Egyptian method of mummification used salt. King Tut would not be where he is today without it.

The word for salt found its way into our vocabularies in the form of salary, from “salarium argentums”, Latin for salt money. The words “war and peace” originate from the words for salt and bread in ancient Hebrew and Arabic.

Salad, sauce and sausage are also words derived from salt.

Salt, and the quest for it, began before recorded time. It was being mined in the Alps at the time of the founding of Rome, and rapidly found its way into politics (no big surprise).

Around 506 BC, salt traders from the Port of Ostia raised the price so much that the state took over the industry.

Then someone got the bright idea of taxation, and it became a bane to the people - and a bonus for the politicians. By the end of the middle ages, the salt tax in Burgundy had grown to more than 100% of the purchase price! Its revenue had become a necessity for the government. The repeal of this tangy tax became one of the main goals of the French revolution in 1789.

Perhaps if Marie had said, “let them eat popcorn”, she might have been worth her salt, and lived to tell about it.

Today, salt in the US goes for .02 cents per ounce and is non-taxable - maybe there’s hope for gas!

Beyond brines, bagels and bologna, salt today has many other uses. It is found in soaps, detergents, pesticides, PVC, paper and is used to set dyes in textiles.

It is also an essential ingredient of a margarita!

But, alas, that margarita and its accompanying salsa and chips can push us well over the RDA of sodium (2400mg) even before dinner.

Your doctor would prefer you keep it under 2000 mgs. Salt is essential to life but we require a mere 500mg daily for health.

The biggest culprits in the salt wars are prepared foods; especially condiments like steak sauce, soy sauce, catsup and packaged sauce mixes.

When trying to lower sodium, label reading is a must. Be prepared for a shock. Salt is more prevalent and pervasive than junk email - and harder to delete.

But, it can be done. I am working hard on a lot of low sodium recipes to share with you. When I say “let them eat healthy”, I want to be worth my salt!

• Show me the recipes!

It is sitting in a warm spot on my counter - and it’s alive!

No, it’s not Frankenstein’s monster, it’s “Lactobacillus”, wild yeast and the magical mystical motivator of sourdough bread.

I love sourdough bread. A hunk of sourdough was the first solid food I ever had! It was a staple in our house when I was a child. It is a staple in my house now. My love for sourdough doesn’t stop with French bread; it covers a big area of affection; from baguettes to breadsticks and cornbread to coffeecake. The unforgettable and inimitable tang of sourdough can make a bon vivant out of anyone.

My sourdough saga began over twenty-five years ago when I first mixed flour, water and wishes together. It has lived and thrived on the coast, in the valley and now in the Sierra foothills; each area having contributed special spores to splendify the starter.

There is nothing in the world like the aroma of freshly baked sourdough bread.

“Jefferson Starship” may have built that city on “rock ‘n roll”. But, surely it was rebuilt on baguettes and rolls.

100 years ago, after the great quake of ’06, Louise Boudin, wife of the creator of the original San Francisco sourdough bread, had the presence of mind to stash their starter in a bucket before seeking safety.

Over 5 decades before, Louise’s husband had started one of the earliest businesses in San Francisco, the Boudin bakery.

Isidore Boudin, a young French baker, had discovered gold - not in the gold fields of the Sierra foothills, but in the tantalizing crusts of a traditional French bread using a simple “starter” he had put together. To this day, the bakery (now a chain) still uses the original “mother” or starter.

The special climate and yeast spores abounding in the city by the bay did something special and unique to the simple combination of water, flour and natural yeast.

This wild yeast is similar to those responsible for the metamorphosis of milk into cheese and grapes into wine. The concept of a starter did not originate with Boudin, it had been a mainstay of bakers as far back as the Egyptians, and goes by such names as Biga (Italy) and Poolish (France).

Bakers relied on these starters; they were the only “up and comers” of the day. Availability of commercial leavening products such as packaged yeast and baking powders was just emerging in the 1800’s.

Boudin was originally selling the starter to 49ers headed out to find their fortunes. With a starter, one could make fresh bread (or biscuits) over a campfire.

These brawny bakers would bundle up at night with their starter to keep it warm, and active.

The miners were too busy digging and panning to bake anything other than biscuits. But I’ve had a lot of time to play around with my starter and, eureka – I’ve discovered a mother lode of recipes, which I am happy to share with you. Here’s a few, there’s more to come. God willing and the starter don’t die.

• Show me the recipes!

Calcutta Cole Slaw, Sugar Shack Pork and Indian Cornsticks

Eating outside has always held a special fascination for me – and my biological clock is telling me we should be eating out on the patio NOW.

So far, this has been the rainiest spring in my memory. Maybe it is not my dampest spring, but certainly the wettest.

Growing up in San Francisco where spring and summer are always enveloped in fog, the only two days nice enough to dine alfresco were the first day of school (naturally) and Christmas Day. Christmas of 1972 we actually had a picnic on the beach!

In the Mother lode, springtime provides a beautiful and very long lasting venue for ventilated vittles, or at least up until this year; I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Dining out of doors, unless we are trying to impress the neighbors or the boss, means informality. Plastic glasses are ok, and so is disposable plate ware. If you want to be a bit more “Martha-esque”, put out some gaily colored paper napkins (designer, of course). Be sure and weight them down with something heavy like a Waterford crystal paperweight or a can of Spam (depending upon your guest list).

The main concern, when eating outside in springtime, is keeping the food hot. If you have some of those electric warming trays or an electric frying pan stashed in a closet somewhere, this is a goodtime to dust them off. Fondue pots are helpful, and can be used to keep sauces or even a bit of chili hot if there is no room on the grill.

The other worry and more so in other parts of the country, is the threat of a sudden rainstorm. Caterers on the east coast always have an alternate locale for garden weddings, just in case.

We don’t usually have to contend with such drastic weather changes (knock on wood), but this year, an alternate plan of action might be a good idea.

If you want to BBQ, plan on menu choices that are quickly grilled in 15 minutes or less, and could be alternately finished off inside, in case the weather turns. This is not the season for a nine-pound roast on the rotisserie!

It’s been a while since I saw a bug, but before you venture forth with the frankfurters, carefully check out the dining site for bees, mosquitoes and ants. And before you plunk down your bankroll for the designer paper napkins, make sure that the garden isn’t full of allergy-laden blooms, or they will turn into very expensive Kleenex.

Once you’ve cleaned and polished the grill, stocked up on citronella candles and located the fly swatter, you’re ready for the culinary kick-off of the calendar.

One of the great things about eating outside is you don’t have to dust, and it smells even better than furniture polish!

• Show me the recipes!