This is the time of year when the Goddess of Gumbo earns her title. Something just happens when the temperature dips below 45 degrees. Makes me want to bust out my cast-iron skillets and start burnin’ … So a few days ago, I decided to make a Charleston, South Carolina, specialty for my Indiana-bred squeeze. He’s a great cook, mind you, if a bit heavy on the potatoes. So I’m trying to introduce him, gently, to the pleasures of the Southern table, the bounty of the ocean, stuff like that.

He is fortunate to have made the acquaintance of a woman raised in the two great Southern culinary traditions–those of Charleston and New Orleans, plus a healthy dose of Tex-Mex from all those years I spent in the Southwest. And I’ve made progress with things like grits, though we’ve discovered a regrettable and apparently unalterable aversion to things like oysters, clams, even scallops. (Sigh).

Anyway, this morning I woke from my post-Thanksgiving turkey hangover with a craving … for shrimp and grits. This, I know, sounds bizarre to non-Southerners–and even to Southerners not raised within the sight and sound of the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. But trust me, it is a delicacy beyond compare. I took myself down to my local seafood market. And word of God, they had never-frozen creek shrimp from South Carolina on ice. I took it as a sign, bought about three quarters of a pound, and this is what ensued…

The Goddess of Gumbo’s Shrimp & Grits

3/4 pound of medium shrimp, peeled and deveined

1 small onion, chopped

1/2 bell pepper, chopped

1/4 cup roasted or sun-dried tomatoes, sliced small

2 or 3 slices of bacon, chopped

1 T oil or butter

1 T flour

1/4 cup shrimp stock (clam juice or even water will do in a pinch)

1/4 cup cream

Seasonings: salt, pepper & paprika or your favorite mix (mine is Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning)

Sliced polenta, seared on both sides

Now let’s get something clear. This recipe will taste just fine if you like jumbo-sized shrimp from Vietnam–you know, the ones that look great on the plate and taste like nothing in particular. But if you want a full-flavored recipe, the best shrimp to use are creek shrimp from the Carolinas. (This is not in any way to take a swipe at Gulf shrimp, which are superb as well. I simply happen to live in Virginia.)

And when you’re buying those shrimp, resist the urge to buy the great, big ones. Medium is what you want. It’s a fact well known  to connoisseurs (and folks who grow up in shrimp country) that the smaller shrimp are, in fact, the sweetest in flavor. And if you really want to blow your taste buds wide open, take an extra 15 minutes and make a stock with the shrimp shells. This recipe does not take long to make–especially if you use prepared polenta rather than boiling your own grits from scratch. The extra flavor boost is definitely worth the extra effort.

One final note: Do not, upon pain of visitation by the Ghost of Great Southern Cooks Past, use quick grits. It is an abomination. Either take the 20 minutes to make real grits or buy precooked polenta in a plastic sock like I do. I’ve seen at least three brands of this stuff in my little town–at the little Italian market and at the big chain grocery story, too. And don’t be thrown by the fancy Italian name. You can call it grits–you can call it polenta: It’s all corn!

Now, down to business.

Heat the oil or butter in a skillet and lightly saute the shrimp to release their juices. Remove the shrimp before they’re completely done (there should be a little gray still visible). Add the flour and saute, stirring frequently, until you have a roux that is the color of a nicely browned bisquit. When the flour reaches the desired color, toss in the onions and peppers. This halts the browning of the flour.

Cook the flour, onions and peppers together for perhaps a minute, then add the stock and cream. This should make a rich gravy. Stir the mixture until the onions are cooked–you may have to adjust the liquids by adding a little more stock or a little more cream, depending on how thick you want the gravy to be.

Stir in the shrimp, the tomatoes and the bacon. Cook for about a minutes. Adjust the flavors with salt, white or black pepper, and paprika to taste. Spoon over a couple of slices of lightly seared polenta, garnish with green onions or parsley. And you have a feast!

This week I realized that I have had no vacation this summer–it’s been work, work, work, except for the times I’ve carved out to play on this blog. And while I like work, and lord knows I need to work–hard and fast–to complete this project, I also needed … a change of pace.

That’s how I found myself braking for butterflies on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The Rockfish Gap Overlook off the Blue Ridge Parkway

Now you may find this hard to believe, but though I live less than 20 minutes from the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway/Shenandoah National Park, I’ve visited precisely once in the fourteen years I’ve lived here. Earlier this week, I had to go “over the mountain” — as we say when we cross Afton Mountain into the Shenandoah River Valley — on business. I wrapped that up by ten, so instead of coming straight home on the interstate, I took the dogleg onto the parkway and drove … for hours.

Homestead with chicken coop in the backdrop

Now I’m familiar with the work of Chuck and Nan Perdue, folklorists at the University of Virginia, so I knew that thousands of families had been moved off their lands to create the parkway and the park. But it never clicked until I found this cabin, part of a farm “exhibit” near Humpback Rocks that included a tiny garden, a chicken coop that was more like a palace, a root cellar, a springhouse, and a cow byre.

These, mind you, are real buildings assembled from farms from which the owners had been displaced. Beautifully crafted–they were built to last–and meticulously maintained by the National Park Service, the buildings allow visitors to the park to experience selected sights of farm life without any of the sounds or smells. No sweaty humans with funny accents and guns to chase off the unwelcome visitor. No animals except for a single, exceedingly fat hen. The only sounds were the voice of the costumed interpreter, bird song, and the buzzing of insects.

Pipevine swallowtail in ecstatic communion with coneflowers

I stood in deep woods looking at the springhouse, the care with which it had been built from stone, wood, and mud mortar, and my body, which had been vibrating with fear and anxiety for weeks, began to relax. I stood marveling at the temperature–it was at least 10 degrees cooler than the city. I daydreamed amid massive flowering wands of black cohosh, drifts and drifts of them, with Humpback Rocks looming above … and gradually the shattering cacophony of bird voices began to resolve into individual songs: the fluting of wood thrushes, the peter-peter-peter of tufted titmice, the wicka-wicka-wicka of flickers.

My only companions were the insects: The forest was simply alive with insects. The occasional hornet. Bees and beetles aplenty. But especially (marvellously) butterflies. Thousands of them. Spotted. Tiger-striped. Giant and swallowtailed. Tiny as my thumbnail and silvery white… Lazily fanning their wings as they fed on the coneflowers and zinnias that surrounded the farmhouse. Dancing by the dozens in ecstatic spiral flights at the side of the road.

I bought a souvenir at the National Parks gift shop and hit the road after about an hour of that, but found my reverence for the butterflies lingering. I slowed my car when they launched themselves across the tiny ribbon of asphalt ahead of me. When I saw a huge swallowtail just chilling in the middle of my lane, I actually stopped the car , backed up, and drove slowly around it…

By this time hours had passed, and I was starved. So I exited the Parkway at VA 646–which, going east, leads to the ski-and-spa resort at Wintergreen and, heading west, leads to Sherando Lake, a swimming-camping-fishing complex around a beautiful spring-fed lake that, even though it was built by the CCC during the Depression, remains something of a secret.

“Beautiful people” or “regular people”? Four-star restaurant and spectacular views or fried chicken (if I was lucky) at the gas station up the road from the lake?

Royal Oaks Country Store in Love, VA

As it turned out, it was neither. I ended up in a country store in Love, Virginia. I chatted with the young man behind the counter about his garden–and the three dozens squash and cucumbers it was pumping out daily. “I’m so sick of squash–squash casserole, squash with butter and onions, squash any kinda way you could think of–I just told my wife to start giving it away,” he chuckled.

I couldn’t resist ordering a “Love Sub” and, while he made it, I browsed among the Appalachian kitsch in his gift shop: homemade soaps and jams and jellies, alternating with arrows fletched with fake hawk feathers and Indian maiden statuettes with angel wings.

Then, loaded down with the sandwich, chips, soft drinks, and water, I headed to Sherando Lake.

Bathers on the beach at Sherando Lake.

There were fewer than a hundred people there. If I’d had my bathing suit, it would have been the perfect day….