Tales of death, survival in Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago: "The lady on the corner, they never found her body'

Hurricane Katrina was blowing through New Orleans when Harry Simms learned the Industrial Canal had been breached, nine blocks from his home on Flood Street in the Lower Ninth Ward.

A failure in the same canal during Hurricane Betsy had wiped out his childhood neighborhood. On Aug. 29, 2005, Simms saw water from Katrina’s breach rising quickly around the house he had bought two years earlier. He had two choices: leave or die.

Flooding is common enough in the Lower Ninth Ward that boats are considered emergency survival tools. Simms, then a longshoreman, powered his boat south to higher ground at Jackson Barracks.

Federal levees and shipping canals were overwhelmed and failed during Hurricane Katrina, putting 80 percent of New Orleans underwater and killing nearly 1,500 people. Images from that day of residents of the Lower Ninth Ward stranded on their rooftops praying to be rescued from the rising waters became early symbols of the devastation across New Orleans.

Rooftop rescue during Katrina flooding

 First-responders borrowed Simms’ boat for several days to check houses for survivors and bodies. They marked each building with another enduring symbol, the “Katrina X.” It was short-hand code to other rescue groups, with the date the building was checked on the top of the X, the rescue-unit number to the left and existing hazards or conditions to the right. The mark at the bottom tallied the number inside who died.

“After they had checked all the houses, we all had to go to the Super Dome,” Simms says, referring to the domed stadium turned makeshift emergency shelter that would become a hellishly lawless scene.

Earlier this year, POLITICO Magazine sent me to New Orleans to write about the city’s recent success in efforts to fix or remove abandoned buildings and clear overgrown properties after Katrina turned an already decaying city into the most blighted in the nation.

I talked to several people living in New Orleans when Katrina hit. They shared stories of survival, renewal and love for one of the most special cities in the United States. In a series of blog posts between now and Katrina’s 10^th anniversary, I will tell their tales, as well as the story of the new New Orleans.

August and September storms seem to be as common in New Orleans as parades before Mardi Gras. Hurricanes flooded the city five times before Katrina, most recently in 1965 and 1969. Some people in the Big Easy developed a reputation for bravado, partying on behind plywood-covered windows while storms raged outside.

Other residents routinely marched out of town whenever New Orleans was threatened by major late-summer storms swirling through the Gulf of Mexico. “We referred to them as ‘hurrications,’” said Michael Casey, who was starting his senior year at Tulane University in August 2005. “Every year we evacuated – twice when I was a sophomore. You’d come for school and go somewhere with your friends for a week. Then you’d come back, get your syllabus and start classes.”

Geographically, New Orleans forms a bowl between the mighty Mississippi River and huge Lake Pontchartrain (a 30-mile-long bridge spans its shores). Levees and shipping-friendly canals link the waterways.




New Orleans: Lower Ninth Ward is the darker yellow portion near the center; East New Orleans (E) is above it on this map. Lakeview (A) is the yellow portion in northwest New Orleans. 

Much of New Orleans lies below sea level. Counterintuitively, high ground is closest to the Mississippi River, which forms the signature crescent shape that gives the city one of its nicknames.

With Katrina, a top-level Category 5 storm, steamrolling directly toward New Orleans, more than a quarter-million of the city’s 437,000 residents fled when the evacuation order was issued on Aug. 28. But roughly one-fourth of residents had no access to cars. Thousands of people – mostly poor and black – were trapped.

Katrina veered slightly east and weakened when it made landfall near the Mississippi border. “That’s the power of prayer,” said Bruce Johnson, who rode out the storm as his Uptown neighborhood was inundated. “It was a Category 3 when it hit us. If it had still been a 5, we wouldn’t be talking.”

Johnson recalled sitting on his porch, about six feet above street level, when he noticed water lapping a few steps below. “I’d never seen it get that high,” he said. Johnson grabbed his mother and moved to higher ground, upstairs in this case. Water eventually reached the springs on a main-floor bed.

In addition to the death and displacement roughly 70 percent of the city’s housing stock – had major-to severe damage or was destroyed. The flood did not discriminate between black and white, rich and poor, residential and commercial.



More than 105,000 houses and apartments in New Orleans had major-to severe damage or were destroyed

In the upscale Lakeview neighborhood by Lake Pontchartrain, scores of its predominantly white residents died and 72 percent of its homes were damaged by flooding up to 10-feet-deep in some areas. High-water levels still are marked on the walls of some Lakeview businesses.

Some of the worst damage was in East New Orleans, low-lying land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Intracoastal Waterway, where roughly 90 percent of the housing stock received major damage or worse. Its residents were predominately black, mostly families with workers earning low- to moderate wages.

Jean (she declined to give her last name) was born, grew up and raised her children and grandchildren in a house on America Street in East New Orleans. Like many houses in New Orleans, it is built substantially above street level. Before Katrina she owned it outright.

“I’ve got 10-foot ceilings and the water went eight feet up the walls,” Jean said. She lost everything and now pays a mortgage to cover the rebuilding costs. But she counts herself among the fortunate. “The lady on the corner, they never found her body.”

Before he was transported to the Super Dome, Simms left his boat tied to a canal bridge. It was gone when he returned a week after Katrina. But bigger problems waited on Flood Street.

His two-story elevated home was severely damaged from water that reached the rooftop. Three other houses had been swept into his yard. Others blocked the street.

“Then (Hurricane) Rita hit a week later,” Simms said. “The water blew through the same hole in the canal. It went right back up and we had to evacuate again.”

(Next, recovery and a new beginning.)

Hog to blog: How George McMillan breaks down dinner

I knew I was in heaven the moment I saw a severed pig’s head on a sheet pan in the kitchen at FoodBar restaurant on recent February morning. Chef/owner George McMillan III was going to walk me through the process of turning a half-hog into menu items.

The food and history lover in me always has been fascinated by how our meals go from farm to table (all too often these days, via factories). Conversations with McMillan at his Cahaba Heights restaurant led to an invitation to watch him break down one of the Duroc/Berkshire pigs he regularly buys from the legendary pork producer, Henry Fudge.

Chef George McMillan III

In an upcoming issue of Birmingham Magazine, I will focus on the end product, the dishes on the FoodBar menu that feature or are flavored by these pigs. This blog goes behind the scenes with McMillan and a pig better left unnamed.

McMillan orders a half-hog every 4-6 weeks, about 150 pounds of meat, fat and bone. (He also orders a side of beef every six weeks.) The initial breakdown separates the side into the head, belly, front quarter and hind quarter. All that’s missing is the innards and the squeal. “We’re thinking about what we’re going to do with the tail,” McMillan said. “We’ll figure out something.”

Dealing with carcasses instead of individual cuts makes good business sense and allows a chef to be more creative, McMillan said. Everything gets utilized, from center-plate chops and roasts to scraps for sausage, bones for stock and fat for myriad uses.

Lacking the power of a kitchen band saw, McMillan gets quite a workout using a hacksaw on the heavy-duty bones. “Ever since I touched a blade (when he worked) at Hot and Hot, I have a strong respect for band saws,” he said wryly, demonstrating that all joints on each finger, fortunately, are still attached.

The hog head can be made into headcheese, an addictively wonderful, meaty and gelatinous flavor-bomb, prized when it appears on any charcuterie board. When the head is done, McMillan reduces the cooking liquid to enhance the natural gelatin that will bind the bits of tender cheek, tongue and other face meat when they are molded together.

McMillan has other plans for our head, rich meat sauces for ravioli. Either way, the cooking process starts the same: Fill a huge pot with a mirepoix of onion, carrots and celery; the pig’s head; a seasoning sachet; white wine and enough cold water to cover all but the tip of the snout. It will cook for three hours; the tip that it’s done is when the skin starts to pull away from the exposed snout, indicating that the submerged meat is falling-apart tender.

The cooked head cools a bit before the meat is removed. “It’s like pulling bubblegum out of quicksand,” McMillan said. “It’s a sticky process.” McMillan’s dogs usually wind up with the ears.

McMillan considers Fudge Farm pork bellies to be special. “It’s always a treat when we get one. They’re big bellies that provide good bacon, big enough to wrap around our sausage-stuffed rabbit loin.”

The skin is carefully trimmed from the belly for use as cracklings. Sometimes, McMillan reserves part of the belly to roast, but today it is exclusively reserved for bacon. The trimmed belly is rubbed down with generous mixture of salt, sugar and spice, cured for five days then rinsed. His neighbors at New York Bucher Shop generously allow use of their large smoker.

Chops will be one of the center-plate byproducts. McMillan slices the meat before sawing through bone to separate each serving. Chine bones are hacked off for use in stocks. The saw also comes in handy when he separates a single trotter and two huge hocks from each leg. They will be smoked and used to flavor beans and greens.

Boston butts come from the shoulder, but McMillan uses most of this shoulder meat for sausage. Some of the fat trimmings also will be rendered into flavorful cooking oil. The ham is destined for roasts and braises. The idea of curing and air-drying a hind leg like prosciutto is appealing, but McMillan says he can’t tie up the cooler space while it ages.

The first rule of sausage making is chill. Everything – meat, grinder and storage containers – must be kept cold to avoid liquefying the fat. “You want to do it quickly, working in batches,” McMillan said.

McMillan cuts his trimmings to a uniform size for the grinder. Added fat comes from different parts of the pig, each with its own appearance and texture. Some is thick and gnarled. Some is snowy white and smooth. “That’s good solid white fat," McMillan remarks. "It’s a piece of pork butter.”

A generous heap of seasoning is mixed thoroughly with the trimmings and fat before they are cooled to near-freezing then ground and blended with a little ice water. The pig’s lacy caul fat will encase some of the sausage for crepinettes.

By now McMillan has gathered the stock bones, which he roasts to boost their flavor. He will brown onions, celery and carrots in rendered pig fat before adding the roasted bones and cold water for pork stock. Sometimes he adds pork bones to supplement the rabbit in a game stock.

The conversion takes hours to complete. Once the mise is in place the fun part begins, putting that pig on plates.

Ebb and flow

It's been way too long since I have posted to this blog. For the most part that's a good sign that I've been flooded with work in the ebb and flow world of freelance writing.

It has been an interesting period in my evolution from daily newspaper report to scribe-for-hire. With Anna taking on bigger and bigger roles in her executive position, the flexibility of being a freelancer working from home has allowed me to provide her greater support behind the scenes, not only at home but also after school with our children. Behind every great woman is a good man. Nuclear family for the 21st Century.

Before I started freelancing, I created business cards with the slogan Writer Researcher Advocate Gastronome. It proved prescient; I have performed each of those roles at some point in the 28 months since the massive layoffs at my former newspaper created this new career opportunity. I have written for national and local publications and clients -- even for my former employer. Here's hoping each prong of that slogan continues to be prominent in my professional life.

Another part of my transition: I have set up a website, Ericvelasco.com. I did it in anticipation of attending the Food Media South conference this weekend, although I'm running a bit behind. Having my own website will allow me to more effectively post my work (I have a good bit up now at LinkedIn), be more visible to potential clients and hopefully be more active in posts.

Often when reporting a story, much good material gets left behind due to the brevity of some assigned stories (mine at Birmingham Magazine generally are limited to 700 words for "main" stories and 300 words for the others). This next blog item, and hopefully many in the future, is a continuation of those stories, a bonus for anyone interested.

Chef George McMillan III graciously allowed me to watch him break down a half-hog recently at his Cahaba Heights restaurant, FoodBar. In an upcoming edition of Birmingham Magazine, I will discuss how the different parts of that hog show up on the menu, linking cuts to the plate. But the following blog post will examine McMillan's butchering process. I found it fascinating.

Starting in March, check me out at Ericvelasco.com. Let me know what you think.

It was 20 years ago today Alberto brought all the rain

Playing a quarterfinal match on the Fourth of July seemed like a good omen for a surprising USA soccer team as it prepared for a 1994 World Cup matchup against Brazil.

What could be more perfect on a rainy afternoon than to watch the hosts take on the world’s best? Brazil, on its way to winning its fourth Cup, ended the USA team’s dream that day with a 1-0 victory.

But back in Macon, Ga. – where I lived then and worked for the newspaper – it was just the beginning. By the end of the match, the still-driving rain made me feel like I was in a Brazilian rainforest. Hurricane Alberto, downgraded by now to a tropical storm, had come to town and would linger.

It rained all day that Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. It rained so hard, the Macon water plant was flooded, leaving the city dry for 19 days until the plant was cleaned, sanitized and reopened.

Here is my description in the July 7, 1994, edition of the Birmingham News, a summary of team reporting for this red-ball story:

“The Killer Flood of 1994 left at least 18 people dead in Georgia, including 11 in the midstate. Several parts of Middle Georgia were isolated Wednesday, with whole towns shut off from the outside world as rising waters threatened levees, dams, homes and businesses. At the end of the day Wednesday, Montezuma resembled a lake. About 500 people were evacuated from the downtown area Wednesday. Seven fatalities were reported in Macon County.

“Americus was more like an island. Rising water from 21 inches of rain completely cut off the Sumter County town, even shutting down all four radio stations. Seven drowning victims were taken to Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus on Wednesday. The victims were trapped in their homes or cars by floodwaters or mud slides.

“At day’s end, water from the Ocmulgee River threatened to flow over the Otis Redding Bridge, near Interstate 16 in Macon. That could be the death of the bridge, according to officials from the Army Corps of Engineers warned city leaders Wednesday. Corps experts believe the bridge is not structurally sound enough to withstand the rising water and it may already have been damaged.”

Macon’s levee was breached, but flooding was limited mostly to the water plant, a low-lying commercial area and a park adjacent to the river, because the downtown rises quickly from there to a bluff.

Interstate 16 and Riverside Drive in Macon

 
The Weather Channel set up in the newspaper’s back parking lot, only a few hundred yards from the peak of the flood zone. Just before deadline when I was writing the story quoted above, I had to run out to the back lot to check one more time with the mayor to make sure the Otis Redding Bridge was still intact. Then I went home, flipped on the Weather Channel, and watched the scene I had just left.  

We were comparatively lucky. Flood waters killed people, disinterred caskets from a cemetery and took out a bridge in Albany. For months, going from one side of town to the other required a 100-mile detour.

Editors told me to grab an intern and a company 4-wheel drive and head to Montezuma, which had been hit with 20 inches of rain, sending the Flint River over a 29-foot levee that protected the downtown area and cutting off the town

I knew many roads were still impassable, so as I drove down the interstate I got the bright idea to call the circulation department to see how they got into the Montezuma area.

They didn’t get in, they said.

Fortunately we found a way. The water had crested, but blocks of the commercial district still was flooded above the rooftops of single-story buildings.

I got a boat tour of downtown. We passed the bait-and-tackle shop that would be sheathed in netting before the water receded to limit stock losses when the shop windows inevitably burst. Only the tips of ornamental street lamps could be seen above the water. At the post office, we peered through a large window on the second floor. Just above the waterline a sign read “Caution: Wet Floors.”




Touring downtown Montezuma by boat

It was surreal. Only responders and the stray business owner were around. No residents. Few  cars. No activity other than lapping water and the occasional revving boat engine.

Back at the office later, I lead my story with this observation: There’s plenty of offshore parking today in downtown Montezuma.

Surreal is a good description of the next few weeks. With no running water, I had to rely on invitations from friends elsewhere to disinfect in their showers.

All that standing water meant daily rain. One day I’d gotten off early and just pulled into my driveway when the daily deluge started. First I cursed the prospect of getting soaked but quickly recognized the possibilities. I dashed inside, changed into a pair of shorts, grabbed a bar of soap and ran outside for nature’s shower.

Those were desperate times. The National Guard distributed water at several locations – canned and bottled for drinking, cooking and cleaning; non-potable water to make the toilets flush. The foyer of our house was loaded with five-gallon buckets and the renters there had an unspoken pact to keep them filled.   

Macon was a city of porta-potties. We had four outside the Telegraph office. Employees had to get a key at the front desk, trading back the key for a wet wipe packet (this was long before Purell) like those at barbecue restaurants.

The spirit of cooperation was beautiful in Macon. People were considerate of each other. Those who had would share with those in need. Out of disaster had come a utopian response.

By late July, water again began flowing through the taps in Macon. Not saddled with the prolonged cleanup facing other communities from the floods, people went back to their personal orbits.

Strange days for capital punishment: Keep debate over lethal injections open, not hidden as state secret

When it comes to the death penalty in the United States, we are in a peculiar place these days.

I have studied capital punishment for more than 30 years, starting in college and continuing throughout my career in daily newspapers. I have interviewed, commiserated with and written about every participant – from victims’ families and homicide detectives to condemned killers; from prosecutors, judges and executioners to defense lawyers. I witnessed four electrocutions in Georgia and covered hundreds of capital trials in both Georgia and Alabama.

I never have seen the issue reach such extremes.

Oklahoma's death chamber for lethal injections

Since 2007, six states have scrapped the death penalty altogether. Fewer than 2 percent of U.S. counties (including Alabama’s Jefferson County, where I covered courts) have produced more than 50 percent of the nation’s current death sentences and executions, a recent study by the Death Penalty Information Center found. Some 85 percent of U.S. counties have not produced a single Death Row inmate in nearly five decades, the study showed.

A solid majority approves of capital punishment, but public support continues to drop. Last year’s annual poll by Gallup showed about 60 percent generally favor it, a 40-year low. Support dropped to a bare majority when respondents were offered an alternative sentence of life without parole.

Life-without-parole capital sentences are increasingly viewed by juries, judges, victims’ families and prosecutors as sufficient to punish the killer and protect society.

The result: even as legislators in states like Alabama increase the number of legal circumstances that could earn a death sentence, fewer and fewer murderers are condemned. The annual rate of new death sentences lately is the lowest it has been since capital sentencing resumed following a brief, court-imposed national moratorium in the early 1970s.

Yet, some death penalty proponents and some of the people tasked with carrying out court execution orders are digging in their heels and going to extremes to maintain the viability of putting killers to death.

Some states, including Alabama, even have debated laws that would keep secret the specific drugs and drug sources for lethal injections, which is the primary method of execution used by all 32 states (plus the federal courts and military) with the death penalty. About a dozen states have bills pending or existing laws or policies shielding their drug protocols.

The reason? For several years, states have been unable to obtain a primary component in the court-sanctioned, three-drug lethal cocktail that was in common use until European manufacturers cut off supplies.

States planning executions have turned to riskier, untried lethal-injection drug combos. Some are prepared by compounding companies, which only came under federal regulation six months ago after contaminated batches of compounded medicine led to dozens of patient deaths.

The Oklahoma legislature passed a bill in 2011 keeping secret the manufacturer and drugs it planned to use for executions. When two murderers slated for execution filed suit earlier this year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court voted 5-4 to delay their executions until it could rule on the condemned men’s legal challenge to the lethal-drug combination.

The state high court eventually authorized the executions to proceed, although the lethal drug combination became public. It was the painkiller midazolam; vecuronium bromide, a paralytic; and potassium chloride to stop his heart – a combination that had been used in Florida.



Stephanie Nieman with her grandparents

Lockett

First up was Clayton Lockett, who helped kidnap two women, a man and a child at gunpoint in 1999 and took turns with an accomplice to repeatedly rape the women.

Lockett shot Stephanie Nieman, leaving her to die, buried in a shallow grave while still alive. The survivors testified against Lockett, who also had made a boastful confession to police.

The execution officially began at 6:23 p.m. on April 29. Fewer than 10 minutes later, Lockett was declared unconscious. But he suddenly began to writhe and mumble while gasping. The curtains to the execution chamber were drawn. Lockett died of a heart attack at 7:06 p.m., more than a half-hour after the drugs were administered.

State officials are investigating whether the procedure was botched – or if, as defense lawyers claim, the new compound Oklahoma used resulted in state-sponsored torture. Currently, state officials cite a collapsed vein as the likely cause and have imposed a six-month moratorium on executions pending a full probe.

It’s ironic to me that lethal injection is under such strict scrutiny now, leaving some death penalty proponents longing for the electric chair. It’s turned the debate about execution methods by 180 degrees.

For decades until the early 1990s, electrocution was the primary execution method. Use of the electric chair was widespread by the 1920s, viewed as a more humane alternative to hanging and a counter to the lynching allusions the noose carried in Southern states that were the chief practitioners of capital punishment.



Georgia's old electric chair

The electric chair was fraught with problems and controversy. In Florida, six-inch flames leapt from the head of Jesse Traferro during his electrocution in 1990, and a few jolts were required to execute him. Several condemned murderers, including one in Alabama, died only after receiving multiple shocks because the first effort failed.

Georgia Power Co. refused to sell electricity for executions. The state installed a generator for that purpose. An hour before one planned execution I covered, the prison was plunged into darkness when a storm knocked out the power. Technically the state could have proceeded but officials had little taste for conducting an execution by candle light. It was postponed for better weather.

By the early 1990s, many death-penalty proponents viewed lethal injections as a more humane execution method – a recognition that society did not need to be so brutal in the effort to show people that killing people is wrong. Worried that death by electrocution would be outlawed by courts one day, state legislators and judges voted to mothball electric chairs and switch to lethal injection.

Of course, this method has had its problems – even with the court-approved, three-drug combination once in common use. Prolonged deaths have been cited in more than two-dozen executions by lethal injection since the mid-1980s, often due to problems finding a suitable vein.

The more problematic lethal injection has become, the more some pro-execution forces have responded by trying to operate in secret and hide those problems from public scrutiny.

No matter how people feel about capital punishment, I have yet to meet anyone who honestly doesn’t give a rip about doing it correctly or fairly.

Folks in our society may differ on the best way to respond to horrific, deliberate murders. But most would agree that, if we’re going to have it, capital punishment should amount to more than mere payback to murderers who in effect have lost a lottery.

Most would say if we are going to have capital punishment, it should be done accurately, equitably and correctly, in a way that doesn’t make us flinch as a society – much less hang our heads in shame. On whether that is possible, good people will continue to disagree.

But the ongoing discussion over capital punishment – especially how the state kills our killers – should be done in public. It should not be rendered a state secret. After all, states conduct these executions in our name.

Judging for 'Bru Appetit:' From 'bee cap' to cooking fresh wild boar, Horn brings beer cooking show to the 'Ham

If all goes well, I will make my cable television premiere this fall.

I recently was a judge in the taping of a cooking contest, which is central to a new beer-and-food themed cable television show, Bru Appetit. Think of it as being akin to the Japanese version of Iron Chef (where cooking is treated as sport), tossed with the adventurous spirit of the cable television show, Dangerous Grounds.

Horn is a home cook, home brewer, personal chef and culinary instructor who is in the process of moving from Alabama to Atlanta. He is trying to parlay a solid concept and good looks into a television career.



Jason Horn

He said he has a deal for his pilot episodes, but must stay mum for now on the specific network. Hopefully soon we will discover which channel will broadcast the show.

The premise of Bru Appetit: Horn and crew -- producer Carlo Overhulser and videographer/photographer Chris Eldridge -- feature a beer from a single state. Horn challenges a chef in that state to a cooking throw-down using the beer and other food items he has locally sourced.

Now, by locally sourced, I mean Horn and crew hunted, killed and field-dressed the wild boar that was the protein in the Alabama throw-down. They went to the apiary that produces the honey used in Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale, the Alabama beer featured in that episode.

They get up close and personal, as you can see from this photo of Horn:

'If you ... don't act a fool, they won't mess with ya.'

Our segment was taped at The J. Clyde beer bar in Birmingham’s Southside district. Horn challenged J. Clyde’s executive chef, Charles Ryan Nichols.

One of the judges was Carla Jean Whitley, managing editor of Birmingham Magazine (who edits my stories for the magazine). The other was Danner Kline, a specialty beer rep for a local distributing company and the founder of Free The Hops, the consumer group that helped usher Alabama’s beer laws into the 20^th Century – even if the state legislature had to be dragged into it, kicking and screaming, nearly a decade into the 21^st.

Taping Bru Appetit is a whirlwind affair, mostly planned but sometimes off-the-cuff.

After starting at Back Forty Beer Co. in Gadsden, the crew traveled to Cold Creek Honey Co. in Hokes Bluff.

On the Bru Appetit page on Facebook, Horn recounts sage advice he got from Cold Creek’s Terry Thomas, who was preparing to shake a tree swarming with bees:

“If you respect them and don’t swat at ‘em or try to act a fool, they won’t mess with ya.”

It was a run or hive moment for Horn. But it had a happy ending.

If the photo below doesn’t wind up on some kind of Back Forty promotion, they’re asleep at the switch.



Like the honey from the bee

At a hunting camp near Geiger, the crew spent a grueling day trying to bag the wild boar for the cooking contest.

Early on, it seemed like all would go smoothly as the party got its first pig in the morning.

But the second pig proved elusive. They waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, around dusk, the mission was completed.

The crew hauled hog and honey to the J.Clyde. Horn and Nichols cooked their respective dishes on a Saturday morning as invitees gathered to provide a background crowd for the taping.

We judges were perched on a side bar, with a narrow space on the other side for the contestants. It was amazing how technology allowed the crew to shoot multiple angles in an extremely confined space.

For our portion of the show, the chefs described their dishes and we tasted each. We also were asked to give feedback, including how well each showcased the state’s chosen beer, Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale, and the special ingredients, the boar and honey. Then we were to confer and choose a winner.

As the guest, Horn was first to present. In a way that was a shame because he made a dish suited for dinner while Nichols followed with his down-home Southern-style breakfast.

Horn’s dish evoked a post-hunt dinner on a French estate. He seared a two-inch-thick wild boar chop, topping it with a sweet-savory mixture of roasted garlic and sweet onion preserve cooked in Truck Stop Honey Brown beer and Cold Creek’s wildflower honey.

That was placed atop a puree of turnips, sweet potatoes and apple. Accompanying was braised Belgian endive cooked in Stone brewing’s Imperial Russian Stout. The whole thing was drizzled in chocolate balsamic vinegar that Horn had purchased in Gadsden.



Jason Horn's seared boar chop

It was an elegant dish, worthy of a white tablecloth setting and a hefty price tag. My only complaint was the chop could have been served more on the medium side, instead of cooked through. The meat was incredibly moist – as wild boar should be – but difficult to saw through.

Still, it was my favorite of the two. To my regret, it was whisked away before I could ask for a to-go box. But I did not want to overindulge; that would not be fair to Nichols.

It’s a good thing I saved room, because Grillades and Grits is one of my favorite brunch dishes. Nichols laid down a great version. He started with cutlets of the pork, which he soaked overnight in buttermilk and Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale. In the morning he pounded and pan-fried the cutlets before finishing them in creole-style gravy.

That topped some of the best cheese grits I ever have tasted. Nichols perfectly cooked the stone-ground grits to a smooth consistency, tossed in smoked cheddar and smoked Gouda cheese and topped it with fried country ham. Accompanying was a biscuit coated in a wonderfully sticky reduction of Cold Creek honey.



Chef Nichols' Grillades and Grits

Carla Jean and Danner both voted for the Grillades and Grits, which no doubt spoke to the Southerner in them. I preferred the chop plate, but frankly the brunch dish came in a close enough second that I said I had no heartburn with the majority's choice.



Danner Kline (left) talks to Jason Horn (right) as Carla Jean Whitley and I listen.

We announced the winner, a 2-1 split vote for Nichols. Horn, who is a great guy, graciously accepted the verdict, heaping praise on Nichols’ talent and generosity for graciously sharing his kitchen with a stranger.

But as the crew packed up to move on to Georgia and tape another episode, I couldn’t help but look back at our decision to vote down the host of Bru Appetit. I wondered:

Did we blow our chance for the premiere episode?

(Thanks to the Bru Appetit crew for the photos.)

Walton Goggins: Birmingham native, creator of memorable characters may be my favorite actor

I am in TV heaven, because now I can get my full Walton Goggins fix on FX. The show in which he co-stars, “Justified,” started its fifth season Tuesday on the cable network, FX. Goggins may be my favorite actor.

The Birmingham native plays Boyd Crowder, a golden-tongued bad boy on the show, which is set in the Kentucky hills where dead-end lives are fertile fields for crime. As played by Goggins, Crowder grew up ambitious and clever, later leveraging his experiences as a combat vet to put some education behind that intelligence (not to mention caps on bad teeth).

Walton Goggins as 'Boyd Crowder'

Take this scene (memorialized on the website IMDb), from an episode last season. Crowder is confronted by a Detroit mobster, Nicky Augustine, who is looking for a man hiding out near Crowder’s home in fictional Harlan County, Ky.

"Nicky Augustine: I got to ask. Where'd you get all those teeth?
Boyd Crowder: Courtesy of the American taxpayer while serving our great nation in Desert Storm.
Augustine: Man, I love the way you talk... using 40 words where four will do. I'm curious. What would you say if I was about to put 40 bullets through that beautiful vest of yours?
Crowder: "What're you waiting for?"
Augustine: Oh, you're cool, huh?
Crowder: I tried to keep it to four words. You'll allow the contraction as one.”

Goggins’ genius as an actor is to bring complexity to characters that might otherwise be dismissed as simple. Crowder is cool, calm, collected – every bit the equal of the Big City gangster or anyone else he confronts. In that same story arc, he effectively summarized the character he created when he told the Detroit boys: “You figured you'd drive south anyway, rip off the simple people? Well, we ain't that simple."

Goggins best showed his acting chops on a cameo for another FX drama, “Sons of Anarchy,” about a biker gang that plays a central role – for good and ill – in a small California community. Goggins played Venus Van Dam, a transgender escort who periodically crosses paths with the Sons of Anarchy gang.

 

'Venus Van Dam'

Venus Van Dam looked so cartoonish, it would be so easy to play her with over-the-top flamboyance. But Goggins gave her dignity, effectively revealing the lifetime of pain that had brought Venus to that point and demonstrating an intelligent, sensitive person swept up in a Southern Gothic storm.

Venus described her prostitute mother as a “street performer” who was unable to “raise a boy of questionable orientation” whose “inclinations” at an early age set a “gender direction” that Mama tried to cure through making her participate in child pornography. Another time she described her mother as similarly built as Venus “but gravity has not been her friend.”

Kurt Sutter – the genius behind “Sons of Anarchy” and a participant in what I consider to be some of the best television dramas ever made (including “The Shield”) – outlined the character and her role in the story. But he turned Goggins loose to flesh out Venus, and much of her dialogue was improvised.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Goggins said being a transgender character was his idea. His goal was to be respectful to transgender people by making her “a three-dimensional person with feelings. Sassy, sweet, smart, and beautiful. Try to make her as beautiful as I can be — it takes a lot of work for me as a straight man much less as a woman to be anything close to beautiful. … If you spend enough time thinking about it, and you’re coming from a real pure place in your heart and you give yourself over to making believe, then all of those specific kinds of moments just become second nature and they just happen.”

“They just happen.” Only for great actors like Goggins.

The character’s name, longtime Goggins and FX fans will know, was a nod to Goggins’ character on “The Shield,” Shane Vendrell, a loyal but ambitious crooked cop. Vendrell occasionally used Cletus Van Damme as a fake name (such as renting a storage unit to hide stolen money). Apparently Goggins – and Vendrell – are big fans of action-movie hero Jean Claude Van Damme.

Walton Sanders Goggins Jr. was born in Birmingham on Nov. 10, 1971, but grew up in Georgia, west of Atlanta. He has lived in Los Angeles since 1990, when he made his film debut in the movie “Murder in Mississippi.” He also has worked on the both sides of the camera for more than a decade as a producer, and has played role in recent blockbusters “Django Unchained” and “Lincoln.”

An avid traveler and photographer, Goggins also has been involved in political, educational and environmental cause, according to various online biographies.

As it turns out, Boyd Crowder’s character was supposed to die at the end of the Season 1 of “Justified,” according to another interview Goggins gave Entertainment Weekly. But the producers realized that Crowder – as played by Goggins – was essential to the ongoing success of the fledgling show.

They were right. Elmore Leonard created the characters of lawman Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder, but killed Crowder off at the end of his novel “Fire in the Hole,” which inspired the show “Justified.” Leonard liked Goggins’ portrayal so much, the novelist resurrected Boyd Crowder as a character in a follow-up novel, “Raylan,” released three years before Leonard’s death last fall.

Only one more season of “Justified” remains before the show ends production. But I know I’m not done enjoying Walton Goggins. I can’t wait to see who he comes up with next.