Category: St. Clair Cooking

Ultimate Tailgating

Auburn Style and on TV

Story by Carol Pappas
Photos by Mike Feline, CNN HLN
and Carol Pappas

When Pell City’s Sandra Murray talks about how an Auburn game day tailgate party turns into a CNN event, she laughs and says, “When you’re not there, you get nominated.”

She and her husband, Dr. Ed Murray, have been hosting home-game weekend parties at their “Auburn House” for years. The house itself attracts plenty of attention. After all, it is appropriately painted orange and blue and sits conspicuously on a knoll overlooking campus and Jordan Hare Stadium.

In October, Ed’s aunt had passed away, and for only the second home game in 20 years, they were going to miss the party. So Sandra traveled to Auburn on Wednesday, set up everything for game day and asked friend Cindy Goodgame to host.

That weekend, she got a text from Cindy simply saying, “Call me when you can.” When she did, Cindy told her that someone from CNN tapped on the window and asked if they could film from the parking area of the house with the stadium for the backdrop. Oh, and they might film in the house.

Sandra said OK. Then another “oh” moment followed with Cindy adding, “And they need a woman to barbecue and compete in a cookoff, and I told him you would.”

“I said, What!,” And the rest, they say, is history.

Turns out CNN produces the HLN Tums Tailgate cookoff, which is set at various campuses across the nation during football season. The man at the window was producer Mike Phelan.

CNN Crews, as part of the cookoff series, have been at the Clemson-Notre Dame and Ohio State-Michigan State games. On this particular weekend, they came for Auburn-Ole Miss. The semi-finals will be in Atlanta for the SEC Championship game and the finals, in Glendale, Ariz., for the National Championship game.

Being a good sport, a good cook and enjoying the fanfare of a good tailgate party, Sandra obliged, cooking her original recipe, Cajun-fried chicken drumsticks with a Bulleit Bourbon sauce, for the competition. “It was only the second time I had cooked it,” she said. And it was only later that she learned famed chef Chris Hastings and Auburn’s Acre Restaurant use the same high-rye, award-winning whiskey in their own recipes.

At 5 a.m. on Friday and 4:30 a.m. on Saturday of the game weekend, a CNN satellite truck and other vehicles pulled up to the house and started unloading – lights, cameras, monitors. “Watching them set up was a lot of fun,” she said.

CNN and HLN sports anchor and correspondent Coy Wire, a former Stanford and NFL player, went over his lines. Cheerleaders from Auburn and Ole Miss arrived. Auburn Tiger mascot, Aubie, joined the fun. So did the Auburn Band. A crowd gathered. Lights, camera, action. “The whole progression was phenomenal,” Sandra said. “It was fun to work with them.”

She competed with Jeff and Jeremy Alexander of Athens, Ala., whom the Murrays have known for years. They own a game-day condominium behind their Auburn House. Coincidentally, they are professional barbeque cookoff competitors. They won the Sloss Furnace competition in recent months.

While Sandra’s drumsticks came in second, she wasn’t disappointed at all. “It was a lot of fun,” she said. “I’m tickled for them. It was good promotion for them.” The Alexanders’ winning dish cooked to order was a brisket. They also made a “Fatty” – Italian sausage taken out of the casing, flattened and topped with a mixture of peppers and onions, rolled up and wrapped in a bacon weave. It is smoked and then sliced into pinwheels. Hence, the perfect moniker.

“They’re serious,” Sandra said. For her, it was simply part of being a gracious hostess, even if her nomination came in absentia. The Murrays love to entertain, and the house they bought in 2004 underscores that notion.

It is the perfect game-day house. They completely redid the interior in 2005 – orange and blue motif and Auburn themed throughout. Mounted televisions are found in almost every room.

“When we found out Pella did navy-blue windows, we said, ‘Here we go!,’” she said, relating the story behind an orange and blue house. “When the crew was painting the house, people would pass by, blow their horn and yell, ‘War Eagle!’”

The house is comfortable and inviting – just like the Murrays. They have used the house for fundraisers and awards. The Pell City Cheerleaders were there for the Idaho game as part of an auction-winner event. “It’s for fun. That’s what it’s all about,” Sandra said.

And in typical, welcoming Murray fashion, she adds, “You know what we say: ‘One invitation lasts a lifetime.’”

Mulligan Stew

A distinctly Skeeter Park tradition

Story by Jerry C. Smith
Submitted photos from Hazelwood Family

What’s Mulligan Stew? Well, it’s a big potful of boiling water, loaded with whatever meats and vegetables one has on hand, and cooked until safely edible. However, for St. Clair’s Skeeter Park folks, it’s always been a fine excuse to get together for a grand party on a creek bank somewhere near Eden, pig out on Mulligan and enjoy a tradition that’s occurred non-stop since the 1930s.

You won’t find Skeeter Park on any GPS, nor talked about in society columns, but hundreds of St. Clair folks will agree it’s a culinary and fellowship delight for lucky invitees. While the cuisine has varied over the decades, the camaraderie has remained.

There were actually two distinctly separate groups who held similar events in the same general area: one, a private annual reunion begun in the 1930s that’s still celebrated today, and the other a more frequent but less structured community affair that got together in the 1960s and 70s.

The original group was organized by two local residents, Frank Patterson and John Willingham. They were soon joined by Frank’s brother, Willard “Shanghai” Patterson, and their close friend, W.T. “Dubb” Hazelwood.

These fellows had hunted and fished around Wolf Creek as boys, often camping there overnight to rest and cook their prey. As the youngsters grew into men, their outdoor meals became well-known and, before long, friends started drifting in to share their rustic fare.

Dubb’s son, Ben Hazelwood, soon joined the fun, later taking an active role in food preparation, with help from his own son, Benjamin, then called Little Ben but now 36 years old. The elder Ben recently passed away, but younger Ben continues the Mulligan tradition in memory of good times with his father, and because it’s so much fun.

The official Skeeter Park venue is an unimproved clearing in the woods near Wolf Creek, on land always owned by the Jones family. The park is only about 40 yards wide and 50 yards long, but has a good spring for cooking and drinking water. Dubb’s daughter, Marion (Hazelwood) Hultgren, currently of Tucker, Ga., says the area was a wondrous place to visit any time of the year, abounding with wildflowers. Mulligan Stews became generally popular during the Depression, when roving bands of hobos and others seeking work would gather into camps, often alongside railroad tracks. They had little, but usually shared it for the common good.

Various campers might contribute a couple of onions or a few ears of corn “borrowed” from a nearby farm, a chicken of similar origin, maybe some potatoes and carrots. Separately, not much of a meal, but when cooked together, they became a nourishing sustenance for all.

The Skeeter Park guys found Mulligan easy to make and serve, universally accepted, and impossible to criticize because there is no official recipe. Cooked in 5-gallon steel lard cans which were bought new every year for the purpose, these versatile stews could contain anything edible, including squirrels, rabbits, chickens, turtles, even beavers, but they never added pork until later years when it became plentiful. Nor was venison used, as deer were quite scarce in those days.

Young Ben recalls camping out at the site overnight so he could clean out the spring and be ready the next morning to build a fire big enough to heat two kettles full of water. He says his father expected that water to be boiling when he showed up a few hours later to start the stew.

Ben remembers that, even in latter years, they sometimes used freshly-killed whole squirrels, including heads but without entrails or skins. Side dishes included Southern-reunion staples like cornbread, biscuits, white loaf bread, green beans, sliced tomatoes, and occasionally a potato salad and other party fare.

Dubb’s children, Marion (Hazelwood) Hultgren, Kent Beavers and Freddy Hazelwood, were quite specific about the way their father ran the proceedings. Everyone who handled raw food had to wash their hands vigorously and keep them clean during its preparation.

He was very particular about who handled food and stirred the pots, usually doing most of it himself. The pot had to be stirred in perfect figure-eights, lest it burn. Further, Dubb insisted that stirring sticks had to be hickory saplings of a certain diameter, with just the right size fork at the end.

The stew was boiled and stirred for hours, until all meat had fallen off the bones which, coincidentally, helped disguise the species of whatever animal was in the pot.

Kent said, “If you didn’t know what you were doing, you just sat over there in the shade and drank beer with the others.” Marion added, “If you really messed up and burned the stew, you got thrown into Wolf Creek.”

Attendance was widely variable — as few as a half dozen to more than a hundred, including several regional dignitaries whose names would be easily recognized. Mulligans drew visitors from the ranks of many noted St. Clair families, among them Beavers, Castleberrys, Bowmans, Footes, Bynums, Ginns, Hazelwoods, Robertsons and Cornetts.

For the first three decades or so, participation was limited to men and boys, but in the “liberated” 1970s, they occasionally allowed family ladies to attend. Marion, who was 25 at the time, recalls being among the first girls on the scene. She helped memorialize those days with her photos, some of which appear with this story.

Naturally, these fun-loving folks didn’t confine their activities to eating. According to Freddy and Kent, the guys played poker, took bets on football scoreboards, pitched horseshoes and washers, even shot a few dice. Singing and guitar playing was usually part of the festivities, although they didn’t bring instruments on very cold days, as it could make the strings break.

Alcohol was usually present, but didn’t cause the kind of problems one might think, because Dubb and Ben kept strict order. Lawmen occasionally showed up, but only for food and fellowship. Whether certain attendees fell into Wolf Creek or were actually thrown in to help sober them up is still open for debate.

It’s rumored that Shanghai once asked some poker players for a share of the pot to help finance their meal. If more than $30 was spent on supplies in the old days, it was considered an especially lavish party.

In later years, another group began meeting nearby, at first along the north bank of Wolf Creek, then under a pole shed that still stands behind a convenience store in Eden. This gathering was started in the late 1960s by the store’s owner, Troy Bannister. Longtime Pell City resident Fred Bunn recalls going there in the 1970s, and seeing the late Tootie Hare and both Ben Hazelwoods among others who frequented both gatherings.

Fred says these events were held at random intervals, averaging about once a month, and usually ran all day long, averaging about 20 to 30 people at any one time, with others drifting in or out as opportunity allowed. Fred adds that they didn’t restrict themselves to Mulligan Stew, often substituting more basic country fare like chitterlings, barbecue or local game animals.

Under the leadership of young Ben, the Hazelwoods still follow the Mulligan tradition, usually every November at the old Skeeter Park site. They’ve been selling printed T-shirts and ball caps among their group since 1992 to help raise money for basic expenses, with the surplus going into a mutual aid fund to help members with unexpected hardship.

Ben mentions one fellow who got his hand chopped off in a work accident. The Mulligan fund helped this man’s family through some rough times.

The family says this year’s Skeeter Park Mulligan will be an especially poignant one, as they recently lost their beloved father and brother, Ben Hazelwood. Your writer has been invited, and I’m certainly looking forward to it.

No, I will NOT say when or where.

Wild Game Dinner

Event attracts
more than 350 men

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Jim Smothers

The menu could have come from a Montana hunting lodge: smoked venison; bacon-wrapped quail; venison cube steak; venison meatballs; elk spaghetti; wild game gumbo; brunswick stew made with moose, squirrel and wild turkey. But the Wild Game Dinner actually took place at the First Baptist Church of Ashville thanks to the contributions of several hunters from St. Clair County.

“It was a way to bring in guys in a friendly, fun atmosphere,” said Pastor Dr. Jay Stewart. “Sometimes people are not interested in going to church because of preconceived ideas, fair or unfair, but something like this, guys relate to it because of the outdoor nature of whole thing.”

The church sold 357 tickets at $10 each for the Feb. 21 evening event, which was far more than its Fellowship Hall could seat. Diners had to eat in shifts in order to accommodate the crowd. Each person got a sampler plate that included as many of the dishes as they wanted to try, plus baked beans, potato salad and pie.

Church and community volunteers began cooking at 7 that Saturday morning. By the time the event started at 6 p.m., outdoor writer and chef Mike Bolton had smoked 450 quail, and Marty Crews of Big Boyz Barbecue had cooked 500-600 pounds of venison.

“This was the brainchild of one of our members, Tom Watson, who came to me with the idea,” said Stewart, who has been at FBCA since July 2014. “We felt like men would have a chance to come with buddies, sit around and talk, swap hunting stories, laugh, eat some things we don’t ordinarily eat. We have lots of events for women, and we wanted to do something for the men in the community.”

Watson served as song leader, minister of music or associate pastor at seven Southern Baptist churches from Alaska to Alabama over a 42-year career. Recently retired and a relatively new member at FBCA, Watson said the dinner was designed to attract men who wouldn’t come to a Sunday church service but would come to dinner and experience wild game and try for a prize.

“We had a lot of big-time speakers, guys who had outdoor television shows, Christian guys who came in and gave their testimonies,” said Watson of the past events he organized.

Hank Hough of Texas-based Kingdom Dog Ministries was the featured speaker for the event. He used his dog, Preacher, to illustrate how God’s children should show obedience to Him.

“Our church guys didn’t know what to expect, being the first year,” said Watson. “I challenged them to make a donation, and 12 to 15 of them came through, so we had some money to buy nice prizes with. Some of the smaller prizes were donated, but we bought the four guns we gave away.” They also gave away an Auburn football helmet autographed by Pat Sullivan, a deer tree stand, deer feeder and a quail hunting trip.

“Alan Clayton, the baseball coach at St. Clair High School and an avid bird hunter, guides hunts in northeast Alabama at the Stick Lake Hunting Preserve near Fort Payne,” Watson said. Scott Duel, owner of the preserve and the physical therapist at Back in Motion in Springville, donated that hunt, according to Clayton, who will personally guide the winner with his own dogs.

Other sponsors, including businesses such as Central Seed & Supply and the St. Clair County Co-Op in Ashville, donated buck jam, deer cain, salt licks, deer sauce, T-shirts, turkey calls, a 50-pound bag of milo for deer feed plots, caps, Mike Bolton game cookbooks, BBs and targets.

Most of the men there either saw the notice about the dinner on the church’s marquee or were invited by a friend. Clint Vickery of Albertville, who attends Flow of the Spirit Church, saw the sign on the marquee. “You don’t often get to try elk,” he commented.

Ashville resident Jeremy Gidley brought his 7-year-old son, Isaac, whose favorite dish was the elk spaghetti. Mark Coupland of Odenville also saw the marquee notice. “I had deer at an Auburn game several years ago and wanted to try some more,” he said. Another Odenville resident, Jeremy Byers, was invited by a friend who attends FBCA. “I’ve been deer hunting since I was 10 years of age in Sumter County,” Byers said, but he liked the other wild offerings, too.

FBCA member Patsy Fouts, Ashville, was conspicuous as one of the few women present. Three others were in the kitchen, and one was shooting photos for the church directory. Fouts brought her two grandsons, Brett, 12, and Brady, 10.

As the diners finished their meal, they made their way to the church sanctuary, where singer and pianist Tim Lett of Chandler Mountain Baptist Church entertained with gospel songs. The sanctuary was almost packed with men of all ages, their arms around their sons, grandsons or nephews. Many were dressed in camo coats and hats. Ashville Mayor Robert McKay was there, and so was a Jefferson County game warden, Kerry Bradford, who took a lot of good-natured ribbing about the legality of the kills that furnished the meat for the menu.

After everyone was seated in the sanctuary, 13 youngsters took to the stage to participate in a coyote-call contest. Two young winners received brand new BB guns, and all contestants received hunting caps.

The dinner may become an annual event, according to Stewart, who said plans are already under way for next year. 

Features

House of Q

[Show as slideshow]

Barbecue’s rising star

Story by Loyd McIntosh
Photos by Wallace Bromberg Jr.

In the crazy, competitive world of competition barbecue, a new star is on the rise, and he just happens to call St. Clair County home. John Coon with his Kansas City Barbecue Society team, House of Q, is one of the hottest masters of meat on the circuit, regularly walking the stage and gathering hardware for his barbecue creations. His celebrity status soared even higher after his recent appearance on the hit barbecue competition television show BBQ Pitmasters.

The Springville resident now finds himself in the strange position of being recognized in public. Blessed with an equal measure of almost Biblical work ethic and a good old boy’s sense of humor, Coon has a way of putting his newfound fame into perspective. “That and a $1.39 will get you a McDonald’s cheeseburger,” he says with a booming laugh while hanging out at his shop on the outskirts of Steele. “I guess this is the closest we’ll ever be to being a rock star. It was a good feeling to get a lot of local publicity and things like that. Can’t complain.”

Coon, his partner Russ Lannom, and the rest of the House of Q gang auditioned for the show along with more than 400 barbecue teams from around the country. The team was selected to appear on the fifth season of the show and compete for the grand prize of $50,000. Coon and his crew filmed their episodes in Tampa, Florida, back in February, performing admirably in a competition that puts the skills of even the best pitmasters to the test. “It was all secretive, so nobody knew who we were competing against, and the way it’s set up you don’t know what you’re going to cook until the day of,” he says. “You open the cooler, and it’s a surprise, so you pretty much have to be prepared to cook any kind of mystery meat.”

Coon and his team won the first episode after turning heads with their versions of the secret ingredients, turkey and rack of lamb. House of Q then moved on to the next phase in the competition, losing in the semifinal round after turning in some beef ribs that failed to impress the judges. Coon mostly smokes pork ribs in competition and catering jobs and admits the beef ribs threw him a little bit. Still, he believed he had a solid plan, but in the end, the issue was with his ribs’ tenderness, and Coon knows exactly where he went wrong. “That’s actually what cost us the win. We had five slabs of ribs, so we staggered them in increments of time so we would know exactly where we would need to be for tenderness,” Coon says. “Long story short, we tasted the first three racks when we pulled them off, and they were perfect. So, the last two were actually my best looking slabs of ribs, but I didn’t taste them. I used the same time increments as what we did on the first three. We were disappointed we didn’t taste that, because it cost us the show in reality.”

Despite the loss, Coon says the experience was well worth the effort, and the exposure has been great for his business. A second generation contractor, Coon’s ultimate goal is to make smoking barbecue his full-time career. He believes the appearance on BBQ Pitmasters may just be the next step toward trading his hammer and nails for tongs and a basting brush. “We really did it for our sponsors more than for us. I don’t really care anything about being on TV, but we got picked, and we went ahead and went through the final selection process and all that, so we were able to go down there,” he says. “It was really neat. We had a ball doing it.”

The barbecue trail
Coon’s journey to the top of the barbecue mountain began when Coon was a child, learning smoking skills from his father while living on their small farm in Pinson. Coon’s father was always smoking meats on the weekends and for special occasions. “We cooked for all our church events when I was a kid, on Labor Day, the fourth of July, things like that. It was on a pit outside, all night long, just craziness, but we had a blast doing it,” he says.

Over the years Coon competed in a handful of small barbecue cook-offs, and 10 years ago, he entered his first major competition. He took his chances in the first Stokin’ The Fire cook-off, a sanctioned KCBS event held at Sloss Furnace in downtown Birmingham, on a dare. Coon admits he didn’t exactly know what he was doing. “Three of my buddies and me went down there and stayed all night. We were underneath the viaduct, and we had smoke going up. We thought that it was always supposed to smoke,” Coon says. “We about choked everybody to death underneath the viaduct all night long.”

Coon took advantage of the opportunity to learn the ropes of how KCBS competitions work. Unlike other competitions where the cooks can schmooze the judges, KCBS utilizes blind judging. The judges never see the competitors and vice-versa. In other words, personality can’t buy you an extra point or two. It’s all about the food, a fact Coon discovered at his very first competition. “I got a call the first event I ever did, which is unheard of. I was hooked,” Coon says. “That was the adrenaline rush I’ve always wanted. I’ve fished and hunted and everything else under the moon, and nothing has ever been like this right here. I mean it consumed me.”

These days Coon and House of Q are on the road 40 weekends out of the year, competing in 34-36 KCBS events and appearing at a handful of private events. Coon credits his patient family, wife Kristin and son Mason, for giving him the chance to pursue his obsession for the perfect barbecue. “I have the best wife in the world,” he says.

House of Q is earning prize money, winning competitions, and is sought after as an instructor as well regularly holding Barbecue 101 classes for barbecue newbies. He’s not terribly private about his methods, for instance, he uses cherry and applewood to smoke his meat, staying away from hickory unless he’s working with a slab of ribs unusually thick. He makes his own rub, a concoction of, among other ingredients, garlic, cumin, and chili powder. The team’s sauce, Granny’s BBQ Sauce, is a huge seller. It’s even used by a couple of dozen teams on the KCBS circuit.

The work Coon has put into House of Q has paid off tremendously. In 97 KCBS events he has finished in the Top Ten 46 times, and he finished 18th in the world in the Barbecue category at the World Food Championships in Las Vegas in August 2013. Coons has achieved all of this success while holding down his day job running the other family business, J. Coon Contracting. Since he spends many a Friday afternoon trimming ribs and seasoning butts for a weekend catering gig, the conversation inevitably turns to ‘cue.’ “I love it. It’s my passion,” Coon says.

“I don’t want to do anything else.”

Features

Crazy Horse

Becoming an Argo eatery icon

Story by Elaine Miller
Photos by Jerry Martin

Butch Evans and his wife, Karen, were sitting in their den one evening, bored out of their minds, when the idea of starting a restaurant was born.

“My wife said, ‘Are we gonna sit sit here like this until we’re 80, falling asleep in the recliners?’ “I said, ‘I can fix that.’”

And that’s how Crazy Horse Restaurant was born.

“I had been in the food business all my life,” says Evans, who owns Evans Steaks and Seafood, a wholesale company, on Birmingham’s Finley Avenue. “I called on restaurants. I didn’t know whether people would accept fine dining in Argo, though.”

Apparently, he had no cause for worry. Since opening in the former Denise’s Country Diner location in October 2011, business has been steadily increasing. Hungry patrons looking for something besides meatloaf and mashed potatoes come from St. Clair, Etowah, Jefferson and Shelby Counties to sample the steak and seafood menu.

“The locals support breakfast and lunch, the dinner crowd comes from Trussville and beyond,” says Evans.

Trying to make a unique place in the middle of nowhere, Evans didn’t want a typical meat-and-three kind of place. “Anybody can slap a hamburger steak or beef tips and rice on a plate, but to have a good piece of meat is totally different,” says restaurant manager Tony Green. “Quality is the key, along with freshness.” Gulf Coast seafood is delivered daily and all steaks are cut fresh daily. “Nothing is frozen,” says Green, who is Evans’ brother-in-law.

Fried Large Buttermilk Breaded Shrimp and New Orleans-Style Shrimp & Grits are served daily, but the Catch of the Day, usually grouper, is served only on Thursday nights. Customers can get it blackened with lemon butter sauce or potato crusted. Also featured are grouper fingers. Seafood Saturday offers platters of fried oysters, grilled shrimp pasta with creme sauce and sautéed Gulf scallops in butter sauce.

On the menu Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights are the chargrilled steaks, with the 8-oz filet mignon being the most popular. It’s served with a baked sweet potato and fresh asparagus.

Dessert choices are simple. Strawberry cake (a local woman bakes and delivers) and bread pudding with whiskey sauce are the only meal-ender items on the menu. The popular orange rolls aren’t made on the premises, but customers buy them by the dozen to take home. Soup of the Day is either Beer Cheese (see recipe) or Seafood Chowder, each made fresh daily.

Breakfast consists of “just about anything a customer wants,” according to Evans. Favorites are the Crazy Horse Special and the Stable Hand Special. The former consists of two eggs, any style, with grits or gravy, hash browns or home fries, and a sampling of smoked sausage, ham and bacon, along with biscuits. The latter starts with two eggs, adding pancakes, grits and bacon or sausage. Denise Sims, former owner of Denise’s Country Diner, and Dustin Nelson prepare the breakfasts.

“Saturday morning breakfasts are packed to capacity,” says Green. Capacity is 104 seats, including the 24 on the screened-in patio added in February. Head chef Andrea Peagler, the Regions Bank chef in downtown Birmingham by day, oversees the kitchen at the Crazy Horse on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

Lunch offerings include sandwiches filled with chargrilled burgers, chicken breasts and New York strip steaks, plus chicken salad, hot dogs and fried chicken tenders.

As for the name of the restaurant, that came from two sources: The Birmingham club where Butch and Karen had their first date in 1974, and the fact that Karen has horses. “I came home from work one day, and Karen said, ‘I thought of a name,’” Butch explains. “It seemed like a fit.”

Green grew up working in fast-food restaurants, but in his day job is advertising products manager at Progressive Farmer. When he started at the Crazy Horse, he was only going to be there Thursday nights, which quickly turned into a three-day weekend. “It’s tiring, but fun,” he says. “When it stops being fun, I’ll quit.”

The Crazy Horse Restaurant, located at 281 US Highway 11 in the Argo Village shopping strip, is open Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. On Thursdays and Fridays, it’s open from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. and from 5:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. Saturday hours are 6 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Reservations are taken only for Thursday nights. The Crazy Horse is closed Sundays and Mondays.

• For one of Crazy Horse’s recipes for their famous Beer Cheese Soup, check out the print or digital edition of the June 2013 edition of Discover The Essence of St. Clair •

Edibles Everywhere

[Show as slideshow]

St. Clair forager finding culinary fame in Birmingham restaurants

Story by Graham Hadley
Photos by Jerry Martin

Where you see weeds, St. Clair’s Chris Bennett sees valuable food.

So valuable that he has been able to make a successful side business out of foraging for wild edibles and selling them to high-end restaurants in the Birmingham area.

His acumen for finding flavorful food in the wild is good enough, in fact, that some of Chris’ edibles were used by award-winning Chef Chris Hastings at the Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham to prepare a meal for famous Chef Andrew Zimmern for an installment of his Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods.

The dish, called the Foragers Walk, included chickweed, Virginia pine, wild mushrooms, hoary bittercress, wild lettuce, cat’s ear dandelion, field mustards — “a lot of different stuff,” Chris said.

Most of that “stuff” Chris finds growing wild around his house.

Pointing to a small cluster of slender, dark-green stems poking out of the winter ground in a field near his house, Chris quickly identifies them as “field onions.” He breaks off a few of the stems and holds them to his nose, saying, “I just snip them off and use them as wild chives.

“They have a more aggressive flavor than regular chives. Why go to the store and buy chives when you can get these in your yard?”

And field onions are just the beginning. In just a couple of hours, he proceeds to identify all kinds of edible plants, all growing in winter within a few hundred yards of where he lives on his family’s old farm property in St. Clair not far from the Interstate 20 Chula Vista exit.

But, before he started showing off his talent for identifying wild edibles, or foraging, Chris was quick to point out that it took him years of research — studies that are always ongoing — before he was comfortable eating things he found growing in his yard and nearby fields and woods, let alone selling them to restaurants.

foraging_Hot-and-Hot-zimmern — The Foragers Walk dish that was served to Chef Andrew Zimmern at Hot and Hot in Birmingham

“People need to know … Rule Number 1 … make absolutely sure what you pick is edible. There are lots of tasty things in nature — but lots of stuff is poison,” he said.

It’s his knowledge of not only what is safe to eat, but how it tastes, that has created a market for Chris’ wild edibles in some of Birmingham’s finer dining establishments.

You can’t just walk up to a chef and say, “Look what I found in the woods” and have them buy it. You have to build a reputation for your product and also be able to speak their “language.”

For Chris, that is easy today — he has worked in restaurants all over the country, from Richmond, Va., to Chicago to Birmingham.

He grew up in St. Clair County, on the very property he now forages on — though it was an 84-acre cattle farm back then — before leaving for college to earn a business degree. He knew he did not like traditional farming and had discovered a love and talent for cooking.

“I grew up on the farm, but hated doing chores. I would rather be off having adventures in the woods. Back then, in the 1980s, you could still walk down the road and pick blackberries — which you really can’t anymore,” he said.

After college, “when I lived in Richmond, I got into cooking, I got more into food; got more into gardening,” he said.

And though he describes himself as an omnivore now — “I will pretty much eat anything” — Chris said he was a practicing vegetarian for a while, which made him pay more attention to what he was eating, reading ingredients labels more carefully.

That love of the outdoors, ability in the kitchen and growing interest in more wholesome foods combined to give Chris the foundation he needed to begin foraging.

“When I lived in Chicago, I read up on a lot of European chefs. They use a lot of wild edible plants. I learned there was a lot more out there than wild mushrooms,” he said. “There are things out there all around us.”

In 2005, Chris returned to Alabama to get the old family farm up and running. But he did not want to do traditional farming. Cultivating the land for foraging did away with a lot of the farm labor that did not interest him and allowed Chris to focus on his new passion.

Though he has a regular “day” job working as a cheese buyer for Whole Foods in Birmingham, Chris makes time to gather and sell his wild edible “finds” to restaurants.

Because he not only knows what is edible, he knows how it will taste, Chris can tell chefs exactly what edibles go with what dishes and how they can be prepared.

“I never sell anything I have not eaten,” he said. “My cooking background lets me tell them how to use it, how to cook it — or serve it raw, how it tastes.”

He also helps the restaurants keep track of what wild edibles are in season. “They come to me and ask is something still in season — like wild persimmons. Those are gone by now.”

As a case in point, Chris walks over to a cluster of what look like tall, leafy weeds with small, bright-yellow flowers on top.

“Wild edibles are mostly considered weeds by people who see them growing up in a yard or field. …”

This group of yellow flowering “weeds” grew where Chris had planted tomatoes and covered the ground with hay. “These plants came up. I am always looking at what things are. These, the leafs look like greens and the flowers look like Brassica” (a genus of plants that includes a number of vegetables, including mustards and cabbages).

“I finally figured out they are field mustard,” he said.

Chris uses several tools to help him identify new plants. He always carries a small bound notebook with him where he writes down everything about what he has found, sketches pictures, even takes pressings of the plants.

And, while he still relies on several books, Chris is quick to take advantage of modern technology to help him — using his iPhone to take pictures of the plants and Google and other online tools to identify them.

“It takes a while to learn what something is,” he said, reiterating, “People need to know — make absolutely sure what you pick is edible.” He also said it is equally important to know about where you are picking — since fertilizers and pesticides used in fields can be toxic, and some of the plants will actually draw heavy metals and other harmful chemicals up out of contaminated soil.

Chris is more than ready to help with that — organizing classes on his farm several times a year where he takes people out and teaches them his foraging skills.

People can check out his class schedule and sign up on his website and blog: hollowspringfarm.blogspot.com. He also uses the site as a way to spread information about what is in season and anything new he has found.

Which, despite the time he has spent roaming his family property, still happens frequently.

Walking across the road to another field that is part of the farm, Chris says, “I have been back here around eight years, and I am still finding new things.”

Pointing all around one side of the field, he identifies a number of small plants that make up a wild strawberry patch he uncovered after cutting the field. Though not in season now, when the plants produce fruit, they are what Chris describes as some of the best, most flavorful tiny strawberries you can find.

“They will ruin you for eating regular strawberries,” he said.

Another one of his favorite plants — a tree actually — borders the field. Chris strips off some needles from a Virginia pine and rolls them in his hands, producing a surprisingly strong citrus scent, with a hint of pine in the background.

“I make tea with the needles. It has a clean, pine flavor, but you can infuse it into any kind of liquid, everything from vodka to milk, even make a meringue with it.”

And, like many of the plants he gathers, the pine needles are good for you as more than just an edible, often containing high levels of vitamin C, especially in the winter.

“If I am starting to feel sick — I make tea with this,” he said, pointing out that many pine species have edible needles, but the complex citrusy-pine flavor makes the Virginia pine his favorite.

Chris has found and grows all sorts of other plants on the farm — sage, herbs, kale, cardoon (similar to an artichoke), chickweed (tastes like a pea pod), wild lettuce (which has the classic lettuce bitterness and is less tough than a dandelion green) — the list goes on and on.

And it keeps growing. Chris is always on the lookout for new edibles.

“You never know what you are going to find,” he said.

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