i won! i won! i won!

Check it OUT! I won a photo contest with one of my favorite photos! Whee! The Knoxville News Sentinel has this congratulations ad up and they told me they are running it in the paper Friday, Saturday AND Sunday. I guess I should think about getting myself an agent...

my favorite photo, my two favorite people

I found out last week that I won and have been on a major high ever since.

the story breaks

Matt just called me from DC to let me know that our story is the lead on knoxnews.com, go check it out! I'm sure they will change it out at some point today so I've linked the image below to the story.

front page news, that's carrie and matt (and my hand) - whee!

They also created two slide shows that are really good, be sure to take a look at them as well.

hunting & gathering, read all about it

Be sure to buy/read the newspaper tomorrow, we will be in the Living section! It's a LONG story but the main gist is this...

• I read the book The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
  
• Matt found it and read the first and last chapter, ha (in the last chapter the author makes a meal out of items that have been hunted, gathered or locally grown - nothing bought, although he did use flour and oil from his pantry I think)
• Matt had the idea to do this ourselves (Mowrers and Smiths) and it took off from there (Matt and Megan were ALL into it, I was somewhat interested and Tommy was amused by it all)
• We decided to use only ingredients that have been grown/hunted/gathered by people we know or ourselves - this means we had to make our own flour from cattails and potatoes (this was a difficult and long process), get salt out of the ocean, churn our own butter and other endeavors...

We've spent a lot of time talking about everything but most of the worked happened the past two weeks. It was a lot of hard work but so much fun!

The paper should have a better rundown actually, so I'll let them fill in the missing spots. I feel that after I post all of the photos my mind will not be working...I will do my best.

Here is the final menu...and you should know that this wasn't an easy meal - we went gourmet 100%.

ooh la la, a soup to nuts experience

The first thing we did was during the beach trip. Megan filled up a gallon jug and a bucket of ocean water and boiled them down to get salt. It was a big success and we were surprised at how much salt we had. Go Megan!

sam shows his amazement at the amount of salt megan harvested from the ocean

Matt used apples from a co-worker to make vinegar...

homemade vinegar, to be used for pickling okra - which in turn was used to make a salsa

We went fishing over at PawPaw's pond, Gramma was on Lottie Sue detail.

this is one handsome fisherman

gramma with bud, lottie sue

megan and tommy fishing

lottie sue and gramma playing with a thomas the train book

the first fish i caught - not bad

megan's first fish

tommy's first fish (he lost the hook about three times before catching this guy)

matt's little bass, he was let back in to swim another day

lottie sue touches mr. bass before he goes back into the water

The biggest project we did was making flour out of cattails. Here are photos of Matt (in waders) and Megan harvesting the plants.

We brought the cattails home and then the hard part began, we had to peel away to the root, then we had to mash them, wash them and then mush them up over and over again. We followed George Washington Carver's directions (circa 1930). We also found another article that said you eat the actual cattail like a hot dog. Um, we tried that it tasted TERRIBLE. It was like eating cotton.

this is what we had, it equaled 1/2 cup of flour

cattail hot dog they say, not so much

matt and megan deconstructing and mushing the cattails

the roots then go in the wash as lottie sue supervises

this will soon be flour

mush and wash, then repeat a million times

after you wash it you run it through muslin to squeeze the water out

then you let it dry and grind grind grind

the fruit of many hours labor, 1/2 cup of cattail flour (matt was very proud and so was i)

this is a shot of all of the flour we made (cattail, corn, potato and sweet potato)

Megan came through with so many items (milk, peanuts, okra, potatoes, duck - I could go on and on). She brought these peanuts over one day and I thought it was so neat. I never really thought of where peanuts came from. A tree, maybe. We had so much - fruit from Matt's grandmother, hot peppers from our gardens and then some from the Gilmores, honey from BB's brother and corn from Marty and Shawn - just to name a few.

peanuts! i had never seen them on the root before

this was a trial run at making butter, i used cream and it made actual butter - it was pretty exciting (seriously)

matt working on the potato flour

chopping peppers (thanks shonnie bear), we used them to spice up the pickled okra

this milk came from a cow that morning

matt pouring the milk so it separates (we skimmed the top off to make whipped cream and butter)

lottie sue takes it all in as tommy uses a mill to grind dried corn

these are the eggs megan got from a friend

Matt made the appetizer, I didn't get a photo but maybe the paper did. He made these cracked from our flour and then smoked the fish and topped it with boiled egg and a salsa we made. It was so good!

yummy crackers

this is megan blueberry and pear pie, isn't is cute?

here i am spooning out the soup i made

carrie came over the for the meal and brought her new favorite wine
(i could make a million jokes here but will refrain)

in the midst of all the chaos i manage to pose for the camera

moonshine with raspberry sorbet, what a way to end the meal

this is deedee (mary constantine) from the news sentinel, she was GREAT - we had such a great time with her (and wade the photographer, but i don't have a shot of him)

I'll post the article tomorrow, I am going to run out and buy 100 newspapers - just like they do in the movies.

Update - I just noticed that the paper's website has a teaser for our story that is running tomorrow. Here's a shot of it because I assume that link will go down after the story runs.

very exciting

It's hard to read here but here's the text:

Four Knoxville area friends decided to put on a fabulous meal with only one hard and fast rule: No food could be purchased. It all had to come from what they found or what friends or family provided.

So began a 2 1/2-month adventure that included collecting sea salt from the Atlantic Ocean, flour made of Loudon County cattails, venison, fresh fruits and vegetables from area gardens and a notorious libation from the hills of East Tennessee.

On Wednesday in Food, read about the hunting, gathering and cooking that led to an unforgettable, four-hour feast.