On Fri, 05 Sep 2003 18:16:16 -0400, Glenn Ashmore
wrote:

Like I said Larry, We don't eat a lot of it down hea' but them Yankees
have a nack for making it taste pretty good. OTOH, their grits suck. ;-)

After my ex and I got married, she took me on a "vacation" to NJ to
show me to her family. Make a note - Visiting ANYONE's family does
NOT a vacation make!

In NW NJ, we passed through one of the towns ending in "ville", there
are thousands. It was early and we wanted breakfast, so stopped by
this nice looking, but ancient, silver diner right out of a 1950's
movie. My stepdaughter, who was 7 and a Charleston girl through and
through, baffled the waitress ordering eggs and grits and toast.
Noone in the restaurant, we later found out, had never SEEN grits.
(She actually wanted SHRIMP and grits, but she figured we were too far
from the ocean in NW NJ out of season.)

All was not lost......

To satisfy Amanda, and knowing the scarcity of decent Southern
delicacies in Yankeeland, Loretta, my ex, had packed Quaker Instant
Grits in the vast array of stock in the car. Having retrieve
somethign the entire town had never seen before, amazed Quaker Oats
would keep such a delicacy from their local stores by diverting its
entire output to the South, she asked the waitress for some really hot
water. Instant isn't good, but it's better'n NONE!

We could see from the look on the waitress and cook's faces they were
very curious about these aliens and their unusual diets, so we offered
them all a bowl of genuine GRITS from our stash, praying they wouldn't
report us to the NJ State Attorney for possession of contraband......

We were clean out of state by the time any repercussions from
polluting rural New Jersey addicting them to new food sources. The
cook owned the restaurant and actually seemed to like them, at least
wanting to experiment with them. He promised me grits would be on the
menu when we came back to his "ville" diner. If you ever see grits on
the menu in New Jersey, please don't report us. I'm afraid to cross
the state line, still. No telling how much it spread by now. That
was in 1984.

I'm carrying a bushel of Okra on my next trip Nawth......(c; THAT
should just wreak real havoc! I'll stay off the Jersey Turnpike. Our
pictures are probably in every toll booth!

Y'all boys stop by.....We'll drop the crab trap off the end of the
finger pier and have some lunch. What do live blue crabs sell for in
Manhattan?....?? Damned things are crawlin' up the pontoons on the
docks, here.


Larry

Extremely intelligent life must exist in the universe.
You can tell because they never tried to contact us.