Heading South for Some Good Eating

I am very excited this morning because I have DOUBLED my followership! Now I have TWO followers. My dear friend Rachel is joined by a person I do not even know, Ms. B1tch! Ms. B. is a hilarious blogger from the Southern US. Her exploits in the world of fine restaurant foodism have inspired me to write about one of my favorite restaurants in the South, Hominy Grill.

Admittedly, I have been known to grumble loudly about the menu choices when we're in the South. It often seems like everything is deep fried, including salad. (This cooking technique has migrated northward. Sometime I will tell you about the deep-fried Twinkies we saw last summer along a Jersey boardwalk.)

But Charleston's Hominy Grill is worthy of great love. This would be true even if it wasn't in such a gosh darn pretty town. In many ways, Charleston feels more like a small European city than a Southern US location. I heart Charleston.

When you are in the South, you must eat grits. I feel strongly about this. If you travel to a place, you should not eat the same stuff you eat when you are at home. You could stay at home and eat that. Duh! I had blood pudding when I was in Ireland. Yes, the name is disgusting. But I did it, and I am a better person for it. Grits is not a great name for a food, although of course it is better than blood pudding. Do not be put off by the name. Grits are not gritty. Well, actually, they are sort of gritty. But eat them anyway. And eat them at the Hominy Grill.

My favorite breakfast there is the scrumptious Shrimp & Grits. Yum! If you can't just hop on a plane and fly to Charleston like Rachel, you can make them at home.

Wikipedia, source of all knowledge worth knowing, shares this fun historical grits moment: The Post and Courier proclaimed in 1952, "An inexpensive, simple, and thoroughly digestible food, [grits] should be made popular throughout the world. Given enough of it, the inhabitants of planet Earth would have nothing to fight about. A man full of [grits] is a man of peace."

This is undoubtedly true. Of course, a man full of any kind of food is probably a man of peace. So grits are not uniquely a peace-inducing food. Men do not like to fight on a full stomach. It slows them down.

Hey! I just realized something! "Hominy" sounds kind of like "harmony." Coincidence? I think not.