A Royal Feast!

Wow--the Natchez Food and Wine Festival yesterday was quite the event! It was held at the Natchez Convention Center, and since Nathan, Kate, Tim, and I were going to help out with serving food, we got in for free (everyone else had to pay $50 per person). When we walked into the gigantic auditorium full of food vendors, and they told us that we could just walk around and try all of the food for free, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. All of the local restaurants had booths there, and even some restaurants from places like Vicksburg came down for the event. Luckily when you sampled food at someone's booth, they just gave you a little taste--so you could try a whole bunch of things without getting too overly stuffed. Here's a little run through of everything I tried: oysters bienville (baked oysters with cheese on top), lobster manicotti, stuffed pepper soup, stuffed mushrooms, crawfish tarts, oyster-stuffed artichoke hearts, lobster BLT's, cheese grits with corn biscuits, pork loin with sweet pepper sauce, duck enchiladas, crawfish and shrimp corn chowder, and tomato basil tarts. Then, for dessert: pecan pie tarts, brownie cheesecake, chocolate chip cheesecake, lemon cheesecake, white chocolate bread pudding (but I think my bread pudding is better!), and red velvet cake. Mmmmmm, everything was so delicious. It truly was a ROYAL feast because the guest of honor was none other than Princess Diana's butler!!! (I can't remember his name, but everyone just knows him as Princess Diana's butler.) He's from England (of course) and has his own brand of wine, which he was promoting at the festival. Earlier in the day he had gone on a tour at Melrose, and Nathan gave the tour, so Nathan considered himself to be a close friend of the man and introduced me to him. He was very nice (and smelled good)! According to everyone at Melrose, he showed up for the tour in a white double-breasted pinstripe suit--he was dressed to the nines, and what intrigued everybody was that he took the tour, then walked around in the hot sun wearing a long-sleeved suit, and he never cracked a sweat the entire time. Hmmm, how is that possible? He told us at the festival last night that when Nathan was talking about the slaves at Melrose always having to wait on someone and never getting a quiet moment to themselves, he could relate. :-) Princess Diana's butler is probably the most famous person to visit Natchez since Ulysses S. Grant rolled through town for a night after the Battle of Vicksburg. They've had him on all of the radio shows and things like that in town--and you'd better believe that people were guzzling his wine last night. Speaking of wine, it just so happens that my job at the festival ended up being, of all things, pouring white wine for people!!! I thought to myself, "Oh dear, I have no idea what I'm doing, nor do I have any desire to do it." But, I needed to earn my dinner, so I quickly got the 4-1-1 from Kate on white wine. Basically, the one in the red bottle was really sweet, the one in the blue bottle was semi-sweet, and the one in the clear bottle was not sweet. It also helped that by the time I started pouring wine, people were already getting a little tipsy, so they were happy with whatever I poured for them. There were some truly funny drunk people, and it made me all the more glad that I have no desire to ever partake of any type of alcohol. It was pretty fun to crack jokes to the people I was pouring wine for though--they thought everything I said was incredibly funny. Little did they know that I thought the way they were acting was even funnier! I was surely the only sober person in the place by the time the evening was over, but we really did have a good time. Even though we took Kate's car, she decided that it would be best if I drove because she, Nathan, and Tim were feeling a little too warm and fuzzy inside. I gladly obliged, and we all made it home safely. As for all of the other drunk people, we can only hope that they made it home all right (and woke up with terrible hangovers so they won't want to drink ever again). :-) It was definitely an evening to remember.

Today has been a pretty good day too. I took Angie to lunch at a new place in town called Vaughn's Cafe and Bakery. She wanted to take me to lunch since it's my last week, but I told her that I needed to take her to lunch to cheer her up. She got a thumbs-down from the people at Vicksburg for the job she had applied for, which she had really, really, really hoped to get. So, unfortunately her 3-hour daily commutes will continue for an indefinite amount of time. :-( She has a good attitude about it though, and says she's glad for the job she has in Natchez. We had a good chat and a fun time trying the food at Vaughn's. It was a pretty tasty lunch buffet, but the biscuits weighed about five pounds. We were laughing really hard when I was trying to eat a biscuit because it sucked all of the moisture out of my mouth, and I was chewing it for about five minutes. When it started to turn into bread dough in my mouth, I thought Angie was going to pass out from laughing so much :-) We decided that maybe we'll ask Vaughn's to donate some biscuits to Junior Ranger camp next summer, which we can then use to play baseball with the kids (the biscuits would be the baseballs!)

This morning I went to open my fridge to get some yogurt out, and all I saw was this gigantic box that said "BEEF" on the side of it. I was like, "Hey, where's my food?" But then I found it all pushed to the very back of the fridge. I have no idea where the BEEF box came from, but it was gone when I got home from work today. It must have been a Catherine and Everett thing. There was also a random black lab (which at first I thought was Dixie, but then I saw Dixie in her usual spot and realized it wasn't her) that sat outside my back door all night. Then this morning the random dog slobbered all over my pants as it was chasing me out to the car. I think it belongs to one of Catherine and Everett's kids, but thankfully it, like the BEEF box, was gone when I got home from work. I'm trying to start the packing process this evening, so we'll see how that goes.