It was a very different time and place when I grew up. In some ways things were more conservative, but in other ways, things were much more liberal. Take alcohol for example. The legal drinking age when I grew up was still 18. Since I was graced with an abundance of testosterone at a relatively young age, that meant I had the full on, Ron Jeremy style mustache by the time I was 15 years old. That also meant that by this age I could walk into a local package store and buy a 6 pack or two. Well, that was if you knew the right ones to walk in to.

Be that as it may, it was apparent (at least to me) very early on that I wasn’t like everyone else. I mean, this being the late 70’s and all, who else would walk into a package store (that’s what they call liquor stores in Connecticut) and buy Guinness Stout to bring to a high school party over at Fortin’s Pond? All part of the master plan you see. Because with Guinness being twice as expensive as the standard Bud or Miller and their associated ilk (light beers were around but so wasn’t generic Beer in a black and white can and let’s not forget the famous Billy Beer named after President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy) I figured that the majority of the package store owners wouldn’t card me as I wasn’t buying the cheap stuff. Hey, it worked, what can I say.

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The company I used to work for had offices all over the world but the particular department I worked for had offices in Northern Virginia and Atlanta, Georgia. It happened that I had to travel down to Atlanta on several occasions and while I was there, my co-workers introduced me to a world of Southern cooking that I hadn’t known existed before. Yeah, there were the traditional things like pecan pie and peach cobbler (just as an aside, it seems that every other street in Atlanta is know as Peachtree. There is Peachtree Boulevard, Road, Street, Peachtree Industrial, it is enough to drive you batty) and grits and stuff like that. But there is also this wonderful collection of stuff known as Brunswick Stew.

Now oddly enough, It is Brunswick County, Virginia for which this stew is named. The story goes that an African American hunting camp cook named Jimmy Matthews, concocted a squirrel stew for his master, Creed Haskins, in 1828. He named it in honor of his home county. Several other towns and places also try to lay claim to this stew including Brunswick, Georgia where a 25 gallon iron pot has been erected as a statue with the claim that this was the vessel that Brunswick stew was first made in back in 1898. Regardless of the actual origins, this stew has been become a loved part of Southern cooking.

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I’ve mentioned before that I spend a bit of time at a fantasy football website called The Huddle. Aside from a plethora of information about fantasy football, there are forums where I can chat about various topics with other well meaning but obviously deluded NFL fans. One of the forums is dedicated to food and beverages. As one might expect, I find myself right at home amongst the denizens of that particular forum.

So just the other day, someone posted a question asking how to crisp up chicken skin whether cooking it indoors or outdoors. I jotted down a quick reply about how to properly grill a chicken leg, however I realized that what I wrote probably wasn’t a complete discussion about how to do this and that there are a fair number of people that don’t know how to properly grill a chicken leg. This brings us to the point of this blog article, the complete discussion that I didn’t write up before.

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It is unfortunate, but in order to get all the things I want at reasonable prices, I often have to go to more than one mega mart. Like many Americans, I feel the need to pinch pennies and when you can save over 30% on you food bill just by going to one store from some things and another store for the rest, well then I’m not afraid to split the food list in half and go to where I can get the best price.

So as Ms Cocktail and I entered the second mega mart of the day we encountered an unadvertised special that really got me excited. Hass avocados were on sale at the price of 10 for $10 which, at least in Northern Virginia, is a great price. It wasn’t so much the price that got me all excited as much as the avocados themselves. The avocado is a wonderful fruit, it adds a certain amount of creaminess and a bunch of flavor to anything it is used in. Then there is that most special concoction that centers on the avocado, guacamole.

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Yeah, I know it’s a bit late. However, I wanted to share a quaint tradition for New Years Day the Ms Cocktail and I have taken part in for over 20 years. It all started back when we were living in Willimantic, CT and newly married. At that time, Ms Cocktail was very much the vegetarian so most of our cookbooks (read: her cookbooks. At this point in time sandwiches were a major culinary effort for me, as often as not causing me to head to the local Subway shop) were of the vegetarian variety.

We currently still have these cookbooks, and the ones that tended to get the most use were a series of cookbooks put out by the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, NY. This is a reasonably well known vegetarian restaurant in a decidedly college town, a perfect match. Very often with their recipes, there are little anecdotes or other bits of information tucked into the preamble, kinda, sorta like what I do but in a much more brief way.

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