One of the highlights of the annual Sweet Potato Festival Banquet to me is certainly the array of sweet potato desserts. Desserts come from the contest entries that day. So each table has a variety of sweet potato delights.
Joel and I tried several, and his favorite was, of course, a sweet potato pie.
My favorite was a sweet potato dish that looked and tasted similar to Boston Cream Pie.
It had a graham cracker crust, with a sweet potato custard-like filling and a chocolate glaze topping.
The Mayor’s cup was won by Peggy Whiteside of Water Valley, who is Joey Shaw’s aunt.
Lisa McNeece
Peggy is a long time entrant in the sweet potato cooking contest and has won many awards over the years. Her winning recipe was Pineapple Sweet Potato Cheeseball with Blueberry Pepper Jelly which is in this week’s paper.
We will print more of the winning recipes as we get them.
Get your cold weather gear ready. The high Thursday and Friday is forecast in the mid-40s with the lows in the mid-20s. Perfect football weather.
My mother Jo Ann Denley has been out walking in the driveway on a cane. Her physical therapy homework includes this at least once a day.
Addi Claire saw her and my sister Deanna out walking Saturday and said “Nana, Mimi is walking up here to your house.”
I don’t think she’s quite ready to pull this hill yet.
She goes back to her doctor in Oxford this week, and hopefully will be regaining even more mobility.
I took the granddaughters with me Saturday to pick up lunch at Bruce United Methodist Church’s annual harvest dinner.
Joel was at home working on football stories, so I loaded the two of them up and told him we’d only be gone a second. He offered to go with me, but I told him it wasn’t necessary.
How hard could it be with a 5 year old and a 2 year old to pick up three carry out plates? A lot harder than it should be.
First, Ellie Kathryn has to potty. Or at least you have to try to get her to potty. And her stock answer if you ask her if she needs to go is “I already been.”
So, that took a little creativity, and you might as well not be in a hurry. Because she certainly isn’t.
Second, Ellie Kathryn had to put shoes on. She doesn’t care for shoes or pants, and prefers to wear a t-shirt whatever the weather. So as soon as she got to my house, she stripped off her shoes and socks, thankfully she still had on her shirt and pants.
Of course, we couldn’t put the shoes back on that she wore to my house, and she wanted to wear flip flops. So she put on a pair of too-big hot pink flops of Addi Claire’s.
Finally, we were ready to get in the car. Not so fast.
“Nana,” Ellie Kathryn said. “I have to get my baby.”
“And my purse.”
“And my phone.”
“And my other baby.”
So now we have two baby dolls, a black sequined purse (that I occasionally use on formal occasions), a purple wallet and a bottle for her baby doll.
I suggested to her when we got to the church, that we leave some of that in the car, because I would be carrying plates.
She insisted that she would carry “her stuff.” Right.
We had to wait a few minutes in the foyer of the church for our plates, at which point, I then had one of the baby dolls. When our teas came out in the cardboard carton, I persuaded Ellie Kathryn to at least put her wallet and baby bottle in the open slot of the carton. That left me with two baby dolls, a sequined purse, my own purse, a bag with one plate in it and a bag with two plates in it.
Addi Claire offered to help reaching for the teas. I thought that was asking for disaster and handed her a bag of plates. Then Ellie Kathryn wanted the other sack.
That’s how we left the church– me with the teas, the baby dolls and the purses and the girls carrying our lunch plates.
And you can imagine, after swinging them around and up into the vehicle how they looked when we got home.
Joel opened one up and said “What happened here?”
Did he even have to ask?
E-mail Lisa McNeece: lisamcneece@gmail.com follow her on twitter @lisamcneece