14 minute read
Only use extension cords temporarily
Chocolate Pound Cake
3 sticks butter or margarine 3 cups sugar 5 eggs 3 cups flour ½ cup cocoa ¼ teaspoon salt 1¼ cups milk 1 tablespoon vanilla ½ teaspoon baking powder
Cream butter and add sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Sift flour, baking powder, cocoa and salt. Add dry ingredients alternately with milk. Add vanilla before last flour. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Bake in greased and floured tube or bundt pan for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Cook’s tip: I like to heat a can of chocolate icing and drizzle over cake. Optional: garnish with peanut butter cups.
Beth McLarty Cullman EC
Amaretto Butternut Pound Cake
2
6 3 3 1 ¼ 2 2 sticks lightly salted butter, room temperature extra-large eggs, room temperature cups sugar cups all-purpose flour cup sour cream teaspoon baking soda tablespoons amaretto liqueur tablespoons Southern Flavors butter nut flavoring
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Prepare pan with butter and flour. Sift 3 cups flour. Measure again and place back into sifter with baking soda, sift again. Cream butter, add sugar, cream again. Add eggs one at a time. Blend in sour cream. Add flour mixture, blend. Add amaretto and flavoring, blending gently. Beat at high speed for 2 minutes. Turn into prepared pan. (Cook’s note: I use an angel tube pan, bottom lined with parchment paper.) Bake for 1½ hours. Remove from oven. Place on cooling rack for 10 minutes. Turn cake onto cooling rack to cool completely.
Helen G. Johnson Central Alabama EC
Red Velvet Pound Cake
1½ cups unsalted butter, room temperature 3 cups sugar 5 large eggs 3 cups all-purpose flour 1/3 cup cocoa ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon baking soda 1 cup whole buttermilk 1 1-ounce bottle liquid red food coloring 1 teaspoon white vinegar 1 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare a 12 cup bundt pan with baking spray and flour. Beat butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, beat in 1 at a time. In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients together. In another bowl, mix wet ingredients. Gradually add dry ingredients to butter mixture, alternately with wet ingredients. Beat at low speed just until combined after each addition. Bake about 50 minutes or until wooden pick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes. Remove from pan and cool completely on wire rack. Drizzle with cream cheese glaze.
Cream Cheese Glaze: 3 ounces cream cheese, softened 1½ cups powdered sugar, sifted 1 tablespoon milk
Mix and drizzle over cooled cake.
Linda Lee Cullman EC
Chocolate Pound Cake
Cynthia's Banana Pound Cake
11/2 cups shortening 2 cups sugar 4 large eggs 2 cups mashed ripe bananas (6 medium-size bananas) 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 3 cups all-purpose flour 11/4 teaspoons baking soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup chopped pecans, optional
Beat shortening at medium speed with an electric mixer 2 minutes or until creamy. Gradually add sugar, beating 5 to 7 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating just until yellow disappears. Combine bananas, buttermilk and vanilla. Combine flour, soda and salt; add to shortening mixture alternately with banana mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Mix at low speed after each addition just until blended. Stir in pecans. Spoon batter into a greased and floured 10-inch tube pan. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour and 30 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack 15 minutes; remove cake from pan, and cool completely on wire rack.
Janice Bracewell Covington EC
Lessons from Admiral Stockdale
These are very unsettling times. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world, the country, the state and all of our communities very hard. Maybe you know someone, maybe a loved one, who didn’t survive the virus. I have been very fortunate thus far, in that I haven’t known anyone who has become a victim of the virus.
We possibly haven’t yet seen the worst. The virus may have receded to some degree (and doctors know more about it and how to better treat those with it), but we don’t know if there will be a recurrence in the fall or winter. We will not be in the clear until there is an effective vaccine or effective treatment readily available and distributed. Equally important, we are just starting to experience the severe economic and societal repercussions of the COVID pandemic. Economic recovery will likely prove to be a very long road back. We are not sure what impacts the COVID pandemic will have on us, our businesses, or our lives, and what changes may result. The future is as uncertain as I have ever known.
I was thinking about the future and how to cope with the present when I came across a story on Rear Admiral James Stockdale that I thought was pertinent to our situation today. The story is from an interview of Admiral Stockdale by Jim Collins that is included in Collins’ outstanding management book, Good to Great. Admiral Stockdale was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer held prisoner in the “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp during the Vietnam War. From 1965 to 1973, Stockdale was tortured at least 15 times, lived out the war with no prisoner rights, with no set release date, and with no certainty as to whether he would even survive or see his family again.
One of the first questions Collins asked in his interview was how the Admiral dealt with those eight years — the uncertainty of his fate, the brutality of his captors. The Admiral answered, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
“Who didn’t make it?” Collins asked. “Oh, that’s easy,” said Stockdale. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” Collins said, now confused, given what Stockdale had said just moments earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Then, after a long pause, Stockdale said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.”
“To this day,” Collins wrote, “I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
Admiral Stockdale wrote books on courage and leadership, including Courage Under Fire and In Love and War. He was obviously a fighter. He refused to compromise. He refused to give in, regardless of the cost. He disfigured himself with a stool and a razor, so his image could not be used to portray him as a well-treated prisoner of war. He attempted suicide because he was scared of being weak and giving up the secrets of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to the enemy.
In his summary, Collins writes, “A key psychology for leading from good to great is the Stockdale Paradox: Retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. And, at the same time, confront the most brutal facts of your current reality whatever they might be.”
How then does the Stockdale Paradox, a business principle, relate personally to all of us in these days of quarantine, disorganized businesses, disrupted plans and possibly health challenges? How do we maintain through the COVID-19 crisis? The paradox offers this insight: Instead of saying optimistically, “It’s going to be over by such and such a date,” and wasting the days and months ahead of us because this situation can’t last long, we should rather face the harsh reality that no one knows when the end will be.
We can’t allow the situation to destroy our will. We must confront the brutal consequences of the disease with discipline and resolve that with God’s help and an absolute faith we will prevail in the end. We have the opportunity to turn the experience into a defining event of our lives, which, in retrospect, we would not trade.
Hopefully, this is a worthwhile lesson from an American hero. I hope you have a good month. Stay strong and safe.
Gary Smith is President and CEO of PowerSouth Energy Cooperative.
How To Place a Line Ad in Marketplace
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Miscellaneous
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Answers to puzzle on Page 25
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Real Estate Sales
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Education
FREE BIBLE CORRESPONDENCE COURSE – write to P.O. Box 52, Trinity, AL, 35673
Fruits / Nuts / Berries
GROW MUSCADINES AND BLACKBERRIES , half dollar size – We offer over 200 varieties of Fruit and Nut Trees plus Vines and Berry Plants . Free color catalog. 1-800-733-0324. Ison’s Nursery, P.O. Box 190, Brooks, GA 30205 Since 1934 www.isons.com
Festivals in the age of social distancing
Southerners have always liked to get together.
Family reunions, church socials, birthday parties. We can even turn a funeral into a gathering.
We particularly like festivals, and down in the South we have some humdingers.
For example.
Every year the town of Sally, South Carolina, hosts its annual Chitlin Strut, where everyone has a dandy time eating fried and boiled pig guts.
Then there is the Marlington, West Virginia, Road Kill Festival, which features a cook-off where creative chefs prepare dishes which, according to the rules,
Harvey H. (Hardy) Jackson is Professor Emeritus of History at Jacksonville State University. He can be reached at hhjackson43@gmail.com
Illustration by Dennis Auth
“must have as their main ingredient any animal commonly found dead on the side of the road.”
However, festivals are not always about food. Though eating something you would not normally eat seems to be an important criteria for having an event, these gatherings are often about doing things you always wanted to do but didn’t because your Mama probably wouldn’t approve.
Like hollering.
Which is what they do at the National Hollerin’ Contest held at Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina. A few years ago the winner was on the The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson and you can still find it on the internet. Something more wholesome to do than trolling politics and porn.
Pikesville, Kentucky, has Hillbilly Days, where local folks do all sorts of things they believe they would do if they were really hillbillies. The main thing they do is shake down city slickers who pay big bucks to attend and who buy all sorts of doodads that local folks pass off as the real thing.
Up north and out west they also have festivals, but they lack something. Out in Pullman, Washington, they have the National Lentil Festival, which promotes healthy eating. Sally, South Carolina, does not fear the competition. In California there is the Tarantula Awareness Festival, which features a “hairy leg contest.” OK, it is California where “awareness” is a big deal, but I’ll take a pass.
Alabama is loaded with festivals – Google Alabama Festivals, pick one, and go to it. The Big Bug Fest in Tuscaloosa gives folks an opportunity to appreciate insects and even eat one – on purpose. There are festivals devoted to gospel music, the blues, and tacos. Talk about diversity.
For years a group of civic-minded hunters down in Clarke County held the Armadillo Gourmet Society Wild Game Supper. The hunters cooked what they had killed. Their wives made desserts. Tickets were sold. Politicians showed up and contributed. And the money went to the Sheriffs’ Boys’ Ranch.
Meanwhile, down on the Gulf Coast, some folks heard of an Oklahoma cow chip throwing contest, and decided to throw a fish instead. The result: Alabama’s most widely known contribution to the festival frenzy – the Flora-Bama International Mullet Toss. I have been there, done that, and got a T-shirt.
But not this year.
The virus that has done so much damage to the nation has caused festivals to be canceled in Alabama and beyond. Someone suggested that wearing a mask could keep out the smell of chitlins as well as any germs lurking around, but it is kinda hard to eat when your mouth is covered.
As for tossing fish, anyone who has ever been to the Flora-Bama wing-ding knows that social distancing just ain’t gonna happen. With that in mind, organizers of the event have postponed the throwing until a later date. They are not alone. All around the state concerned folks are putting up TBA postings to let everyone know that the future is uncertain.
So, we must wait it out. Meanwhile those who can should fire up the grill, turn some ice cream, and make the best of a bad situation.
Something Alabamians are good at.
CALL FOR ENTRIES Alabama Rural Electric Association’s
11 th Quilt Competition Our 2021 theme is: First responders
Mail, or E-mail form below for your entry package. Deadline to submit quilt square is January 29, 2021.
Cooperative: ___________________________________________ (The electric cooperative name on front of this Alabama Living.) Mail to:
Linda Partin AREA 340 TechnaCenter Drive Montgomery, AL 36117
or
Phone: 334-215-2732 E-mail: lpartin@areapower.com
