Food Truck Mashup
Major holidays such as the one we are celebrating today almost always involve eating. It might be a big family meal in the formal dining room using the wedding china that sees the light of day once or twice a year. Or it might be binging on limited edition candy. For verification, just go to any major grocery and look for the pastel-painted aisle, or the meat department where hams have multiplied like bunnies. (See what I did there?)
I know a lot of folks have a ham on Easter – sometimes we do, too. But it’s not a requirement. As long as we have family and friends around the table, it still feels like an Easter meal no matter what we’re eating, even if it’s braised rabbit (which it never is, unfortunately). Because it hadn’t been decided before my deadline, I can’t give you a rundown of our Easter menu today except to say I fully intend to sneak a waffle in somehow. But I do have a story to tell about another recent family meal.
Son is practicing his adulting this year with a genuine co-op job at a genuine government agency in Jackson. I’m taking that opportunity to visit our capital city more often - to see him, of course, but as a bonus I have a bucket list of restaurants to try. Last weekend I went down for a progressive dinner. Traditional progressive dinners usually entail a group of people driving from house to house for each course of the meal. Ours was non-traditional. We walked from truck to truck at the Clarion Ledger’s Food Truck Mashup.
There were close to 20 food trucks from around the state represented at the Mashup, all parked around the concourse of Trustmark Park in Pearl. Our strategy was to try as many edibles as we could, focusing on dishes we don’t see very often, or variants of dishes that we really like. If there was nothing particularly interesting or new on the menu, we skipped that truck, opting for the unique.
Let’s taco ‘bout the food. The Big Bad Wolf Truck was one of the first we came to. I had already scoped out their rotating menus online and knew this was a truck we needed to visit. The smoked duck taco was the obvious choice. Little rounds of smoked duck breast, avocado, onion, pepper and crumbles of queso fresco cheese. Somehow our first bite was also our favorite of the night. And alongside it, freshly fried pork skins, still hot!
Another truck I had my eye on was Lurny D’s Grille, which featured a number of intriguing burgers. I went for the throwback to my childhood: the French onion dip burger. There was nothing fancy about the meat itself - the appeal was the slather of French onion dip and the crushed Lay’s potato chips not just beside the burger, but on it. I’m not sure we ever had a party in the 80’s without chips and onion dip, and now I was able to relive those days by way of a hamburger.
Taqueria la Reata provided our second taco of the night, as well as a shredded chicken tamale. They had a list of what I considered authentic tacos, then something else called a “Gringo Taco”. Though I may be a gringo, I certainly wasn’t going to order one of those, so we ordered the lengua - aka, the tongue taco. As I’ve said before, I just love saying those two words. They just roll off the … you know. When we got our order, the telltale taste buds were missing, and Son asked if we’d ended up with the gringo version. Gringo and lengua do sound a little bit alike with enough background noise, and there certainly was plenty of that. I did what any good father would do for his son, and said: “If you’re not sure, just ask it.” (Think about it - it’ll come to you.)
To round out our meat groups (so far duck, chicken, and beef two ways) we stopped at Kingz Kitchen for a hefty glazed pork chop big enough to hide the piece of white bread underneath. And a quick shout-out to Fergndan’s Pizza for bringing out the wood-fired oven for their pepperoni pizza - that’s love.
As we headed to the other side of the ballpark, we stopped at Chunky Dunks Sweets for ice cream nachos. We chose the praline pecan ice cream (homemade), served over cinnamon and sugar chips, drizzled with caramel and chocolate syrup. Decadent. If the chips
I took a look at my landscape this weekend trying to decide how many plants, if any, I’m going to have to renovate or replace after our hard winter. I have to say I was really impressed at the regrowth so far this spring.
One factor that contributed to most of my plants surviving was me providing freezing temperature protection.
Since I grow almost entirely in containers that range in size from 1 gallon all the way up to 25 gallons, I was able to bring much of my landscape into the garage. My containers spent 14 out of the first 21 days of January indoors, including my entire citrus orchard in 25-gallon pots.
With those cold memories behind us, now we need to think about the hot summer we know is coming. I count on reliable plants to perform their jobs in the summer season. And maybe at the top of my list of must-grow summer plants is lantana.
There are many great selections available for our gardens, from 4-foot specimens to sprawling ground-cover choices, along with just too many colors to list. Lantanas are so perfect for our Mississippi landscapes that two varieties have been chosen twice as Mississippi Medallion winners: New Gold and Sonset.
One of my favorite lantanas to use as a ground cover is definitely Luscious Lemonade. The flowers are sunshine yellow, and when viewed early in the morning, especially when there is dew on the plant, the flowers take on a two-toned appearance.
A new addition to the Luscious series is Royale Cosmo, which produces a seemingly endless amount of flower clusters showing off magenta-purple with orange-yellow flowers. I grew Royale Cosmo last year and am going to enjoy it again this summer.
A lantana I became acquainted with last year was Bloomify. This group produces flowers all summer long and, unlike some of the older lantana varieties, it does not produce any seed. Bloomify Red features bright-red flowers, and Bloomify rose has soft-pastel flowers in rose-pink. The plants remain neatly branched and reach about 14 inches tall and wide, which makes Bloomify lantana perfect for mass planting.
The only significant pest I watch out for is lantana lace bug. This bug produces leaf stippling and tar-like frass on the undersides of leaves, very similar to the damage caused by azalea lace bugs. Heavy infestations reduce flowering and even cause the plant to defoliate.
Prevent this problem by applying systemic insecticides to the plant root zone in May and July. Systemic insecticides include dinotefuran (such as Greenlight Tree and Shrub Insect Control with Safari) and imidacloprid (such as Bayer Advanced Garden Tree and Shrub Insect Control).
Light pruning through the summer helps maintain the size and tidiness while stimulating more flowering and a bushier structure. Fertilize twice per month with a water-soluble fertilizer to maintain flowering potential. In the early spring -- now is the perfect time -- cut them back hard to about 4 to 6 inches from the ground to make room for new growth.
Always plant lantanas in full sun locations with good landscape bed drainage. Once established, lantanas are drought tolerant. During these times, the flowering show will make your landscape pop.
Lantanas not only brighten the landscape but are also literal butterfly and pollinator magnets.
For more information and to see these lantanas growing in the landscape, check out the Southern Gardening segment Fall Lantana, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=O6Gb20pCSnc .
weren’t Stacy’s pita chips, they were certainly similar, sturdy enough to hold up under the ice cream without getting soggy.
Our first real wait was at On a Roll, a gourmet egg roll truck. We missed the cookie dough roll by mere minutes, but did get a cheesecake roll which was still mighty fine. On the savory side, we chose the NotchoTaco roll, with seasoned ground beef, cheese, onions and peppers. They serve all kinds of non-traditional egg rolls, including the dessert varieties, and make them fresh. Definitely worth the wait.
Our last stop was at the overall winner for the night (though we didn’t know it at the time): Small Time Street Eats, which focused on hot dogs. Sort of. You could choose your sausage - we picked alligator and pork. Then your toppings: we chose the crawfish cream sauce and they added a healthy shake of Paul Prudhomme’s Magic seasoning. Twas a bit spicy, but it was the Ragin Cajun dog - what did I expect? A few good slugs of strawberry lemonade freeze from Sno-Biz helped out, too.
So, Starkville: Jackson has food trucks, Tupelo and Oxford have food trucks - even Winona has a food truck. Isn’t it about time we got rolling, too?
Jay Reed is a local food enthusiast and pharmacist. More of his food musings may be found at www.eatsoneate.com. He welcomes your comments at eatsoneate@gmail.com.