Ep. 113: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Where To Eat On the Road

Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host Brent Reeves. From Cone hunting to trot lining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and country skills that will help you beat the system. This country life is proudly presented as part of Mediators Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts the airways have to offer. Alright friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I think I got a thing or two to teach you. Where to eat when you're on the road? Who's hungry? Hungry? Brent, what do you mean who's hungry? What's hungry got to do with it? If it's time to eat, let's eat. So it's time and you're in an area you aim for me with to what you're going to do. How you going to find a spot that's got the vittles you like without eating the same old thing at the clown's place or at that other burger joint where the dude wears the crown and the britches like Shakespeare? Well, I'm going to tell you. We're going to cover all of that and more, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. There was an old country store in the New Edinburgh, Arkansas located in the fork where one graveled county road wide and became two. One went toward our house and the other toward Crane Lake where it was an uncommon in the spring and summer to find a boat full of raised boys driving crickets one blue gill brim at a time. Now, that store had been there for as long as I can remember. Mr. Almas Marks owned and operated it and had since what seemed like before the Allies put the Germans in check the first time. But when Mr. Almas retired, some folks took it over that were nice and friendly enough and provided service to the rest of us living in the country by not having to drive all the way to town for a few necessities. The only issue was while they kept the store clean, their personal hygiene habits were somewhat suspect. That's not true. They weren't suspect at all. They were nonexistent. So we didn't buy sandwiches that they made there, but we would get lunch meat, bread, and other packaged groceries. My dad and I were headed home one evening from the lake and as we got inside the store, dad said, how about we fry up some bologna for supper. Now, let's talk about fried bologna for just a minute. It's one of those things that if you know, you know. Our bologna had a first name and it wasn't OSCAR like that old Oscar Meyer jingle suggested. It was PETIT and stood for Petit gene bologna that was and continues to be made right here in the great state of Arkansas. And when I say there's no comparison between how good Petit gene bologna is, fried or otherwise, when compared to every other fact, assembly of lunch meat call and self-bologna, you better pay attention because I have just rendered unto you in the spiritable facts from the book of Brent for the people of Brent. It is that good. But I digress and back to the story. We called them just before they closed and went straight to the meat counter. The lady said, hey buddy, you a Brent and catch any fish today? My dad said yes ma'am, but we're too hungry to clean them and cook them tonight. So we're just going to clean these fish and just fry up some bologna for supper. With a smile that had teeth but resembled a fence around the haunted house, she smiled and said, how much do y'all want? And I was still young and I was at eye level on the customer side of the glass. She fired up the meat slicer and I watched her as she reached into that lighted meat counter for that uncut five-pound stick of Petit gene bologna with the filthiest hands and fingernails I'd ever seen on a human being. It looked like she was wearing a pair of dirty brown new gloves. My dad saw it too. I slowly looked up at him and seeing the disgusted look of horror on his face and waited for his next move. It was then I got to listen. In my mind, we had two options. One, just say we changed our mind and grabbed some crackers and potted meat and hit the door. Two, try to build a sandwich from the best bologna on the planet that had been sliced and packaged by hands resembling a literal petri bucket of weapons, grayed and nasty. There was no amount of heat in that skillet that was going to erase that image out of my head. However, in one of the slickest moves I've ever been blessed to witness. My dad stammered a little at first but gained his composure and said, wait a minute, I'll just take the whole stick and I'll come around and get it out of there. And just like that, he had chosen option three, which was taker completely out of the equation. We had fried bologna for supper that night instead of potted meat and crackers or a staph infection. As a matter of fact, we had fried bologna for quite a while and that's just how that happened. Alright, amigo, it's time to eat and we're rolling through a place we've never been or in an area we're just not familiar with and it's time for some grub. You can always grab that stuff that'll slowly kill you from the side of the road and I'm not talking about roadkill. Speaking of roadkill, my brother Tim and I were headed back to our camp cruising along on top of the Arkansas River Levy with some duck hunting clients from New Jersey after a successful hunt many years ago. All of a sudden a doe deer ran out in front of us and wound up under my old barroco and our boat and trailer, which doesn't fare well for the longevity of a doe deer. Tim called the game board and he said we could have it. So we loaded her up in the boat, took off for the duck camp, roadkill. It's just like sweet milk. It does a body good. But being fresh out of roadkill, Clay Nuke and I found ourselves in this very situation only a short time ago coming home from a turkey hunting Missouri. We ain't had a bite to eat all day and it had done got over into the afternoon so we started looking for some groceries. Soon as we hit the city limits of Lebanon, Missouri, population 15,013 in the hometown of Harold Bell Wright, Arthur of the novel Shepherd of the Hills. I'm driving and Clay starts digging around on Google looking for a good spot. Well Google wanted to take you so far and you never really know about those online reviews about the food. There's no telling who wrote it and there's folks out here running around that'll eat anything. And if that wasn't true, Lewis Grisard would have never warned us years ago about how you never ever eat in a place that says they have food just like your mamas. I promise you, they do not. It's all a matter of taste or lack of and I've been in different parts of this great nation of ours and it's some great food but there are some drastic differences in what folks call good food. Some of it is a struggle to call food and I'm sure there's plenty of people who think I'm crazy for loving squirrels like I do. My wife is one of them but what does she know? Her judgment is obviously suspect from the company she keeps. And my dad who killed more squirrels than any person I know on this orbiting rock we call earth wouldn't they at one if he was starving to death. That's a true story. But that's fine. More for me. I didn't got to share. So back to Lebanon and mine and Claybows hunger pangs. He mentioned something about a Mexican place he was reading about and I like Mexican food. My wife Alexis who is from Texas could eat it for breakfast but I could kind of burr out on it after a while so I told him to look for something a little more north of the border. About that time he said there's a barbecue and a fish place right up the road according to Google. Ah, fish. I know it's going to be catfish and I could eat fish every day. And if they've got barbecue my kind of barbecue then it went on instead of moved prior to its arrival to the restaurant. As we got closer I could see the sign and the vehicles in the parking lot. About as many cars as trucks and a couple of big rigs that were parked there too. Now there's our clues about the food right here. Right out in the bald open. Truckers can sniff out a place to eat but you can't always go by where you see their trucks. Sometimes they have to eat where they can get the trucks parked off the road so it could be a place of convenient parking more so than the quality of the food. Also you got to figure in the time of day. If it's in the early afternoon between dinner and supper you know the noon and the evening meal and the parking is at a premium and resembles a slow day at the used car lot you're probably in for some good vitals. On the other hand if it's getting close to the time when people normally eat and parking lot is empty well that's a sign that they're either closed or they should be. Now most kids would eat chicken out of a mailbox. Don't matter where you are or what you're doing it could be the finest Italian Chinese or famous steakhouse restaurant or any food specific oriented place and they'll holler I want some chicken strips. And I have to admit I like them too but you need to be careful about the food you order from places not necessarily themed in that direction. Trout almondine which I love from a nice place in Little Rock that Alexis not go to on occasion is not something I order if I sold on the menu or at a cafe or a diner where you can see in the kitchen and the waitress calls you honey. They might be fine but a safer bet is the chicken fried steak. That's my default and any place I'm unfamiliar with and don't receive any vibes from the menu or plates of those eating around me. It's hard to screw up a chicken fried steak. They can be done but come on it ain't that hard to fix it decent when I was scrolling through Instagram the other day and saw old chef Kevin Gillespie sharing his grandma's family recipe for a chicken fried steak that had me hankering for one the one that he was cooking before the video ended. I'll tell you one thing for sure the one he was cooking would have been a safe bet anywhere and anytime which brings me back to picking out a place to eat and order food from a place you really don't feel as soon as you be serving it. Would I eat spaghetti from Baskin Robbins? No. What about fried rabbit from an army mess hall? Yes. Would I regret it? Definitely. In September of 1987 I found myself in the company of several hundred other freshly peeled headed America loving volunteer army recruits in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. If you've never been there you should go. It's quite an anomaly. The wind blows in every direction it wants all the time and everywhere you need to march or run to next is always uphill and all the folks you see are mad and hollering at you for you to hurry up. Now that post was built back in 1869 and has been occupied by the United States Army ever since. It was a stepping off point for a lot of Western expansion back in the day when the government's idea of getting into the real business was showing up at someone's door with a cannon and asking them if they'd ever thought about selling out and moving away. It's also the barrel place of Geronimo and we used to run past his grave every morning during PT. It was the only section of Geron where we were silent when we passed out of respect. We were training to be warriors and our drill sergeant's demanded we honor a real one. Unfortunately that same level of respect was not shown to whoever was in charge of buying meat for the mess sergeant to cook for his troops. More on that in a minute. It was Friday evening that we were standing in formation outside the mess hall about a month in the basic training. Every breakfast that time was as good as you could get in any cafe. Eggs to order, grits, pancakes, sausage, bacon, toast, biscuits, gravy, SOS. Don't know what SOS is? Ask your grandpa when you're grandma when you're listening. He'll tell you. But I enjoyed breakfast. It's still my favorite meal of the day and we'll have it for some time now. But back at Fort Sill, once you got to the next two meals of the day, it was a crapshoot as to what the menu held especially for a country boy from Arkansas. Lots of hamburgers, spaghetti, baked pork chops, ham, things like that that were edible but they just tasted bland to me. I also realized that they were feeding them off the two troops and only keeping us healthy enough to brutalize on a daily basis. That was the real reason they were letting us eat anyway. They didn't fix food like I had grown up eating. Like that cornbread I was eating every day that was so sweet, I thought it was cake. I remember a buddy of mine from Boston said, Boy, you country boys, you really like that cornbread, huh? You eat it like dessert every day. I'm sure that name really like you. How he talks but that's what I remember it. But anyway, I answered, man, I ain't had no cornbread since I left home. I've been seeing it posted on the menu just about every day but by the time we get here, all that got left is this cake. As disappointed as I was in the Army's version of cornbread, I don't know why I was so excited to see fried rabbit posted on the mess hall menu one evening. Did I see that right? Fried rabbit. Oh Lord, y'all, please don't wake me up. Let me finish this beautiful dream I'm having about eating a mess of fried cotton tails. It was October and rabbit season back home and I love fried cotton tail rabbit. And though I was only away in a neighboring state, I might as well bet on the moon when it come time to eat and suffer every day. Nothing was the same and yet there it was right there on the menu, fried rabbit. I was about to be rudely awakened from that dream. By the time it took to move the 40 or so troops in front of me out of the way so I could get some groceries, I was about to have a few. I could smell the familiar aroma of fried food about a minute before I got the first glimpse of what the army called fried rabbit. There was a huge pile of them there behind the glass and they all looked like hind legs. The hind legs off a shell and pony. I never seen such a sight and I couldn't imagine how big the rabbit was they'd cut them legs off of them. My immediate thought is I wish they'd left the foot on there so I'd know exactly what critter that running gear had come from that I was about to eat. But they said it was rabbit and I was excited to eat it. The mess hall PFC looked up at me and said one or two. No, wait a minute. They only have two of them. I mean, I answer two private and he dropped two of them magnet rabbit hams on my tray, blowing mashed taters and English peas off into the floor and on me like that rabbit's last act of defiance before getting there was giving the boys on KP something to mop up after we left. Then rabbit legs took up so much space on my tray that I had to tow up my cornbread cake in the cargo pocket of my beady use. There's rules for everything in basic training, everything. Your drill sergeant is there to encourage you to follow them. He's there to tell you when to eat, how long you can eat, when to stop eating and when to get up and get out of the mess also you can run uphill some more. He's also there to make sure you clean your plate of all the food the army prepared for you, every bite. They'll feed you a lot, but you better eat it or there would be repercussions. That had slipped my mind when the opportunity of getting two rabbit legs came about. Two's better than one right? Well, that's what I thought. Now, when our drill sergeant finally said we had five minutes to eat, I grabbed that first humongous rabbit leg, did a bicep curl to get it up to my mouth and took a bite. The amount of grease that ran out of the corners of my mouth was enough to have had a small fish fry. It was terrible. It was tough as woodpecker lips, chewed like a tennis ball and I had two of them to eat. That was 36 years ago and I ain't had a bite of fried rabbit scents, not even a nibble. Michael Roseman has some good rabbit dogs and I love hunting them so I think I'll try them again this winter and I'll let y'all know how that goes. Growing up in the south and I can only guess it's the same way in most points of the compass, but here folks look for an occasion to gather and eat. Someone died. Someone had a baby. Somebody got married. Somebody had an anniversary. Somebody got parole. Whatever. It's all cooked, eat, fellowship and enjoy everyone's company. That's why the food being so good is important. You out there on a long trip, it'll help those long ones seem a little shorter. It'll add joy to the good times and comfort to the hard ones. But let the food be bad and woe is me. It'll only compound the pain. I'll give you a prime example of bad food making a bad situation worse. Many moons ago and before I had the sense equal to what God gave a goose and before I corrected myself, initiated salt upon my liver and senses, I stumbled home in the early morning darkness on a Sunday morning after making a long night of bad decisions. I'd made so many bad decisions that night that one would think I didn't have any left to make between momma's front door and my bedroom. But I did. I had one more left in me. And boy, it was a good one. A fellow that has restricted his diet to adult beverages for several hours will eventually get hungry. And since I was walking through the kitchen at the time, I realized I hadn't eaten anything all day. What better place to stop and fix myself a snack. There were no leftovers in the icebox, so I looked up in the freezer and I found a bag of frozen, breaded chicken strips. They looked fantastic on the picture on the bag. Why not throw a handful of these rascals in the microwave and have myself a snack before hitting the hay. Remember what I said about kids eating chicken out of a mailbox? Well, folks that pour a thief in their mouth all night to steal their brains will eat warmed up raw chicken strips from their microwave and get salmonella poison. I'll spare you any more details about what happened a few hours later that continued for a couple of days. But if you're curious as to whether I lived through that literal biblical flood of sickness, I can't tell you. Because I'm still not sure. I told my dad about that years later and he told me that that wasn't uncommon for young men to lose their sense of good judgment and a higher weakness and that it had happened to him as well. He said he'd remember drinking moonshine all night in his youth and he'd eaten one peanut. Next day he woke up, he felt so bad he swore he'd never eaten that again. So let's bring this home. Where are we going to eat when we're out on the road? You can easily find all the franchise places that we're all familiar with but I like to look for the places where the folks that are cooking are dependent on feeding enough people to pay their light bills and make their car payments. These folks are taking pride in what they're preparing and hoping you'll like it as well. They want you to like it well enough to come back. Places like Cheryl's Diner, Cabot Arkansas, where you can eat a platter of groceries called a gobbly goop. It's every breakfast item you can think of except pancakes piled on two cat head biscuits and covered in gravy. I can hear my left ventricle slamming shut just thinking about it. Mmm boy it's good. How about Big Zach's place in Logan's port Louisiana for fish, steaks and crawfish or some vittles from Stanley's famous pit barbecue in Tyler, Texas? I've even got it on good authority that Spanky's Diner and New Foundland PA makes the world's greatest cream chip beef over toast breakfast. Any Pennsylvania or any other human being would be fortunate enough to poke fork in. There's goodness and support in our neighbors and I'm not saying the folks that are slinging fries and burgers out of the drive through or running the franchises in our neighbors because our neighbors are working there. I'm saying let's not forget about the places off the beaten path. I like to look for them first. Make sure that late night chickens cooked thoroughly and if you ever find yourself in Lebanon, Missouri and have a hankin' for some catfish, now it's catfish house that barbed you about a half mile off of Interstate 44 is a safe bet. You can tell them being old clay bowls since you. This is Brent Reeve signing off. Y'all be careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful. You're going to be a little bit more careful.