What is Darryl's, you ask?  WHAT IS DARRYL'S?  You don't know? Seriously? ..

Who knew Googling "tipsy cake" would yield hundreds of pictures and thousands of recipes? Certainly not me until I recently did it. If you add "trifle" to the search - and after all, a tipsy cake is the Southern cousin of an English trifle - you'll have even more hits, but none remotely similar to my grandmother's Tipsy Cake (capital letters de rigueure for this perennial family favorite). Her recipe was an original - and perhaps a regional favorite although I wouldn't know for certain because I've never had Tipsy Cake any other way and I've never lived anywhere else.  ..

A dinner cruise - with delightful company and spectacular views of the water around us and above, an enormous, full rising moon - should have been enough. The night was still young when we arrived back at the dock, and Susan and I hadn't eaten much dinner and were still a little hungry. So instead of calling it a night and walking back to the hotel, we walked in the opposite direction to explore and find a good restaurant to have a glass of wine and an appetizer or two to finish off a perfect evening. Little did we know we'd find a rose among a lot of thorns.  ..

Do I like eating by myself? No - but am I going to miss a great meal because I'm by myself? Definitely not (stop that snickering in the back row). This weekend Susan had to work and by Thursday was forced to cancel our weekend at the beach...well....HER weekend at the beach....but I wasn't going to miss mine.  ..

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Today's post will be like a book for toddlers....lots of pictures and not many words. Maybe-but you know me...maybe not (probably not). I'm too tired to even try to be funny but not before one quickie. I learned something I should have know a long time ago - size does matter. Small cuts of watermelon rind ended up being mushy after they were cooked and I was the designated fisherman to get them out of the pot o' pickles before they were placed and sealed into jars. Anyway, as you can see above, we finally finished the job and the watermelon rind pickles look exactly like they're supposed to but they were so damn much trouble to make, I'm not sure they'll ever taste as good as the ones Mother made. A jar is in the frig, tomorrow we taste test them and I'm a little scared. We've tasted the hot pickles and they were good but I always eat them cold so that will be the final test. When I started unpacking the jars first thing this morning, all I could think about is what I used to say to my parents when we were on long road trips, "How much longer"? What I know now is that as I was unpacking these jars we still had a long, long way to go. Where ever there was, we weren't even close.  ..

In the 1960's and 70's my mother and her best friend Anne Brunson would make watermelon pickles. It was a several day labor intensive process but the end result was worth it. Our family never had a Thanksgiving or Christmas without Watermelon Pickles (yes, capitalized...these pickles are that important) accompanying the meal. And everyone in our family loved them and we all still do. In the late 70s they stopped making the pickles because watermelon rinds became thinner, which was the one thing in the world my mother didn't want to get thinner. Doesn't it always work out that way? Evidently, thinner rinds are what people want for the watermelon fruit but of course those didn't make great pickles. They stopped making homemade Watermelon Pickle and we started buying them at Deans Farm and the hardware store. Those are OK...actually, they're very good....but we longed for the homemade pickles that our mother and Anne made from their old recipe.  ..

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