A Restaurant Love Affair.

Ah, Stoby’s. I’ve had a 19 year love affair with the place, not for its eponymous cheese dip but for its breakfasts, corned beef and pies.

See, people know the name Stoby’s because of cheese dip… in-state they see it in stores (I recall the hubbub when it went into stores some time back) and out-of-state because of Kris Allen, the American Idol guy who’s the lucky goose for getting that lifetime supply of Stoby’s cheese dip. Stoby’s yellow dip just won second place at the World Cheese Dip Championships. It’s that good.

And I like the dip -- more concisely I like the yellow dip, the white dip’s okay but I can’t get my head around it being Stoby’s dip. But that's not all there is to the restaurant. In fact, there's a lot more than just the Stoby sandwich, too. There's a whole lot of food on the menu.

My favorite meal at Stoby's is breakfast. Now, usually I go for The Northerner ($6.49), corned beef hash and two eggs with a biscuit and hash browns. I ate it when I went to school at Arkansas Tech in the early 90s, I ate it when Stoby's opened up briefly while I was living in Jonesboro. And I still eat it sometimes when I can make my way up to Russellville in the morning hours.

But there are other good breakfasts, paired with fabulous biscuits, moist and a little cakey, soft and hot. I could already sing the praises of Stoby's housemade strawberry jam, which comes served up in a squirt bottle for easy application along with a bottle of squirt Parkay. The biscuits are just salty enough to make your mouth water; the jam reminiscent of homemade strawberry compote for shortcakes, that bright red that almost doesn't seem natural.

I like the Ole' Omelette ($5.80). How could you go wrong with Stoby's chili, cheese and such. The chili and the cheese do fine together with the egg, in a stick-to-your-ribs sort of way. Paired up with a hearty bowl of grits, and you have a meal that won't leave you craving lunch. And if you beg really hard, they’ll bring you some cheese dip with it.

There’s lunch at Stoby’s which often includes the Stoby ($5.65) -- three meats and two cheeses of your choice on the bread of your choice. The Stoby can be just about anything -- ham, turkey, summer sausage, salami or bologna in any combination; American, Swiss, Provolone, Mozzarella, Pepper Jack or Monterrey Jack cheeses; sourdough, rye, wheat bread, pita, bun or croissant for the bread. Because of this it’s really hard to photograph the perfect Stoby.

They do a mean Reuben ($6.55) with sliced corned beef on fresh baked rye bread with the thousand island dressing and kraut. It can be offered with mustard instead.

I dig the Hickory Burger ($6.85), which comes with Stoby’s own hickory barbecue sauce and Cheddar cheese and a couple of strips of bacon. I usually get the bacon on the side and let my dining companion du jour have it. Something about that sauce and burger meat just goes together so well.

Paul usually goes for the same thing, every single time -- the Stoby’s Nachos, ($5.95) with chili and Cheddar cheese and pico and lettuce and jalapenos served up on those thick yellow chips.

I’ve had both variations now -- you can also have Chicken Fajita Nachos ($6.95) that come with sautéed chicken, bell peppers, onions and tomatoes and the spicy white cheese dip on those chips. They’re both pretty good.

But Paul's also been known to go for a burger, and if he does the burger he gets the super-hot Jamaican Jerk Cheeseburger ($6.85) with its hot Jamaican Jerk sauce. You can almost see the steam rising from his ears when he eats it.


There are the pastries, too -- especially the Colossal cinnamon rolls ($1.85) for breakfast. They‘re not always available -- if there‘s a rush on them early in the morning you‘re going to miss out. They‘re fresh baked confections of rolled dough and cinnamon, topped with a gooey frosting and pecans. And they are to die for.

Of course, Stoby’s isn’t just Stoby’s any more. It’s also PattiCakes Bakery -- both the Conway and Russellville locations have PattiCakes sitting across the parking lot. It’s named after Patti, David Stobaugh’s wife -- that’s the owner of Stoby’s, in case you weren’t aware. And their fudge is to die for. I’m a huge fan of pistachio nut. They also do doughnuts -- and the Red Velvet cake doughnuts? Aw, man. PattiCakes does those baked goods for Stoby’s like the buttery huge croissants. Right there. That’s it.

You know, I still prefer the Russellville location, even though I’m closer to the Conway store living in Little Rock. It’s that whole college-age nostalgia going on there. I like getting a booth and watching the trains pass overhead. So does my daughter.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Possum Pie. PattiCakes provides a lot of desserts to the stores, including a nice selection of cakes and several pies. Possum Pie is my favorite -- with its layers of chocolate, sour cream/cream cheese and whipped cream. It's tart and chocolate all in one, my favorite.

You'll find the Russellville Stoby's on Parkway (wow, seems weird not to call it "D Street") a block west of Arkansas. In Conway, it's on Donaghey north of UCA. Oh, heck, just go look at the website.

Breakfast Trek: I-40 Westward.

When I accepted the project from the Arkansas Times to create an article on the best breakfasts in Arkansas, I knew I’d have some old favorites to chip in. But I wanted to do something far more comprehensive. I wasn’t about to sit there in Central Arkansas and blow smoke about the places I’d been. I challenged myself to seek out just about every good breakfast place in the state.

Thing is, I was on a deadline, a self-imposed deadline of September 10th. I wanted to get everything in before I went out of state for an assignment -- and frankly, I had no idea when the Times would use my cover story. I was in Door County, WI (where I ate what Good Morning America has dubbed the Best Breakfast in America at the White Gull Inn -- pictured to the right) when I got the project and I knew I’d be out of state for work in Memphis and Western Tennessee in the middle of it all. I also knew there would be mornings I would not be able to get up and go out… mornings where my daughter was going to sleep in or my husband wouldn’t be available to hang with her so I could go get what I needed.

And frankly, there were going to be long distance morning, too. Little Rock is very close to the geographic center of Arkansas but that still means a four hour drive to places like Bentonville or three hours to Lake Village. I started planning out trips -- some overnight that included several outlying restaurants, some close in where I could just go get the review and come home and write it up.

And then there were the multiple breakfast mornings. Those were the mornings where I tackled breakfast time and time again. It was the most effective way for me to get out and get what I needed to get done, done. It meant I had to do major pacing; I’d come home with a stack of take-out boxes in the passenger seat and a memory of yet another amazing Arkansas sunrise in my head. Even with my careful pacing, I was unable to keep all the pounds off. I gained about 20 pounds in my sampling of roughly 75 Arkansas restaurants between July and September of this year. Still trying to work them off.

So what was it like? I figured the best way to share this was to give you a narrative of what I went through. Here’s just one day of many I experienced.
***

Friday, September 3rd, 2010. I was up before the dawn, leaving out around six from Little Rock on my way westward. I had assignments that weekend to tackle in Fayetteville, Springdale and Rogers (you’ll hear more about these along the way) and had decided it was a prime opportunity to check out four of the breakfast restaurants recommended to me by readers of the Times and of Tie Dye Travels.

I was taken by the beauty of the morning and stopped briefly in Mayflower, where I captured shots of the sun starting to reach into the sky over Lake Conway. Photos can’t quite capture what I saw that morning, but I stood out on the shore and attempted this anyway.

Back in the car and up to Conway, where I pulled up to Bob’s Grill on Oak Street about 6:45. I initially went to the cafeteria line where one of the ladies behind the counter told me breakfast service was at the table. I found one of the backless booths along the entry line and had a seat.

I recall there being a breakfast buffet the last time I’d had the opportunity to stop in, but since that was the Friday morning of Toad Suck Daze back in 2007 I couldn’t tell you whether that had been normal or not. That was all right. I looked over the tri-folded paper menu and found the Double Hashbrown Plate With All Veggies ($3.99). Sounded like a good start. I also ordered a small orange juice, which was strangely restorative. I was still in the process of waking up.

The décor in Bob’s Grill is pretty simple -- green tablecloths, local wildlife paintings on the wall up for sale. At seven in the morning there were three groups of half-a-dozen people each, mostly guys. There was no music playing, just the steady hum of conversation and the clink of utensils against ceramic plates and spoons stirring coffee in mugs, all over the sizzle of the griddle and the sigh of the Vent-A-Hood in the back.

I could tell the regulars. The waitresses would bring them their coffee or cola without any sort of introduction, plopping beverages down and pulling out their order books.

Maybe it was the orange juice soaking into my system or the increased light coming through the windows, but the inside of the restaurant was gaining color by the moment.

In the next booth closer to the door a middle-aged woman had a seat. The waitress came right over to her and sat a mug on the table.

“Good morning, Ms. Connie,” she greeted the woman. “The usual?”

The cheery woman smiled and nodded. Others across the room called over their greetings, and she waved to each of them before settling into her crossword puzzle.

I’d been looking through the condiments on the table and heard “did you find the jelly you wanted?” beside me. I looked up to see my smiling waitress grinning at me. She slid a platter and a squeeze bottle of salsa in front of me.

“I think so. You have a good selection.”

She smiled down at me again, slid my ticket under the corner of my plate and moved on. I looked at this marvelous pile of vegetation in front of me and sighed. The shreds of hash brown were almost occluded by the pile of sautéed peppers, onions and tomatoes that were themselves coated in melted shredded cheese. The four wedges of buttered white bread toast perched on the plate. Well, time for work.

I sampled the potatoes. They were buttery and spiced well with black pepper and salt, tucked in under the complement of vegetables above. It was a very good combination, and I could have eaten my weight in it. The salsa was a nice touch, but completely unnecessary. I could take or leave it.

I had another slow bite, watching the other patrons. My waitress sauntered by, carrying a 10 inch plate that had a short stack of pancakes hanging off of it, a container of melted butter and warm syrup in her other hand. She dropped off her load at one of the group tables to murmurs of appreciation.

The other waitress came by with mugs and a pot of coffee she delivered to a booth up from mine, only to return shaking her head. “No on the coffee, they want cokes today,” she told my waitress, shaking her head.

My waitress came back by and I asked her for a take-out box. She looked down at my plate. “You eat like a bird!” she proclaimed.

“I wish that were the case,” I conceded, but she was already gone to the kitchen for my veggie-potato receptacle. I drank the rest of my orange juice and paid at the register before heading out -- $5.50 for my breakfast and a dollar on the table.

***

My next stop wasn’t far off. I wanted to check out Something Brewing, the little coffee shop over on Front Street. I’d had their lunch before -- they do a really good Reuben -- and I’ve tried their syrup-flavored teas, even had a latte there before. Seemed like a no-brainer to get there and have breakfast.

The restaurant was quiet when I got there at 7:30, no one visible from the outside. Inside at the counter one guy waited, taking an order on the phone before turning to me.

I gazed longingly into the pastry case and made myself settle on a single item -- the blueberry scone ($1.75). Paired up with a traditional mocha ($2.99), I figured I could buy myself a little stomach space and get a good waking up at the same time.

The inside of the restaurant was quiet, but outside the weather was perfect, as cool as it had been on any morning since the start of summer. I found myself a spot on the deck out front and watched traffic go by.

After my usual round of photos, I had a good sip of the mocha, more chocolate-y than most and a welcome wake-up. I turned to the scone, the perfect sort of biscuit-crumbly. I think a lot of places forget that about scones -- they’re just Scottish biscuits and they should have a flakiness to them that overrides any hardness of the crust. They should be slightly moist, too.

This one was, except it had notes of texture of a good sugar cookie to it, too. It was pleasant, and I could tell how the dried blueberries had soaked up some of the butter in the batter. The butter flavor was in every bite; I didn’t feel like acquiring more butter to smother it in.

School buses were passing by, heading out to run the first of their routes for the day. I found myself relaxing, almost forgetting my morning’s mission. But the road was calling again, and I knew I only had a few more hours to sample anything else and a lot of miles to get under my tires.

***

See, that’s the thing about breakfast. With the exception of a few 24/7 diners and the occasional “breakfast anytime” local joint, the breakfast window is short. It opens when the first of the breakfast restaurants open (for Bob’s Grill that was around 5am) and closes when they stop serving breakfast. The average for Arkansas is 10:30 a.m., though some stop as early as 9 a.m. (65th Street Diner actually closes its doors and turns off the lights at that ime) and some as late ast 2 p.m. (Fayetteville’s Common Grounds). I had a recommendation in Clarksville to check up on. It was 7:46 a.m. To be safe, I needed to sit down for breakfast in Clarksville by ten. I was over an hour away.

So… Atkins. I had heard of a little place north of the interstate to check out, and it looked like I had time. So back on the road I went.

I fielded phone calls and watched the scenery go by -- Menifee, Plumerville, Morrilton, Blackwell. Heading west after the slow turn a mile north of Blackwell, I could see the ridge of the mountain that hovered over Atkins, hazy and bluish green under the light blue sky, the twin ribbons of interstate ahead, the tanning crops of summer’s end spread out on either side of the roadbed.

I took the exit and started looking for the place. There was a small restaurant behind the gas stations just off the road, but there was no sign of life out front. There was a sign on the door that mentioned it would be closed for Labor Day weekend. Their loss.

It was 8:20 and I had plenty of time to make it to Clarksville. I could get back on the road and stop at Fleet Diner in Pottsville or I could drive into Atkins’ small downtown and see what I could find there. The latter sounded more interesting.

I crossed Highway 64 and the railroad tracks before turning to the left and looking at all the storefronts. I noticed several cars in front of a storefront on 64 and figured if there were breakfast available it’d be there.

I was right -- and surprised, too. I’d never heard of the Atkins International Café. I lived in Russellville in the early 90s and went to and through Atkins quite a lot -- and since then had traveled through many times heading back and forth to visit my father-in-law. This place had never hit my radar.

I had a seat at a table along the west wall. There were others there, a three-top to my right, one guy at the lunch counter. The interior was very warm and eclectic -- a large painting over my shoulder, exposed brick walls, mismatched dining sets, tin stripped ceiling and a piano in the back. It was now 8:30 a.m. and though I had eaten just a quarter of Bob’s Grill’s hash browns and a third of the scone at Something Brewing I was already feeling full.

The menu seemed pretty typical for breakfast -- eggs, French toast, pancakes. I dithered over the idea of the Corned Beef and Swiss omelet but after seeing the strong Mexican influence throughout the rest of the menu I went for the Huevos Rancheros ($5.95) with iced tea. The tea was delivered with a chunk of fresh lime, a variation I appreciated (I like lime but not lemon in my iced tea and rarely use either).

The people at the three-top to my right had come in when I had but they’d called their orders in, so their platters were delivered before mine. I saw these three big platters come out and wondered if the diminutive woman at the table was going to be able to finish hers -- or whether I should expect something similarly large.

I felt something slid onto the table. A man was standing next to me, smiling down. “You from around here?”

I noticed he’d slid a menu onto the table. “My father-in-law’s in Dardanelle, so we come down here some.”

“Take this with you. You might want to come back,” he told me, smiled again and went back to the kitchen. I realized he saw me photographing the menu. Busted.

My waitress was there moments later with the plate. I was immediately struck by the bright reddish orange salsa -- so orange, in fact, there was no way it’d come from a jar. It was housemade, somewhat astringent and packed with onions and bell peppers. It was the consistency of a very chunky spaghetti sauce and similar in color, but the flavor was Spanish with hints of cilantro.

The salsa had been poured over the two eggs, which were over easy and which ran like crazy when poked with a fork. They’d been separated from the fluffy yellow rice and the beans with a tortilla. The rice was typical, but the beans were wet and somehow they were irresistible. I stopped myself a few spoonfuls in, realizing just how full the beans would make me, silently griping at myself because they were beautifully seasoned.

I needed to try the full experience, so I pulled one of the very hot tortillas out of an aluminum foil pocket and placed a bit of every ingredient inside. This was perfect, hearty and almost too much to bear. I needed to hit that Clarksville restaurant. I knew I did. So I called for another take-out box and packed my breakfast to go.

Another dollar on the table, $7.74 at the register and a knowing grin from the guy who’d brought me the menu. He knew I wasn’t just another passer-by. He had no idea I was on a breakfast quest.

***

Fleet Diner didn’t appear to be open when I pulled through Pottsville on Highway 64. I briefly stopped, updated my Facebook page with the week daily lunch suggestion and checked my email, then rolled back onto I-40 to head on up.

I stopped in Russellville and gassed up the van. I wasn’t worried about Russellville -- I’d already found three great breakfasts there (one of which, Paradise Donuts, sadly closed this past month due to non-payment of sales taxes). Up through London and Lamar, and I saw Clarksville in my sights.

I took a right at the end of the ramp, headed back to Highway 64 and turned right again. I went down quite a ways, not seeing anything except a taquaria and wondering if this place existed. Right on the edge of town, I saw it and pulled in. It was 9:45 a.m. and I was hoping breakfast was still the menu of choice.

This was Momma’s Kitchen, a neat little white building packed with little booths and tables and a counter all in one room, shades of beige and wood paneling striped with the sunlight coming through the blinds.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful as to see the words “small plates” on a breakfast menu. I was already starting to hurt just a bit from all the food and the idea of eating anything large was just not comprehensible to me.

I went for the very simple, ordering one egg, grits and a pancake for $3.29. As I blearily realized I needed another eye-opener, I caught a sign a-glance. It read “In order to be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid.” Oh, how true. That little sign by the register should have been a warning for me. Four breakfasts in the course of three hours was probably too much, even at the limitations I’d put on consuming those breakfasts on myself. The clock over the register said 9:50. There would be no more breakfast acquisitions this particular morning. I checked my phone for messages and realized it was once again attempting to go dead on me. Stupid phone (I replaced it the next week -- it was a refurbished model that was pretty faulty).
I tried to focus on what was happening across the restaurant on the grill. The girl working the grill managed an expert flip of a pancake; I found myself hoping that wasn’t mine -- it was very large and I figured I’d be unable to conquer it.

I was listening kinda off-hand to the conversations around me, not really consuming the words but feeling the patter around me. That is, until the plates were slid in front of me. I took out the camera and started to shoot, not thinking about any sort of conversation.

“So who do you write for?” my waitress asked me. I realized she’d sat down at the booth next to mine and was watching me. So were the other four people in the booth. Busted again.

I told her I wrote a blog and shared all the things I ate on it, and this seemed to satisfy her. I hoped my exhaustion wasn’t showing. I also hoped my stomach was going to accept this meager offering.

I had nothing to worry about. Perhaps I was misjudging myself, I don’t know, but one bite of that crispy-edged pancake and I realized I was really hungry. I’d been teasing my belly all along, just taking a few bites here and there and then hitting the road. I’d already spent more than $20 on breakfasts that morning and hadn’t really eaten one. Weird.

The pancake was white and fluffy but not very thick, somehow achieving a crispiness all along its edge. The over-hard egg and grits were okay, but it was the pancake I found at the end of my fork over and over again. I finished it off unabashedly. It was very tasty and I was glad I’d finally found some place in Clarksville to stop at that wasn’t some chain operation.

As I sat there gathering the last bit of strength I’d need to make it to Fort Smith to meet my photographer for our next shoot, I doodled away on my notepad. I wrote the words “Eat Arkansas for Breakfast - Kat Robinson spends a summer rising early and traveling far to discover Arkansas’ best 50 breakfasts.” I counted out on my fingers every place I could remember. The breakfast I’d just consumed was number 57. I was going to have to do some culling -- and I hadn’t even hit northwest Arkansas yet. Dear heavens.

***

That was four. Over the course of that weekend I ended up eating breakfast 12 times -- and barbecue twice. This job has its hazards, that’s for darn sure.

The Best Little Visitors Center in Arkansas.

Face it, our state has plenty to be proud about -- and a lot of things that people of polite company would never find proud-worthy. The City of Fort Smith has taken something that many wouldn’t even want to touch in their history and made it into something memorable.

That would be Miss Laura’s -- a house of ill repute from the turn of the 20th Century. It had been built in 1896 as a hotel. In 1903 Laura Ziegler got a $3000 loan, bought the property and opened her bordello along the Arkansas River. Yes, it was allowed-- in fact, there were a row of six similar institutions all perched there on the west side of town. You get away with a lot more with a border state.

Ms. Laura took care of her girls. They couldn’t come downstairs without being fully dressed and they all received medical care. They cost more, too -- $3 a pop instead of the dollar the other bordellos charged.

By 1910 there was an active movement to shut down the red light district, and that year an oil tank explosion took out two of the row houses and damaged the others.

Ms. Laura sold her bordello the next year to Bertha Gale Dean. “Big Bertha” continued to operate under Miss Laura‘s name into the 1940s, when soldiers from Fort Chaffee heading to World War II would stop by the social club. It had deteriorated into a bit of a slum by that point, and after Big Bertha’s death in 1948 it closed. She left it to a man by the name of Jay Bartholomay.

Eventually it was left abandoned, and it remained such for years, until Donrey Media Group founder Donald Reynolds purchased the property to keep it from being demolished in 1963. In 1973 it became the first bordello to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places and in 1983 remodeling began. The next year Miss Laura’s Social Club and Restaurant opened. That didn’t last long, and eventually the building was donated to the city of Fort Smith, which turned around and made it into its visitors center in 1992.

You’d think the place had been through enough -- but in April 1996 a tornado came through and swept the roof clear off. The city got right back to remodeling the place again and today it’s still open.

What will you find when you go there? Well, several of the rooms have been returned to how they would have appeared in 1903: complicated, heavily patterned wallpapers; velvet chaise lounges; bathrooms fully decked out as they would have been when the ladies worked there; bathtubs and boudoirs; restored stained glass displays right next to the originals and so close you can’t really tell a difference.

You’ll find a staff of dedicated workers who can tell you all sorts of tales about the place and show you upstairs. There are fantastic outfits both original and restored on display, and even a bathtub in the middle of the common area upstairs. Best of all, it’s a free stop, and a good jumpin’ off point -- the folks that work there know all the best restaurants in town and can tell you where to find all the neat attractions.

If you plan to be in the area, drop on by -- it’s off US 64 in downtown Fort Smith, just before the river bridge. It’s open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day except Sunday, when it’s open 1-4:30 p.m. For more information, check out the website or call (800) 637-1477.

Scenic Seven Survives VI: Breakfast in Jasper.

Writer Kat Robinson and photographer Grav Weldon head into the hills in search of what’s brought a stretch of Scenic Highway Seven back to life.

An abridged version of this article appears in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of Arkansas Wild. Click through for a downloadable copy.

After the night at The Hub and Grav’s descent into Dogpatch USA the following morning, we found ourselves staring at 10am hungry and ready to get back to work. I had a tip to follow up on and needed to go find breakfast back at the Ozark Café.

The crowd was just as hearty at ten in the morning as it was in the just-after-noontime hour. The same booth we’d occupied the day before was waiting for us.

I’d already decided on my breakfast before we’d headed up the highway. I was going to tackle the Ozark French Toast ($5.49), reported to me by Jasper-returning readers as the thing to get for breakfast in town. Grav wasn’t so certain. All he knew was that after the hike down into, around, and back up the hill from Dogpatch was that he needed hydration in a bad way.

“Ma’am, I’ll drink as many Mountain Dews as you can bring,” he told the waitress when she came to take our drink orders. I asked for my usual unsweetened iced tea and she disappeared, grinning. We looked over the newspaper-borne menus and salivated a bit.

I knew we had a good one when she plopped a whole pitcher of Mountain Dew down in front of Grav with a straw in it. That was worth an extra dollar’s tip for certain.

We hemmed and hawed over what Grav was going to try. Our conversation that morning on the way down from Marble Falls had been all about breakfasts in Arkansas and what constituted a true Arkansas breakfast -- and chocolate gravy had come up. Now, I have to admit that I didn’t have my first serving of chocolate gravy until I was an adult -- and even then it was in Missouri, not in Arkansas. But readers had been naming chocolate gravy as something purely Arkansawyer. Seeing it on the menu ($4.49) just sparked our curiosity more, and Grav (who’d never had it) decided it was a good day for experimentation.

Our food didn’t take long to prepare, and I think he was a bit surprised when out came this big bowl of what appeared to be chocolate pudding and a couple of biscuits. The biscuits themselves were flaky on the inside but had a nice strongly buttery sheen about them, almost a coating of it, as if someone had thought about frying them long and hard before deciding to thrown them in the oven instead.

And that chocolate gravy? Well, it was chocolate pudding, and then again it wasn’t. There was something to the consistency that reminded us both of Jello-brand, but there was also a flavor of flour and butter-rue and salt to it. And it wasn’t half bad. In fact, for what it was, it was quite tasty. It’d take us three more months and dozens more breakfasts before both of us could safely conclude that we weren’t fans of chocolate gravy -- but that we could both tolerate it.

But I was going to tell you about this Ozark French Toast. It was… good. It was four slices of Texas toast that had been lightly battered, skillet-fried in butter and drizzled with caramel and powdered sugar. It was served with a side of Log Cabin maple-flavored corn syrup, but we couldn’t divine why -- the simple little dish was just perfect, custardy and sweet and didn’t need a thing. Buttery.

I wouldn’t realize until a few weeks later when I was looking at the photos that there wasn’t a single damn pecan on the whole thing… and it had been advertised as being covered with them. Well, I guess it’s all right. But if you go back, go demand some pecans. You deserve them.

***

Following our morning repast, we went back on the square to look around and do some shooting and visiting. One of our first stops was in the Chamber of Commerce shop. Jasper’s the only place I know of that has an entirely volunteer CoC, and it’s funded with the proceeds from the consignment shop slash visitors center on the square.

From there we went to Emma’s Museum of Junk, a block off the main square and so odd it always attracts eyes. Grav having never been before, I shooed him into the oddness.

Emma’s is something truly Ozarkian. You can get something or anything inside. We saw all sorts of weirdness -- painted eggs, fishing lures, incense, decorative plates,
baskets of piles of old match books, cookie cutters, random keys,
old bug spray canisters (“Gulfspray Kills!” one cheerily announced),
mouse traps, cast iron coffee mug trees,
rusty vegetable peelers, fossil shark teeth, brass bells, hand-thrown pottery, glass bottles, quilts, cabinetry, stone and shell beads, glass ornaments, antique lamps, Coca-Cola glasses, military gear, Boy Scout mess kits, birdhouses, stained glass window hangings, faux jade Chinese dangly things, painted toilet seats, rusty bicycles, old paint cans, porcelain dolls, hairpins, old and new Mason jars, unusual wire sculptures, bedpans, electric kettles, old sewing machines, stepstools, ashtrays, marble figurines, old baseballs, comic books, Funk and Wagnall’s, bird nests, marbles… the cacophony of strange sights inside was worth the trip alone.

After wandering a bit more and discovering the still functioning but ancient city jail and an old abandoned movie theater, we took off for higher elevations once more, still searching out those almost fabled riders that were alleged to have brought back this little burg in the hills. We headed south.