Giggles at work
Posts tagged Florida
Florida nostalgia: Mermaids of Weeki Wachee
The training/maintenance regimen of these women athletes was and is astounding! And, this video is when the ‘mermaids’ wore masks most of the time and didn’t wear binding mermaid tails.
Recipes for the Florida gardener
I’ve become a little more regionally inclined in my recent vintage recipe book purchases and I was extremely happy to find that some of these books included recipes for materials that usually have to be grown or obtained directly from someone who grows them.
Each of the books above yielded at least one recipe that I consider more for the gardener trying to figure out what to do with their new harvest than for a cook who normally gets materials from the store.
Papaya Butter from Florida’s Favorite Foods by the Florida Department of Agriculture 
Calamondin Conserve from The Gasparilla Cookbook by the Junior League of Tampa 
Yaupon Tea from American Indian Cooking & Herb Lore by J. Ed. Sharpe and Thomas B. Underwood 
Monstera Deliciosa from Louise’s Florida Cook Book by Louise Lamme 
Surinam Cherry Jelly from Florida’s Favorite Foods by the Florida Department of Agriculture
While my calamondin tree bit the dust (I suspect greening) and my papaya is far from producing fruit, I do have a handful of established surinam cherry bushes. I am super familiar with the monstera deliciosa as a garden plant but I do not have one of those either, and I would love a yaupon holly.
However, I do have a sea grape, that I understand produces human edible fruits, and a volunteer loquat tree. I have also been following Eat the Weeds and Other Things Too, trying to figure out an offensive against some of my most pernicious garden adversaries. I will have to experiment some and see how these things can be worked into daily food.
Permanently Halloween
I was inspired by images from road-side America, and went digging through more photo collections to find more magic in Florida. I really hope that this mini-golf course still exists, though I imagine it’d be awfully faded by now.
Pascua Florida Day
I am a little calendar obsessed. And I live in Florida. Yet, I had never heard of Pascua Florida Day before this year. A spring time holiday, Pascua Florida means, roughly, feast of the flowers. It is a State of Florida celebration by statute, and as a state day it ” commemorates the sighting of Florida by Spanish explorer Ponce de León (LINK).”
Even so, it doesn’t seem like we do much with the day, which I think is a shame. I’m a little late in brainstorming this year. Thinking cap is on for 2020. What do you think would be the best way to celebrate Pascua Florida?
Happy Christmas from Florida
Florida love
When we first bought our house, I started studying the building methods of the period it was built, tracking the previous owners through publicly available city and county records, and learning about the history of the area we were planning on living in for a while to come.
I found brochures and magazines, 
information dedicated to the Florida tourist or investor. A wealth of time specific salesmanship! And, I started collecting. I buy in little bits at a time, looking for pamphlets and brochures from the time period when my house was built, or with information on population and industry.
Two recent acquisitions of mine have a couple of choice passages that I felt compelled to share with you. The first: “Tampa Hillsborough County Florida” alternately “Florida’s Newly Discovered Vacationland” on one side and “Florida’s Industrial and Commercial Center” on the other, was published jointly by the Board of Representatives, City of Tampa Board of Commissioners, and Hillsborough County Chamber of Commerce in the 1940s (pictured top left) includes a rather foreboding message to visitors: “…please advise anyone seeking employment not to come to Tampa.”
The second: “Know Florida” a 1939 facts booklet issued by the Florida State Department of Agriculture through The Tribune Press in Tallahassee is an understandably dry, but well written fact booklet with loads of information on industry and agriculture throughout all of Florida, except two paragraphs where the author takes a trip into the most florid poetics I’ve ever seen aimed at my home state:
The shocking change in tone from the paragraphs around it is quite jarring. I suspect that someone else slipped those paragraphs in there. Maybe the brochure was laying out just a little short, or the editor looked over it and thought it was a bit dry, so she pulled out her bong and basked in the Florida love for a while. At least two paragraphs worth.
For the love of Florida
I saw on the DVR that the next recorded episode of Stephen Fry in America was going to include Florida and I thought, ‘heh, I wonder what awfulness he’s going to find there.’ Not long ago I was actively looking for opportunities outside of Florida, and I have never been a fan of the traditional Florida fare of sunshine, beaches, mice, and water sports (citrus, I like). Maybe because I have since settled down in my birth state, or maybe because it is my birth state, I was a little disgruntled when Mr. Fry’s primary visit was Miami, and his primary reaction was understandably scathing. How, you might ask, can I be disgruntled when I understand his reaction? Well, he visited Miami. Except for The Golden Girls, there is and has never been anything tied to Miami that could entice me to visit there. It’s like having someone come visit your house and they only see the inside of your garage, dented, stained holiday decoration boxes and all.
–by the by, I am in entertainment consumer love with Stephen Fry; as in, I love to consume and am terribly entertained by all his writing, speaking and acting.
So, partially as an exercise in state love, which I am still new to, I started wracking my brains for the bits of Florida that I’d rather have been seen by Stephen Fry. What I realized, is that the bits of Florida that I think make it great are withering away. Fewer and fewer of the quaint and wholesome tourist attractions of a hopeful postwar (WWII) U.S. can still be found in our tropical peninsula. They are slowly making room for the attractions of today’s tourist.
Case in point: Cypress Gardens. I remember Cypress Gardens as a bright, hot, floral and fragrant fairy land of leisurely enjoyment. As a typical American little girl, I was in awe of the pretty ladies who twirled their gigantic ball gowns into perfect circles of fabric as they perched on the green green lawns of the gardens. At the time of my visit, Cypress Gardens was still doing well, but was most definitely the day trip that grandparents took their grandchildren on. It was of their generation. And, while they tried to pass it on to a new generation, most grandchildren, me included, didn’t spare it a second thought until it was too late. Now that I’ve come around to my grandmother’s way of thinking, Cypress gardens has been swallowed up by LegoLand.Continue reading For the love of Florida