Today, it was all about the food.

First, breakfast! We had fresh fruit, yogurt with granola, delicious coffee, and our other choices were grits and eggs. I had a little try of the grits. Paste. Nope, not a fan. Everything else, yum! And the courtyard was just a dream, a place where your troubles are not allowed inside the iron gates. This has been the case all week, since we arrived on Monday.

Many of the people we talked with about our trip told us to take a food tour. So, why not?

#southernfoodtour2019

Our first stop, Another Broken Egg Cafe, a little stop on South Market Street. There, our food tastes were grits and fried green tomatoes.

#uhoh

I love tomatoes in many different dishes, but just to eat them, I’m not a fan. Grit, I’ve only had the plain stuff that just, well, tasted like paste. Nothing I’d ever want to eat again. However, these grits were with Gouda cheese, which I do like, so what the heck?

#OMGdelicious

Someone said that anything fried is always good. A truer statement has never been spoken. The tomatoes were marvelous, firm and well seasoned. The grits, so much different than previous attempts. A fine beginning to our food tour, a fine beginning indeed!

Second, a trip to the Oyster House, another great place in Charleston. Here, we had she-crab soup (which I thought was delicious, my wife, not so much, a rarity in our family) and a shrimp, wrapped in bacon, stuffed with crab. And to top it off, hush puppies. Now, my (and my wife’s experience with hush puppies, Long John Silvers. No, not very good at all. These were corn meal, fried to perfection, served with a praline butter.

#heaveninmymouth

Third, a quick stop at The Spice and Tea Exchange of Charleston. Here, most any kind of tea you could imagine, plus a variety of flavored salts. We purchased a scorpion pepper salt for our daughter’s boyfriend. The scorpion pepper is one of the hottest peppers in the world, so his eye lit up when we gave it to him as he and his family enjoy things as a heat level that would leave my head on fire. No, I did not sample that one! 🙂

Our next stop, Poogan’s Smokehouse, a rustic, yet modern place where we had pulled pork sliders and fried pimento cheese. Pulled pork is a staple around here in Iowa, but this was made with cabbage, shrimp, and some southern seasoning that spiced things up! A change from the she-crab soup and shrimp for certain. Pimento cheese, I was very nervous about trying. Again, not being from the south, I’m used to my pimentos either in a loaf of processed meat or a cheese that doesn’t taste very good. Either way, the fried pimento cheese, delicious! Certainly something I would (and did) eat in a heartbeat!

And to finish our walking meal, a sweet at The Fudgery. There we got a sample of various sweets they make, along with a praline to take with us. And between you and me, the praline we had in Charleston made the one we had New Orleans pale in comparison.

After all this, we had to walk, a lot!

#ohnonotagain

Yes, we walked and walked, looking at the different houses, the different architecture, reading the different historical signs on various houses. We made our way down to the southern part of the city, Battery Park. It’s an awesome place, full of old oak trees and the intersection of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. On top of all this, streets of huge old houses, redo to their former glory. We got a little bit of rain (the big storm headed slightly north, but gave us quite a lightening display). We walked back past “Rainbow Row”, which is the longest cluster of Georgian style houses in the United States. Again, just a magnificent display of what the south is all about.

We returned to our hotel for our nightly wine and cheese (such an easy thing to do that pays so many dividends). Then, dinner! 🙂 We dined at Hyman’s Seafood, a Charleston icon. The food was very good. My grits with shrimp in a parmesan cheese sauce was delicious and the “light cajun” shrimp my wife had were a spicy delight! Our only problem, we ordered sweet potatoes and both were cold, flat out cold.

We wandered back to our room and passed out in a food coma! 🙂 What a great day!