Happy Hour

When neighbors are around, we gather at someone’s house at 5 p.m. for an hour of happiness.

I suspect we do this not out of boundless love for one another but rather because an hour of each other is quite enough!

In the beginning, happy hour was a simple, snacky time. If you showed up with any food at all it was use-your-finger-fare like nuts or chips. It was considered overboard to bring anything that required a knife to spread it on a cracker.

It was good and right.

Over the years, the food part morphed. Happy hour became a way to share an appetizer you thought was special - or perhaps the only thing you knew how to make.

Things got out of hand.

Stuffed jalapeños, sausage balls, deviled eggs, elaborate dips, little wieners on a toothpick, even crab cakes.

This was the feature at a recent gathering of six (6) people

What we wound up with at happy hour was a meal. Which lasted an hour or so, then everyone went home to…??

Yeah, eat supper.

You had been smoking a butt all day or had a big pot of spaghetti in the crock pot or had a ginormous steak waiting to be grilled, and you went home with no appetite left. Dumb.

Fortunately, my friends neighbors are friends neighbors with someone who is a voice of reason. Someone who isn’t afraid to stand up and shout, “enough!”

He demanded that happy hour become a little more practical and healthier. (Can ‘happy hour’ and ‘healthy’ be used in the same sentence?)

Apples and toddies?

Why not apples? After all, there’s Apple Crown, Jack Daniels Tennessee Apple or Angry Orchard Hard Cider.

There’s even a Busch Light Apple beer, though if you were to show up to happy hour with it, you’d see folks leave the room. So that they can talk about you behind your back. Without hurting your feelings.

We are polite Southerners, after all.

We are also a sophisticated bunch, as demonstrated recently when we staged a happy hour mayonnaise taste-off.

The idea born from a random conversation about which mayo most represented the South.

Fourteen participants sampled three mayos. There were actually fifteen of us, but one person sat on the sideline with a towel over her head, nauseated at the thought of eating naked mayonnaise.

Interesting results: Dukes and Blue Plate received an equal number of first place and last place votes, leaving Hellmann’s with a solid second-place finish.

For the most part, heavy snacking has slowed down though they still show up. Sometimes they are a fun or interesting something that needs to be sampled.

Basically, squid jerky

As much as I love calamari, dried squid is nasty! The one person that could eat it was not American-made. (Translation: Chinese.)

I’ve cooked up some Spam and cut it into little squares for sampling.

With Worcestershire sauce for more salt flavor

It was special Spam.

Oh yeah!

If you are not aware Spam also makes hickory smoke, jalapeño, maple and teriyaki flavors, perhaps you should spend more time with Spam at your local grocery store. They make so many flavors, the Spam aisle has become a destination aisle.

If it were my store, it would be a ‘destination isle. I’d invite travel writers and influences to visit and offer free samples while listening to reggae and sipping drinks.

Another recent happy hour…

Yeah, that’s homemade pickled peppers. And yeah, that’s a shot glass.

Did this happen after someone picked a peck of pickled peppers? Probably not since people can’t pick a peck of pickled peppers. But people can pick a peck of peppers and pickle them.

According to potentially pickled people.

At happy hour.

Footnote: for more on how our happy hours work, try this one: Gay Turtles