RIVER CITY JOURNAL: ZUCCHINI ATTACK: PEOPLE ARE STARVING IN AFRICA, YOU KNOW

First, Susan McClanahan devoted her entire recipe column this week to -- hold on to your socks -- zucchini. Then Bill Kiel tried to bribe me -- I am not making this up -- with zucchini chocolate-chip cookies.

You know what I think? I think the August heat is addling more brains than we realize.

Susan's "Recipe Swap" column is one of the most popular items in the newspaper on Wednesdays. Yet she risked everything to tell us how to make cornbread with zucchini in it.

Listen. If God had intended for cornbread to have little green bits in it, he wouldn't have created hush puppies.

And Bill, the head fund raiser at St. Francis Medical Center Foundation, landed on my doorstep before the sun was up holding a plastic bag of chocolate-chip cookies filled with green flecks like they were gold nuggets he had just found on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. He said his wife made them. And he said I would love them.

Folks who write and edit and photograph all day have appetites that won't quit. I've never had any problem getting rid of anything sugar-coated or fried in any newsroom. Well, I had a bit of difficulty pushing last year's fruitcake, but it's not my fault most people would rather eat gourds than rum-soaked candied fruit.

So I offered the first of the Kiel cookies to whoever showed up first. Everyone munched away and agreed they were really good cookies. Then I told them they had zucchini in them. Everyone handled it pretty well, I thought.

Andrea took one of the cookies and immediately exclaimed: "It's full of green stuff!" But she ate it anyway. What did I tell you about newsroom appetites?

(Note to Mrs. Kiel: You might want to consider soaking the smushed zucchini in rum before adding it to the cookie batter. Better still, use the smushed zucchini for garden mulch. But that's your call.)

n

A woman who said her name was Mary Lou Baertschi called from Nevada, Mo., this week.

Nevada, you will remember, is the Garden of Eden of All Things Fried and the home of Delway Drive-In. I recently lamented in this very column that Delway had closed a few years ago. If you had ever eaten a double cheeseburger (no middle bun) with onions and a full order of Suzie-Qs, you'd know why that was such a tragic day.

Mary Lou and her husband, it turns out, have re-opened Delway. That must have been the morning I thought I heard "Hallelujah Chorus" every time I went outside.

Everyone on the western side of the state is raving about the food at the new Delway and how it tastes every bit as good as it did when Bob and Evelyn Bain ran the place. And even the original owner of Delway -- that would have been 30 years ago or longer -- comes every day to eat. That's quite a tribute.

I have a personal invitation to visit Delway and once again sink my teeth into a cheeseburger and Susies. You can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to find a good reason to head that way.

What the heck. Delway is a good enough reason.

n

To be real honest, I don't know what a "bottom dollar" is (see above). I suppose it must be your very last dollar, which means you have to have a sure bet before you wager it.

This week, I asked Heidi if she expected any problems in getting election results from the area school districts that were voting on tax increases.

No, she said, election night was going to be "a cakewalk."

It occurred to me that Heidi is probably way too young to know what a cakewalk is. So I asked. She said she had read about one.

And a pie supper?

Now I had her stumped.

Once upon a time, rural areas like Kelo Valley and Greenwood Valley and Otter Creek Valley and all those other valleys in the Ozarks west of here had to find ways to amuse themselves. This was long before TV. It was before electricity. It was somewhere between Christopher Columbus and Ike.

About once a year, families with children in the one-room schools I attended would get together for a pie supper and cakewalk to raise money for the schools. My mother, who taught at those schools, organized quite a bash one year. The school only had about a dozen students, so to increase the crowd (as well as the proceeds) she invited all of the Miller clan to come for the festivities. A couple of my cousins were part of a singing trio from Bismarck that figured it would probably hit it big on TV as soon as electric lines made it to Mill Creek Valley, where this particular school was located. I have never forgotten the trio's rendition of "Mr. Sandman," which was all the rage at the time. I thought they sounded plenty good enough to be on the radio.

This is how a pie supper works: Women bake pies (you can do this with cakes and whole dinners too) and take them to the pie supper. Only the person picked to be the auctioneer knows who baked which pie. Men bid on the pies and have to eat the pies in the company of the bakers. Women coached their husbands for days before the event:

She: Now, Hobart, my pie is the lemon with the six inches of meringue on it. Can you remember that? Just for one night?

He: Idell, I'd recognize your pies anywhere. (Hobart eats burnt biscuits and scorched ham for a month after he mistakenly is the highest bidder for the store-bought blackberry cobbler brought by that floozy from town, Mae Lou.)

Those were great pies.

n

As a matter of fact, some of them were almost as good as Mrs. Kiel's cookies.

Yes, I ate some of the cookies. I liked them. A lot.

But I waited until the very end of this column to admit it. There's nothing easy about conceding to the whole world that not all zucchini is bad.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.