What’s orange and white and moUThwatering all over? A Tennessee Vols tailgate! We asked John Antun, director of the UT Culinary Institute and assistant professor in the hotel, restaurant, and tourism program at UT Knoxville, to help us assemble some distinctly “UT” tailgate recipes. To spice it up even more, Antun chose recipes from his already award-winning, soon-to-be-published multicultural cookbook.
Antun received a grant from UT Knoxville’s Ready for the World initiative to publish the cookbook. The book contains 180 recipes from the families of Antun’s students, including matzo ball soup, homemade egg noodles, Maryland crab dip, and pav bhaji, a vegetarian dish from India.
The book will be available to purchase through the UT Culinary Institute and retailers in Knoxville. Each student’s recipe also comes with a description of the food and its significance to his or her family. Though not yet published, the book is already an award-winner. Antun nabbed second-place honors for it from the Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (CAFE). In June Antun presented the project at the CAFE leadership conference in Chicago.
My grandfather lived in Chicago during the early 1900s and was probably one of the biggest Chicago Bears fans ever born. It was his passion to go to every Bears home game and have his “chili picnics.” They were a very early version of what we now call a tailgate party. He would make enough for 20 people, and they all showed up at every single home game. Then it became a Sunday ritual at home, watching the game on TV. Although to this day we still call it Bear Chili, it has evolved into what my dad now calls “GoVol Chili” and has become a Saturday ritual.
—Courtney Krich
Ground beef, premium grade 1 lb.
Tomato soup 2 (10.5 oz) cans
White rice, cooked 1 cup
Frozen corn 1 (10 oz.) bag
Chili seasoning packet 1
Chili beans 2 (16 oz.) cans
Cheese, shredded 1 bag
Onion 1 small
Tortilla chips 1 bag
My great grandparents met in an orphanage, so they had very little heritage to draw upon. This recipe was one that my grandmother started making every Christmas morning. Sometimes you have to make your own customs and traditions. My grandmother has since passed, and now my mother has taken over the egg-strada, which we have eaten every Christmas morning for the past 65 years. The dish doesn’t really tell you much about our culture, but it shows a will to create something of a family tradition.
—Nick Robinson
Eggs (or equivalent egg substitute) 6 to 8
Milk, 2% 1 c.
Salt 1 Tb.
Pork sausage, cooked, crumbled, and drained 1 lb.
Cheddar cheese, grated 1 c.
Ground mustard 1 tsp.
Worcestershire sauce 1 tsp.
White bread 6 slices
I was born in Baltimore and lived very close to the Chesapeake Bay, so I grew up around seafood. This recipe is a must for anyone with a hankering for seafood. It best represents where I am from and the types of food we like to eat. If you are from Maryland, you cannot live without crab.
—Brittany Ecalono
Jumbo lump crab meat 16 oz. (two 8 oz. containers)
Cream cheese 8 oz. (one 8 oz. container)
Mayonnaise 4 Tb.
Garlic powder 1 tsp.
Lemon juice 1 lemon (or 1 tsp. lemon juice)
Old Bay Seasoning 2 tsp.
French baguette 1 loaf
The M&M cookies recipe is special to my family. My father’s taste for M&M cookies began in his early childhood . . .. When he joined the military and was stationed at Fort Knox for his basic training, he refused to eat any of the food that was available to the soldiers. His mother would send him M&M cookies every week. My mother started fixing the cookies for him after they were married . . .. M&M cookies are not just a popular dessert for my family; they are part of my family history.
—Rachel Hutchison
Crisco shortening 1 c.
Light brown sugar 1 c.
White sugar ½ c.
Eggs 2
Vanilla extract 2 tsp.
All-purpose flour 2 ½ c.
Baking soda 1 tsp.
Salt 1 tsp.
M&Ms 1 lb.
My mother and her side of the family hail from New Orleans, so I grew up around all things Cajun. The first meal my grandmother would make when we visited was always étouffée. When we walked into grandma’s kitchen and could smell the Cajun spices simmering, we knew that something delicious was in our very near future, and the leftovers would feed us throughout our stay. Étouffée was always just the beginning of a big family gathering, and with it came other Cajun traditions like king cake, crawfish boils, and Mardi Gras. But it was always grandma’s crawfish étouffée that I looked forward to most.
—Lane Francis
Onion, chopped 1 c.
Celery, chopped 1 c.
Green onions with tops, chopped ½ c.
Shallots, chopped 4 Tb.
Garlic, minced 2 cloves
Butter 1 stick
Flour 2 Tb.
Chicken stock 2 c.
Ro-Tel tomatoes 1 can
Salt to taste
Black pepper 1 tsp.
Cayenne pepper dash
Worcestershire sauce 1 Tb.
Crawfish meat, rinsed and drained
(or shrimp, peeled and rinsed) 2 lb.
Cornstarch for thickening, if needed
You can count on finding a riot of color among the blooms and foliage at the UT Gardens in Knoxville. This year, though, you’ll see more silver among the beds of annuals, perennials, herbs, and trees that abound throughout the 5 acres along Neyland Drive. The UT Gardens is celebrating its 25th, or silver, anniversary. In honor of the occasion, curator James Newburn (Knoxville ’95, ’08), gardens interim director Dr. Sue Hamilton (Knoxville ’80, ’95), and students are growing such silver plants as artemisia, dusty miller, and silver sage on the agriculture campus. They are also joining with the Friends of the Gardens to dedicate a new Friendship Plaza, a sweeping entryway designed to welcome the 50,000-plus visitors the gardens host each year.
When you ask them about their careers, twins Wes and Ches Jackson are quick to point out that no one really graduates from college and aspires to sell hot dogs. But in 1982, with UT Martin business degrees in hand, that’s exactly what they sold—along with other Reelfoot Packing Company products. Their father, Billy Joe, had worked for the Union City, Tennessee, Reelfoot plant most of his career, and his sons naturally gravitated there for jobs during high school and college to help finance their college educations.
It was as simple as telling someone to put the bag of fingers where the patient didn’t have to look at them. That, and having someone like Nicole Perez to know what was causing the patient, a 7-year-old boy, to be inconsolable. Perez (Knoxville ’04, ’06) is pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at UT Knoxville and taking part in a program that’s putting the campus on the leading edge of clinical psychology training.
Anna Maria Horner is a homemaker in the oldest, and newest, sense of the word. She spends her days sewing, folding socks, and devising activities to occupy her brood of five children. But unlike homemakers of the past, she doesn’t hang over the fence sharing recipes and mending tips. Instead she invites friends in for a virtual cup of coffee and a chat through her blog, “Anna Maria,” at http://annamariahorner.blogspot.com.
From her home in Cary, North Carolina, Kelly Utt-Grubb runs a one-of-a-kind business. The UT psychology graduate (Knoxville ’05) is a family naming resource. That “huh?” that came to your mind is to be expected. She believes she’s the only person in the world in her chosen line of work. Utt-Grubb helps people with their last names, exploring, for instance, whether to keep them, change them, hyphenate them, or merge them with other names. She says those and other options should be explored to find a comfortable fit.
Pearl is the “Cow of the Month” at the Hatcher Family Dairy. Her hobbies are sunbathing and chewing cud. The 2-year-old Holstein is pregnant for the first time and spends her time relaxing on the farm. Since 1831, five generations of the Hatcher family have lived on and worked its almost-500-acre farm in College Grove, Tennessee. When Dr. Jennifer Hatcher graduated from the UT College of Veterinary Medicine in 2005, she became the third generation of UT graduates to join the family business that includes a dairy, a milk store, and Rock-N-Country Animal Clinic, a mixed animal practice her father, Dr. Charlie Hatcher, started when he graduated from veterinary college in 1984.
The Queen Elizabeth 2’s final round-the-world cruise was a hot ticket, and an expensive one. But two alumni actually made money aboard the storied ocean liner and did it with a song in their hearts. Stew Bystrzycki (Knoxville ’04) and Brad Martin (Knoxville ’91) were mainstays of the Queen’s Room Dance Band—Bystrzycki as the bandleader and Martin as drummer. Both studied in the studio music and jazz concentration in the School of Music in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Summertime is prime time at theme parks—a vacation to one of these magical destinations might well be in your plans. These UT alumni who work with Disney, Dollywood, and Sea World Orlando would love to welcome you.
The 2008 Lady Vols brought home an unprecedented eighth NCAA women’s basketball crown. Tennessee Alumnus tips its hat to all the championship teams in Pat Summitt’s storied reign
What if your computer weren’t really a computer? What if the “hard drive” where you store the vital pieces of your life—like work applications, e-mail, and financial and medical information—wasn’t located in a single piece of equipment, but was available everywhere, all the time, as part of a computing “cloud”?
A glimpse of East Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains shrouded in low-slung clouds is an archetypical image and one that prompted the Cherokee Indians to term the region “the place of blue smoke.” But while the daydreamers among us are inclined to study the cloud formations drifting overhead, the region’s scientists—UT researchers among them—are more interested in what’s happening on, and under, the ground. The cloud formations above and the moving water below are, in fact, closely linked.
Pandemonium broke out at Hoi Tu Thien orphanage, and a sea of frenzied, giggling children took control. In the thick of it was Dan White, a 2004 UT Knoxville philosophy graduate living in Can Tho, Vietnam. He grinned as he surveyed the familiar scene before him on that humid April evening.
It must be true that opposites attract. Garry and Betsy Phillips didn’t agree on much of anything before they married. But today the couple agrees on one thing for sure—the United States must succeed in stabilizing a democratic government in Iraq. The stability of the whole Middle East hangs in the balance.
The first few months of Madras’s life weren’t easy, although she didn’t seem to mind. During birth, her mother Buljba, an older tiger having her first litter, sat down as the cub was partially out of the birth canal. When the trainer tried to get Buljba to stand, the tiger swung around and slung the newborn cub against the bars of the cage. The result for the cub, Madras, was a severe head tilt.
