As Swade is wont to say, I’m not fond of personal reference in the context of an actual post. Comments, sure. In the actual post it seems a bit self-indulgent.

However, now is one of those times when we must make an exception.

Swade chuckled (via e-mail, so I assumed a chuckle more or less), that a friend of his asked about who I was, and why I chose this admittedly odd pseudonym. Indeed, that’s a fair question.

Who is Eggs n Grits?

Like all of you, I’m a Saab enthusiast, and that’s what matters most in this context, that’s for sure. I own a 1988 Saab 900 16-valve turbo convertible that’s been documented here. I’m currently thinking about a newer car, perhaps a first generation 9-5 or an NG900 to go along with the ‘vert. I’ve owned three Saab 900s in total.

My real name is Mike. I am in my early forties and I have a wife and two elementary-aged children. I have an engineering degree from an actual university (surprise!) and I’m employed in the high-tech industry. I currently live in Franklin, Tennessee, USA. Franklin is a suburb of Nashville, which is my hometown, the state capitol and a metropolitan area of about 1.5 million people. Nashville is known for country music (earning it the nickname ‘Music City’), health care business (healthcare accounts for one in five jobs in the area) and education (often called the “Athens of the South“). That last part is very important: yes, Nashville, Tennessee is a part of what is known here in the United States as “the South”.

“The South” is used to describe either the Southeastern US or the Southeastern and South Central US together. Used either descriptively or pejoratively, “the South” denotes as much a difference in culture as it does a geographic region. That is, people in the South are different is some ways, having a different history, eating a different cuisine and generally pursuing a different way of life than our counterparts in the rest of the country.

Hold that thought. Especially about the food.

Why EggsnGrits?

It’s a bit of a long story. Settle in for a few minutes.

Think back about ten or twelve years. During the infancy of the internet. This was a time when it was cutting edge stuff to connect your computer to a phone line and go screaming around the ‘net at 28kbs. When web pages could take minutes to load. If you were like me, you took the time between page loads to work on something else in parallel — balancing the check book, reading the paper, etc. During this period in the middle 1990′s, if you lived in the US you got ‘one month free’ discs from every internet service provider on the planet mailed to you about once per month. And, if you were willing to put up with the hassles, you could ‘one month free’ just about every month. Many people did just that.

AOL was the undisputed king of the internet then. Indeed, they were the only real option for me — they had six or eight local dial-up numbers in my area (I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee at the time) while the next closest competitor had two. No contest. I was going AOL.

When I signed up for AOL, there was one small snag — all of the “screen names” (their term for user name) had been taken by all of the legitimate users PLUS all of the people dropping the service after using the ‘one month free’ offer. That is, if you didn’t want a user name like ‘mikeh45290′ or ‘mjh2592034′, you had to really work at finding something that hadn’t been used previously. And there were 10 or 12 million previously claimed user names. I can’t remember all of the iterations, but if I didn’t want the random numbers tacked on, there were only two that were available and suitable. The first one went to my wife. The second one took a lot longer to find. After many MANY attempts, I started down a path of thinking “you are what you eat”. I tried many favorite foods and then I started asking myself, ‘What did I eat today?’ For breakfast that day, I had scrambled eggs, grits and toast. A pretty common breakfast where I come from. ‘Eggsandgrits’ was illegal; you couldn’t have more than ten characters in the screen name in those days. ‘EggsnGrits’ was available. I know — it’s absolutely shocking that nobody else wanted this moniker. Well, I hastily claimed it and the rest, as they say, is history.

What are grits?

The short answer is this: grits are a cereal product made from corn that are eaten primarily in “the South” and most of the time are eaten for breakfast. They are very similar to the Italian polenta and the Midwestern mush.

Grits are processed from corn. Back in the days before mechanized corn milling, the manually or grist-ground corn would be screened and the finer part (mostly the endosperm) would be packaged or retained as corn meal, while the coarser material (mostly the germ) would be separated as ‘grit’ or ‘grits’. Of course, that term is used for the byproduct from a number of grinding processes; in this case it also refers to the finished product.

Once separated from the corn meal, the grits are cooked by boiling for a few minutes or about half an hour depending upon the variety of corn and the moisture content of the stored product. The result is a thick, semi-solid porridge with a mild popcorn-like flavor that’s primarily eaten for breakfast, but can be eaten anytime of day. I happen to like mine a little thick, with a little butter and salt.

A typical Tennessee breakfast. Eggs, grits (in the bowl), country ham (salt-cured and smoked), sliced tomato and biscuits with blackberry preserves. The brown sauce in the ramekin is red-eye gravy, which I dislike. It’s made with coffee and the drippings from bacon or ham.

Of course, since none of us work on the farm anymore and we all want to live past forty without heart disease, we only eat like this once in a while. Usually, an egg and some grits or toast will suffice.