"lenells" news and stories

Alabama-born LeNell Smothers defines herself first and foremost as a bartender, but she's been called many things, most recently the owner of LeNell's liquor store. She's owned her own whiskey label called Red Hook Rye and been recognized by her home state as an honorary Colonel. Other interests include gin, sin and men.

You survived the Derby Day parties, and your annual mint julep tickled everyone's fancies quite nicely. Now you are wondering what to do with that leftover bottle of bourbon.

How dare you have a leftover bottle of bourbon, first of all! But if you do, here's an easy way to get rid of it.

There are few holiday dishes so polarizing as green bean casserole. If it was part of your usual Yuletide feast growing up, the stuff is sacrosanct and utterly essential to holiday joy. The bulk of it -- the french-cut green beans, cream of mushroom soup and French-fried onion strings -- must come blopping and clattering from cans and be baked in a casserole until it resembles a roiling green bog topped with a dry moss of frizzled onion straws. There are always seconds, and there's hardly ever any left over for a midnight refrigerator picnic.

If you didn't grow up with it skulking on the holiday table, good gravy, does that stuff look ten-foot-pole nasty.