Country Ham with slow cooked collard greens, hoppin’ john’s, sweet potatoes, and homemade cornbread.

Buttermilk biscuits with ham, honey and mustard.

Hoppin’ John’s & corn muffins.

Fish sandwich with fried green tomatos, pimento cheese and hot sauce.

Ham steak, fried eggs and grits, homemade biscuits and good strong coffee.

Delicious peach pie

and gone…

Hamburger with grilled onions and Heirloom tomatoes & homemade french fries with sea salt.

Portobello mushroom burger with veggie chips & roasted red onions.

Open faced heirloom tomato sandwich with mozzarella and sourdough bread.

Open faced egg & bacon sandwich with roasted tomatoes.

Veggie burger with homemade kale chips. Veggie sliders with butternut squash, soybeans, bean sprouts and goat cheese.

You know you’re hungry now.

Here is a screen grab of how the images were used, and you can see the website HERE.

Now normally, leaving at dawn would let us escape the LA traffic and be out of the metro area in no time at all, but on this trip, we discovered traffic wasn’t our only nemesis.

In the “olden days” we’d whip out our trusty AAA map and plot the course. Now we have GPS that guides us on our way. Most of the time it’s great, but when you’re trying to follow a highway that isn’t officially on a map anymore, it can lead to detours, incorrect turns, numerous repeats of “recalculating” and two hours of delays.

Today, technology was not our friend.

In addition to discovering that tech can make things more difficult, we also stumbled upon a mystery: where in the world are the apple trees in Apple Valley?

Lew’s recap:

Pacific Ocean is where we started.
Got lost in downtown la
There’s no apples trees in apple valley ca
Lots of trains on the way
Lots of dog farts too
Saw donkey’s in a gold mining town.
Flagstaff AZ next stop.
Getting colder.
518 miles, 12 hours. 4033 images for time lapse.
12 inches of snow in Flagstaff tonight.

As part of our annual holiday traditions, we pack up the suitcases and head to the Midwest to visit our families. Usually, we fly, but this year we have decided to take the new Jeep loaded with all the dogs and camera gear and head out on an adventure!

In the grand old tradition of road trips, we’re going to travel the iconic Route 66, the Mother Road. Starting at its original end in Santa Monica, California, we’ll follow the road east through San Bernardino, Barstow, Flagstaff and other iconic landmarks from the song – and history.

As part of our adventure, we’ll be recording the drive itself with a stop motion camera mounted to the top of the vehicle and will make many stops as we get to know the towns and bits of America that line what is left of this famous highway.

Be sure to bookmark our site and follow along in our adventure as we head home for the holidays.

Styling by the lovely Alicia Buszczak, Art Direction by Steph Fowler and of course all photography by Mr. Lew Robertson.

The recipe below calls for white chocolate, but you can substitute milk chocolate too!

The sweet dog pictured here is Twiggy. Chrissy our Producer, volunteers at A DOGS LIFE RESCUE You can call and ask about Twiggy, or go to her page on their website to find out more info. She is a little lover and needs a good home. Chrissy often brings her to the studio for the day on little field trips, and we all love her here.

And Below, a little behind the scenes of making our sheet music ornaments. These are so easy, all you need is some sheet music (can be printed from pinterest, we found Holiday songs!) A couple of paint brushes, old christmas bulbs (or cheap plastic ones from the 99 cent store), Mod Podge, and glitter! Tear strips of the music paper, paint on mod podge (front and back) stick onto the bulb and keep repeating until your bulb is covered in paper. Take one last brush of mod podge over the whole bulb, and then cover with glitter! Have fun!

There are a few consistent things that will always be found at Lew Robertson Productions: food, dogs and something on the TV. One of the shows in the viewing line-up is American Pickers on the History Channel. Seeing the crazy items they find on the show inspired us to take a closer look at the yard sales, antique shops and flea markets we stumble across in our travels.

Sure enough, once we began paying attention to the seemingly random items laid out we realized we were going to have to shoot a series on vintage and antique kitchen items.  They were mysterious and unfamiliar – some almost sinister looking.

With many of the items in our collection, we did not realize at first that they were indeed used in kitchens. They looked strange compared to the plastic gadgets we have today. Crafted of metals and wood with exposed cogs and gears with bits of rust and chipped paint as the only decoration. Some had the names of manufacturers on them though many did not. There weren’t instruction books or web pages to reference as to their use. Luckily, we found some vendors who knew what the pieces were and we marveled at the ingenuity of some of the items dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s.

We hope you enjoy the series titled Tastefully Twisted, artfully styled by Alicia Buszczak.

The Legend of “Stingy Jack” (via www.history.com)

People have been making jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween for centuries. The practice originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed “Stingy Jack.” According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn’t want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree’s bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years.

Soon after, Jack died. As the legend goes, God would not allow such an unsavory figure into heaven. The Devil, upset by the trick Jack had played on him and keeping his word not to claim his soul, would not allow Jack into hell. He sent Jack off into the dark night with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with ever since. The Irish began to refer to this ghostly figure as “Jack of the Lantern,” and then, simply “Jack O’Lantern.”

In Ireland and Scotland, people began to make their own versions of Jack’s lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets are used. Immigrants from these countries brought the jack o’lantern tradition with them when they came to the United States They soon found that pumpkins, a fruit native to America, make perfect jack-o’-lanterns.