Category: recipes

Mid-August Garden Update.

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The squirrels are beating us to the tomatoes this year – Daisy hasn’t yet found her voice to scare them away as well as Betsy beagle did, but considering how far she’s come in every other way, we’ll overlook it. Without a beagle chasing unwanted visitors off, it’s become wildlife central out there, with rabbits keeping the sweet potato greens from running outside of their raised bed and an entire charm of hummingbirds fluttering about all day, stopping to rest on top of the cages around the pepper plants. The hummingbirds are next to impossible to capture with a camera but of course that doesn’t stop me from trying. All of the animals seem to be getting quite comfortable with us out there, which I suppose has its pluses and minuses.

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When life hands you cabbage.

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I currently have a glut of cabbage in my fridge, thanks to our CSA this year with Whisper Hill Farm. In looking about for different ways to serve it, I remembered a recipe I hadn’t made in a while that I swore I had posted here once upon a time. Having recently sat down and organized my recipes page, I was shocked it didn’t appear when I pulled it up on my phone – isn’t that what you do? Keep your blog recipe link page bookmarked on your phone for easy reference at all times? Well, you should if you don’t. Because when you can’t remember which one of your kitchen binders or notebooks a recipe is scribbled in, it’s helpful. Wait, you probably don’t have three of those either, do you? Oh.

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Tomato Pie Experiments.

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One would think that someone with a cookbook collection like mine – particularly one with a solid Southern bent that includes a number of church, Junior League and similar collections as well as some Southern classics – would have a solid tomato pie recipe or three among them. And yet, after recently combing through the ENTIRE collection, I realized the TWO I come up with in no way resemble the pies I’ve had in the past that I know had some sort of tomato, mayo, cheese mix.

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Variations on Chicken Soup.

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We’ve spent what felt like the better part of October into November battling a nasty cold going around, which means lots of chicken soup. Due to our habits of being good at not all being sick at the same time – we just take turns with it –  there is always someone who is comforted by chicken soup, while at least one of us is slightly over it (because we’ve had some form of chicken soup for weeks on end). Thankfully,  I have a small repertoire of soups I make specifically when we are ill – all based on chicken broth with lots of garlic – that are soothing while not being too heavy or fancy so that we don’t get burned out on the idea of chicken soup. Continue reading →

Mrs. Carroll’s Eggplant Casserole

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One of the perks of going to college 1000 miles away from where your family lives is that friends would often take pity upon me on long weekends and invite me to come home with them. I found myself with a group of friends that had all gone to high school together, so I’d get invited home by one, only to find myself being transported around town all weekend to have dinner with another friend’s family and then brunch the next day with yet another. Southern hospitality at it’s finest y’all. Over the years I accumulated a number of recipes from these friends’ mothers, all of which are written down in my notebook as Mrs. blank’s _____________, like Mrs. Cape’s Pimento Cheese. 

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Spring Greens.

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Now that the farmers market is flush with fresh, local greens again, I find myself buying several varieties from various vendors weekly.  Every meal has some sort of green worked into it, but towards the end of the week, I find I need to start getting creative with the slightly fading greens. Continue reading →

Better living through organization.

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I recently made a batch of chicken broth with a carcass I had stashed in the freezer. You do this, right? Have a stash of roasted bones in the freezer just for making stock? So anyway, I was down to my last jar of broth and needed to make a batch. There was just enough meat that came off the bones to make a pot of soup, but I sensed by my family’s reaction that one more pot of straight up chicken soup – or really, any variation thereof to be honest –  might be one pot too many for this winter soup season. That’s when I realized I hadn’t made Dorie’s White  Chili in some time and that might be a nice change.

See the reflection of my bedroom windows on my lap top screen?

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