Apple Julep, a refreshing drink made with apple juice, pineapple, orange and lemon juice, is bumped up to a sangria with the addition of white wine and rum for a refreshing adult drink.

Apple Julep Sangria

If you've ever been to the Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant in the Sevierville/Pigeon Forge area of Tennessee, chances are you've had their signature Applewood Julep. The restaurant, a renovated farmhouse, serves good ole country cooking and is so homey that it even has a great sittin' porch - if you're so inclined. It's been awhile since I was up that way, but isn't that area of the country just beautiful?

The Apple Julep they serve is a fantastic summer beverage, almost identical to our beloved Southern Fruit Iced Tea, except that the tea is exchanged for apple juice. Just like my fruit tea, when I have a jar of Maraschino cherries in the fridge, I like to also add a bit of the juice to the Apple Julep too, so when you make a dessert that requires you drain the cherries, save that juice! I never throw out juices from drained canned and jars of fruit, I follow this method to keep it in my freezer. Works great and it can be added to anything!

Though most folks associate a julep with the mint and alcohol associated with the Derby Day drink of choice, a julep is actually considered any drink made from a sweet sugar syrup, some kind of flavoring, and sometimes containing alcohol. Or, according to some dictionaries, medication. Funny. All I can think of with that last part is Granny's "spring tonic." ♫ "Granny's brew, it's good for you, if you're off your feet you ought to have some too." ♫

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A quick and easy ice cream using chocolate milk, or Yoo-hoo chocolate drink, with sweetened condensed milk, chocolate syrup, and a small tub of Cool Whip. It tastes remarkably similar to those Wendy's Frosty milk shakes we all love.

Chocolate "Frosty" Ice Cream

I'm gonna tell you a secret. Like with iced tea, we Deep South Southerners never really stop eating ice cream. Even north Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama get a little bit of a winter most years, but except for a very few, and very temporary, winter cold flashes - that frankly exit just about as quickly as they showed up - the climate down here along the Gulf Coast is such that all of those frosty treats are pretty much a year round thing.

As far as homemade ice cream goes, I am, of course, like most everybody else, a huge fan of custard ice creams - I mean y'all know how I feel about custard anything right? But custard ice creams do take a little bit of advance planning, and with the newer freezer bucket types of ice cream makers, we can now get a decent ice cream going in no time, without fooling with all the ice and salt. Those makers cry out for the easy versions of ice cream using sweetened condensed milk, like this one.

Many of you are familiar with this ice cream in some variation already, but I thought it'd be a good time to bring it out with the upcoming holiday weekend. It's just a few ingredients, it's quick, easy and fun, and I like to call it "Frosty" ice cream because it really does taste like a homemade version of a Wendy's Frosty. The most wonderful thing about this recipe, is that once you process it in your ice cream freezer, you can either pour it right into a cup, stick in a spoon and a straw, and treat it just like one of those Frosty milkshakes we all love...

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A simple and classic fruit salad made with mandarin oranges, pineapple chunks, marshmallows, sweetened coconut, maraschino cherries and dressed with sour cream.

Mandarin Orange Fruit Salad

This fruit salad has been around a very long time and is another one of those recipes that falls back to my old Bell's Best cookbooks. Those books and that trusty red Betty Crocker binder is literally where many of us southern gals, and often our mothers, picked up a lot of the familiar recipes you see on your favorite southern sites and food blogs today. They were certainly key cookbooks in my learning experience as a young bride in the 70s.

In fact, if you're a fan of the movie The Help, set in the early 1960s, this is the very salad that Sissy Spacek, aka Mrs. Walters, ate while she watched The Guiding Light during the bridge parties - though in the movie she calls it ambrosia. So funny the part where Skeeter walks through the room, and with her bubbly personality and big ole smile says "Hi Mrs. Walters!" who promptly responds by pointing to the television with her fork and saying only "I'm watching my story." Reminds me so much of my Mama and my Nanny Rosalie. You simply did not interrupt them during their "stories," or if you did, the house, or your hair, better be on fire. Seriously!

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Sweet southern iced tea enhanced with a puree of fresh peaches and freshly squeezed lemon juice.

Fresh Peach Sweet Iced Tea

It's gettin' to be southern peach time and we've got the early Georgia peaches already showing up in our markets down here in south Mississippi. The first batch I picked up were nice and ripe and supremely juicy, so I thought it'd be a good time to use some for peach tea.

I love a good iced tea and for a change, all manner of fruited iced teas, with peach being right there at the top of the list, though I've had some that were not all that tasty and kind of uninspiring and blah. The secret for me that many of them leave out - besides using only fresh peaches, rather than a commercial peach nectar - is also including some freshly squeezed lemon juice.

I think that fresh lemon juice just makes the flavor of the peaches pop and Meyer lemons, which are much sweeter than their more acidic cousins, are an excellent lemon to use for drinks if you can get your hands on some. I happened to have some in the fridge, so I used two of them, but good ole grocery store acidic lemons are perfectly fine to use too of course. Just be sure to test this the first time with just one of those, before adding in the juice of a second lemon. You may only want one acidic lemon, again depending on the sweetness of your peaches. Summer peaches tend to be sweeter than these early ones.

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