Tortilla chips, covered in shredded beef, seasoned pinto beans and white cheese, and finished with your favorite garnishes.

Cowboy Nachos

I love nachos pretty much any way you can fix them. I mean who doesn't like piles of tortilla chips, topped with loads of cheese and all kinds of goodness? It's a great game day or movie night snack too and pretty darn easy to throw together.

This one uses some leftover beef roast that you've reserved from that Sunday dinner, along with some seasoned pinto beans, and then finished with some Pico de Gallo or all those delicious individual garnishes we all love - chopped fresh tomatoes, chopped purple onion, sliced green onion, chopped cilantro, sliced or chopped pickled jalapeno, sour cream, guacamole or chopped avocado.

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A combination Italian style salad made of romaine lettuce, shrimp, boiled egg, fresh tomatoes, olives, loads of veggies and dressed with a spicy tomato and garlic dressing.

Combination Chopped Salad with Shrimp

Yessireebob... that there is what you call a main dish salad! I know it's supposed to be fall but it's still pretty hot here in the Deep South, so I haven't moved away from summertime eating quite yet, and what a beautiful salad for one of the last salutes to summer!

This is a salad, that at least back in the day, was well known in the New Orleans and coastal Mississippi areas, when it had a rather colorful, totally inappropriate and not very politically correct name, which if you're from around here you know exactly what I am talking about. I'll just leave it at that. It's what the Friendship House referred to as a combination salad, with lettuce, tomatoes, olives,  shrimp, boiled eggs, loads of veggies and a garlicky tomato based dressing.

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A tangy enhanced ketchup sauce, loaded with flavor, perfect for burgers and meatballs.

Burger and Meatball Sauce

A big leap above the standard ketchup, this is one of my favorite burger sauces, but it's a great meatball sauce too.

Though somewhat of a riff on the vintage grape jelly and chili sauce meatballs we all know and love, I patterned this version after a burger sauce once used by an old favorite and sadly now gone, little bitty, local burger joint in Biloxi.

There was nothing particularly unusual about their flame-cooked burgers really, but it was the sauce that really made them ultra delicious to me. For many years I had fond memories of it, and thought I'd give a hand at trying to make one somewhat like it. This recipe was the result. It makes about 4 cups, perfect for loads of burgers, or several pounds of meatballs, though it can certainly be reduced.

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A salad of cucumber and sweet onion, dressed with a creamy, sour cream, mayo and buttermilk herb dressing. Add a little purple onion for color.

Cucumber Salad with Creamy Buttermilk Herb Dressing

Well, here it is September, and the last weekend before fall, and as happens every, single, year with the blogging community, you're probably seeing all sorts of apple and pumpkin posts as those of us who write about and share recipes on this internet world get anxious to switch over to the aromas of fall.

Unfortunately for many of us here in the South, most especially the Deep South, it doesn't matter what the calendar says, the weather betrays it! Although we got a slight break this weekend, it's still hotter than hot in my part of the world and I'm not ready for that pumpkin spice latte y'all. So... I'll still be plugging along with those cooling summer foods, like cucumber salads, for a bit yet.

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Boneless chicken breasts, soaked in a southwestern seasoned, brown sugar brine, tossed in fajita seasonings, grilled over indirect heat and served with a southwestern seasoned rice.

Grilled Fajita Chicken and Rice

This is a main dish take on those well loved chicken fajitas, putting that bold fajita flavor on those ever popular, full-sized boneless, skinless chicken breast and using the classic peppers and onions to flavor a side dish of rice. Just something with familiar flavors. but a little different!

As always, the full recipe with instructions are further down the page, past the step by step photographs. Scroll or swipe down to the bottom of this post to go straight to the recipe.

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Russet potatoes, air fry baked, then the pulp scooped out and mixed with cream cheese, butter, salt, pepper, Cajun seasoning, grated onion, bacon, cheddar cheese, stuffed back into the shells and baked again.

Air Fryer Twice-Baked Potato

I tell you what, if you live in the Deep South and you don't have an Instant Pot and an air fryer, I seriously don't know why.

Those have been the two most used appliances in my house all summer long in this oppressive heat we've been experiencing down here. I mean yes, we always have hot summers down here, but it sure seems we have had an awful lot of those heat advisories this summer and even though I have a killer A/C unit, I have had the oven on only a couple of times.

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A quick spaghetti dish made with roasted fresh tomatoes and seasoning vegetables, mushrooms and bacon. Known by a few different names, including Okie Spaghetti and Cowboy Spaghetti, when beef is also included.

Bacon Spaghetti

A few years back one of our readers, Brian, was looking specifically for a Bacon Spaghetti recipe. Although I make some variation of my semi-homemade version of spaghetti most often, and in the summer, you just cannot beat a homemade sauce from those fresh from the garden tomatoes, I do love mixing things up with spaghetti recipes too. I don't know why using bacon as the base meat never really occurred to me!

Sometime after that, I was browsing through the Notes archive on my Facebook page, and ran across a recipe called Okie Spaghetti shared by another reader Linda a few years before. I used her recipe as a base for this one, adding in my own spin, of course!

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The flavors of a New Orleans Style BBQ Shrimp, made with brined and marinated, peeled and deveined grilled shrimp, making it much less messy to eat. Serve with plenty of French bread to sop up the sauce though!

Grilled New Orleans Style BBQ Shrimp

Most of you know by now about New Orleans style BBQ shrimp and that it has nothing to do with anything remotely linked to smoke cooking or even barbecue sauce. It is thought that the recipe originated with Pascal's Manale Restaurant - a nearly 100 year old eatery located on Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana. The name likely comes from the smokey flavor that the shrimp gets from the spicy, heavy on the butter, yummy sauce, Worcestershire sauce and the spicy, peppery seasonings.

There is no doubt that we love our shrimp in this country - we eat more than a billion pounds of shrimp alone every year! Unfortunately, 90% percentage of the shrimp we are consuming is imported - and frankly many of us who live outside of the coastal regions, don't even realize it.

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A corn salad made in the tradition of Mexican Street Corn on the Cob, with fresh cooked corn and dressed with a mayo and sour cream mixture of Cotija cheese, chili powder, cilantro, lime juice and zest. Toss in some crisp veggies, chill well and garnish with a little more cheese and cilantro before serving.

Mexican Street Corn Salad

So, I finally got around to trying a Mexican Street Corn Salad y'all and wow, am I glad I did - it is delicious!

The Cajun's idea of a salad is pretty much a head of iceberg lettuce - that's it. When I make a side salad for a meal, I'll put in other things that are hit and miss as to whether he'll eat them. Sometimes he surprises me, but mostly he picks around things like onion, shredded carrots, cucumber, tomato, radishes, things like that.

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The Peach Truck Cookbook Review

The Peach Truck Cookbook

It's peach season! Hurry up y'all because like Vidalia onions and Creole tomatoes, it'll be over before you know it too.

We have some decent peaches here in the southeast region of this fine country - a lot of Chilton County Alabama peaches make it down here to the coast, mostly at the farmer's market and roadside, and while occasionally you'll see some peaches from around the area featured, for the most part grocery market peaches down here are not anywhere near local.

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