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.

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!

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.