A classic, homestyle lasagna, made with a ground beef and Italian sausage, a homemade tomato-based pasta sauce and layered in with lasagna noodles and cheeses.

Classic Lasagna

Lasagna is one of the best loved casseroles there is. Even on the All Recipes website, the all-time, most popular recipe is what's called "World's Best Lasagna," which turns out to be pretty much the same as my recipe, my Mama's recipe, and likely I'd guess, pretty similar to just about every other good, homemade lasagna in the world, really.

Even that recipe has a striking resemblance to the McCalls 1973 cookbook recipe, that I'm certain many homemakers adopted as their own at the time.

A classic Deep South dressing, made with torn French bread, vegetables and fresh Gulf oysters with their liquor.

Classic Oyster Dressing

Growing up, Mama always made two dressings. One, she made with bread, most often using the Pepperidge Farms herb stuffing mix and it went right into the bird, with leftovers to be baked in a side dish. I always ate the one from the turkey and despite modern day warnings, I somehow survived. It really was the best!

The other dressing she made was an oyster dressing for my Daddy. Daddy was the oyster lover in our family and other than me, none of the rest of the family were all that interested in it to my recollection.

Big, fluffy and tender yeast rolls, reminiscent of those old school cafeteria rolls so many of us loved.

Old School Cafeteria-Style Yeast Rolls

If you're a parent or grandparent who has had the occasion to attend a child's elementary school lunch in recent years, you know that kid's school lunches are nothing like the ones we used to enjoy as children. Back in the dark ages when I was in elementary school, lunches were home-cooked meals, and many my age have fond memories of cafeteria favorites - brownies, goulash, even sloppy joes seem to top the list, but the one I find most often mentioned are those homemade yeast rolls.

Many of us have been on a quest for a roll that is as close to those amazing homemade yeast rolls from our elementary school memories, but in more reasonable batches. Fresh baked in the morning, you could smell those rolls all over the school, getting a symphony of tummy rumbling going.

A traditional Mississippi Gulf Coast Christmas treat, this is my small batch version of pusharatas - a heavily spiced, drop fritter, made with apple, orange and lemon, raisins and pecans, and deep fried and finished with a dip in a thick powdered sugar glaze.

Small Batch Pusharatas

I love pusharatas. Love. Love. Love. But, because of their history here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and more specifically Biloxi, the best recipes are mostly huge batches, making hundreds! That is excellent when you are giving them away as gifts, of course, but sometimes you just want enough for your own cookie trays, so this year I wrote a smaller batch recipe.

Old fashioned peanut butter balls are a rich dessert, both in its heritage and its taste. A classic Christmas confection, peanut butter, butter and powdered sugar are rolled into balls and dipped in chocolate. If you remember these from your childhood, one bite will take you right back.

Old Fashioned Peanut Butter Balls

In the Deep South, we don't typically do buckeyes, the peanut butter and chocolate confection from Ohio, that is partially dipped so that the result is patterned after the nut of the buckeye tree.

We do peanut butter balls down here.

While I don't know if the recipes are the same, the concept, of course, is. We just completely encase our peanut butter balls in chocolate down South.

My Mama's Shrimp and Fettuccine recipe, made with shrimp and andouille sausage, cooked in a buttery sauce tossed with fettuccine, fresh herbs, artichokes and pimentos.

Shrimp and Fettuccine

This recipe for Shrimp and Fettuccine was in my Mama's collection and written in her hand which always makes me nostalgic and miss her even more than usual.

She had written at the bottom of the recipe, "this dish will make them scream for more," which always makes me smile. Well, I don't know about all that, but I can say that this is definitely a restaurant quality pasta dish that, despite the inclusion of artichokes, The Cajun gobbles up and declares delicious!

That's a winner to me.

Mama's Grilled and Smothered Chicken

A grilled chicken breast, finished with caramelized onion, crisp bacon and sauteed mushroom, topped with provolone cheese.

Grilled and Smothered Chicken

I lost my Mama in 1997 but she was always such a fun person and I sure do miss her. One of the things that I used to love to do with her was to go to restaurants together for lunch or dinner, and one of our favorites was Ruby Tuesday located right on the beach in Biloxi - gone now thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

We would eat far too much, laugh a lot, and it was just a wonderful time, and boy did she love those ribs! We never had enough room left for dessert and used to say we should just go out and eat dessert sometime, but sadly we never got around to doing that before she passed.

Brown Sugar and Mustard Glazed Bone-in Ham with Cola Pan Sauce - Plus Bonus Glazes

A bone-in ham, glazed with mustard and brown sugar, and cooked in a cola syrup is a traditional southern holiday feature.

Brown Sugar and Mustard Glazed Bone-in Ham

A baked ham is a southern holiday staple. My Mama used to make ham one of two ways. One was with this absolutely marvelous glaze produced by using simply one ingredient - classic cola. Ham and cola. How much more old-fashioned and southern can you get than that? The other was baked in a plain brown paper bag, studded with pineapples and cloves.

A classic made from jello, juices, ginger ale or lemon-lime soda, and sherbet, this party punch shows up at just about every event imaginable in the south. Photo Credit: Taste of Home.

Party Punch

Though this is not a southern punch as far as I know, almost every baby shower, wedding shower, wedding reception, reunion, pot luck, church social, "fill-in-the-blank-home-party," or other social event that I attended most of my life, has had a party punch in some variation of this one. Sometimes it's called Bride's Punch, Reception Punch, Wedding Punch, Creamy Punch, Holiday Punch or Sherbet Punch.

Mama's Red Velvet Cake with Boiled Milk (Ermine) Frosting

A classic southern cake that usually makes its appearance over the Christmas holidays.

Mama's Red Velvet Cake

This was a traditional Christmas cake around our house growing up and it is as moist as it is pretty. I can barely think of Red Velvet Cake without thinking of my Mama, and it is the Christmas season where my heart gets real heavy on missing her.

I have heard that there is a newer evolution of red velvet cake that substitutes cooking oil for the real butter used in the original cake. I can't imagine why.

Why you would want the oily residue of a cooking oil versus the flavor impact and richness of butter is beyond me, though I think it probably has something to do with the mouth feel texture result, which would probably be somewhat similar to a box cake mix that so many people use. If so, then just use the box mix I say! As far as me, I don't know that I'll go messing around with something that I know is delicious and good... and works!

Grandma’s Elixirs - Hot Toddy Cold Remedy

Grandma's Hot Toddy Cold Remedy - Hot tea, lemon, honey, ginger & cloves with a splash of good ole whiskey.

Hot Toddy Cold Remedy

Looking for a recipe on how to make a great hot toddy cold remedy? You've come to the right place, because it's nearly 2:00 a.m. and I have been up and down - meaning from the bed - on and off since earlier this evening. I have a horrible, horrible cold - the worse I've had in awhile. The Cajun is coming down with something too, and I called my son earlier and he left work early sick to go to the doctor and said my daughter in law isn't feeling well either. The worse part is that my brother is in town, and only for a few days! So we all have to get better quick!

There were several occasions that my Mama made a hot toddy for me growing up when I was feeling under the weather. It was, and remains, an old home remedy for colds and flu. I always thought it was interesting that parents were more than willing to pass on a bit of booze to their underage kids, but honestly we never looked at it as being cool, since we felt so bad. It was simply medicinal. I'm sure Mama only put the tiniest splash of whiskey in it anyway.

Traditionally a hot toddy uses Scotch Whisky, hot water, sugar and lemon, but my Mama always made her hot toddy with tea. This recipe is similar to her recipe, but I played around and added a few additional healing elements. I think it turned out great and I'm working on my second cup tonight before I crawl back into the bed.

Feel free to vary the tea too. If you're off to bed, a bag of Zen green tea and Calm are nice too. It really does seem to help make me feel better, and since I'm up, I figured I might as well pass it on. Hopefully you won't need it, but just in case, hope you'll remember seeing it here! But, if this is timely for you then while you're at it, check out my post over at My New 30 Blog for some natural cold & flu treatments geared toward sinus congestion.

A roux based stew of oysters in a cream sauce, is finished with a drizzle of hot sauce and garnished with broken saltine crackers and green onion.

Creamy Oyster Stew

It used to be said - and lots of folks still live true to it today - that you should only eat oysters in months that contain the letter "R" in them, that being early spring, but mostly in fall and winter.

It's really an old fallback to the days when refrigeration and spoilage were an issue, but there is a bit of truth there in that those "R" months just happen to be when Gulf oysters are at their peak flavor. These days oysters are also farmed, so you can pretty much get good oysters year-round all over the country. Well old folks tale or not, lucky us that we are in an "R" month because down here in the Deep Coastal South, we love our fresh Gulf oysters and they show themselves in many of our holiday dishes, one of them being oyster stew.

Perfect and Easy Old Fashioned Cloverleaf and Crescent Yeast Rolls

Mama's favorite cloverleaf and crescent holiday yeast roll remains my favorite recipe too, even after all of these years. These are truly the original old fashioned yeast roll - tender, light and perfect.

Old Fashioned Yeast Rolls

This is my go to holiday dinner roll recipe, an absolutely perfect dinner roll for any holiday dinner, and, of course, any other day really. I wrote it for my stand mixer but if you don't own one, don't fret! You can still make these rolls with a little bit of extra elbow grease, so I've also included basic instructions for hand kneading in the recipe.

Airy, soft and tender on the inside and nicely browned with the tiniest bit of crunch on the outside, they truly are the perfect holiday roll. It's really a shame that we don't make homemade yeast rolls more often, but mostly they only make an appearance at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner because of the time needed for the two risings. Those 30 minute quick rolls are nice as a fill in, but they are really more like a biscuit than a roll to me because you really do need that extra long rise for the yeast to develop. They are so worth the extra time though, and especially for these two special meals, and aside from the rising time, so easy to make.

Homemade Southern Banana Pudding

Banana pudding, layered with vanilla wafer cookies, bananas, and a made from scratch egg custard, topped with a homemade meringue.

Homemade Banana Pudding

Woohoo, it's homemade banana pudding y'all! And let me tell you - while we southerners love our banana pudding, we really love it, homemade, from scratch, with real custard, layered and meringue topped. Now that's southern banana pudding - the way banana pudding was meant to be eaten y'all.

Stuffed (Deviled) Crab

Stuffed crab, made with fresh lump crabmeat, onion, and bell pepper, seasoned with Old Bay and Cajun seasoning and bound with egg and toasted bread crumbs and baked.

Deviled Stuffed Crab

I so love stuffed crabs! My Mama almost always made these from freshly picked crabs and then stuffed the cleaned and sterilized crab shells as I have here, but most folks would just make these into patties, or put them in those aluminum crab shells, which is perfectly acceptable!

A classic southern comfort dish made of stewed chicken with fluffy drop dumplings.

Old Fashioned Chicken and Fluffy Drop Dumplings

You just cannot beat this Southern classic of stewed chicken with dumplings in the comfort meal category. While most of us Southerners can agree on that, it's the dumplings that can cause a stir as much as our cornbread can.

A basic and traditional southern potato salad - simply potatoes, onion, celery, eggs, just a bit of mustard, some pickle and mayonnaise, shown here plated with my BBQ menu, including grilled ribs, baked beans, macaroni salad, marinated tomatoes and Silver Queen corn on the cob.

Classic Southern-Style Potato Salad

Potato salad reminds me so much of my Mama. This recipe is basically the same as hers - simple, basic, southern potato salad. Nothin' fancy or highfalutin' - just potatoes, eggs, onion, celery, a little bit of mustard, some pickle relish, salt & pepper. Oh, and mayo, of course!

Step by Step Tutorial for Homemade Southern Banana Pudding

A true southern classic, no event would be complete without somebody bringing a big bowl of banana pudding with homemade custard.

Homemade Southern Banana Pudding

Banana pudding is a mainstay here in the south. It shows up at just about every single event there is.

Homemade custard is not absolutely necessary but it really is a huge difference from the shortcut version, so I highly suggest that you give the custard a try. If you use a double boiler it makes easy work of it and it really doesn't take any longer than whipping up some instant pudding to be honest.

For those who prefer a bread dressing, this bread and herb stuffing mix will fill the bill!

Homemade Herb Bread Dressing (Stuffing)

Is it stuffing? Or is it dressing? Does it really matter? Course not!

It's really the same to me - just depends on the presentation, as far as I'm concerned. I say if it's cooked in the bird, it's "stuffing;" if it's cooked in a separate dish, its "dressing." Whatever you call, we sure love it!

Grape Jelly Cocktail Meatballs and Smokies Sausages

 

Grape jelly meatballs, made with homemade or frozen meatballs, chili sauce and grape jelly, are classic south and always a crowd favorite for any gathering.

Grape Jelly Cocktail Meatballs

Cocktail meatballs with grape jelly sauce. As country as that may sound to some, these little meatballs - and sometimes little smokies (or Lit'l Smokies) sausages - drenched in a sauce of grape jelly with tomato based chili sauce is just outright loved down south. I think it will always be.