A shortcut sweet potato casserole with the unusual addition of banana and finished with rows of marshmallows and brown sugar sweetened cornflake cereal crumbs.

Sweet Potato Banana Crunch

I am all for being about tradition when it comes to holiday meals. Keep the dishes that you know and love on the menu, because everyone will be expecting them, every, single year!

My Mama's holiday table was the same every year, with very little variation between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I miss those times so much, and while we now share our holidays with my son, our daughter-in-law and grandkids, I still find myself missing my Mama tremendously this time of year.

A few basic ingredients: cherry pie filling, crushed pineapple, sweetened condensed milk and Cool Whip make up the base for this old school frozen delight! From there, make it your own with easy add-ins.

Frozen Cherry Fruit Salad

I live on the Gulf Coast, and down here, the humidity is as important as the temperature. Maybe even more so! We've been under 100+ degree heat advisories here for awhile now because of that heat index. In June. Already. I pray we don't see a hurricane this year, well, ever again in my lifetime really, that knocks out power for long. Gotta have that air conditioning down here!

When the weather heats up like this, cooling foods are a steady in my house. Watermelon, cucumbers, grapes, cantaloupe, strawberries are consumed regularly around here! Of course, although they may mostly be relegated to those family gatherings more so these days, we have our icebox and freezer desserts too. This cherry salad is one of those that has been around for years.

A wonderful heirloom recipe dating back 100 years, this simple pecan cookie bar is topped with a brown sugar meringue layer, giving them a slightly crisp, cracked topping.

Original Old Fashioned Mud Hen Bars

You may never have heard of Mud Hen Bars before, or you may have seen them for first time in the last couple of years across the explosion of food blogs, but it's actually one of those recipes that's been around even longer than I have.

Old Fashioned Holiday Fruit Salad with Custard Sauce

Old Fashioned Holiday Fruit Salad with Custard Sauce - a mixed fruit salad, made with canned fruit cocktail, mandarin oranges, grapes, maraschino cherries and fresh apples and finished with an egg custard and fruit juice based dressing - a long-time favorite on many Southern holiday tables.

Holiday Fruit Salad

Fruit salads are popular for holiday meals and there must be thousands of variations, from congealed, to mixed fruit, to frozen. This classic version made from an assortment of fresh and canned fruits and dressed with an egg custard that substitutes juices for the traditional cream sauce, dates back many years and has been a holiday favorite in my family for years.

Rich and decadent, dense and fudge-like, Mississippi Mud Cake is made with cocoa, topped with marshmallows, a buttery cocoa icing and salted, toasted pecans.

Mississippi Mud Cake

While there is some slight variation in recipes for Mississippi Mud Cake among us Southerners, they all contain flour, sugar, eggs, cocoa, butter, pecans, a layer of marshmallow and a buttery, powdered sugar and cocoa icing.

Some folks use large fluffy marshmallows, some minis, and some use marshmallow creme. I've used all of those!

Some put all of the pecans in the cake, others of us put them on top, others divide them between.

Some even add coconut.

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.

It's very similar to the Old Fashioned 5 Cup Salad, and, 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 this recipe ambrosia, as do some of you.

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!

Chocolate cake mix with marshmallows, sweetened coconut, sliced almonds, butter, chocolate chips make Almond Joy Cake, a fabulous and well loved candy bar cake.

Almond Joy Cake

Almond Joy Cake is one of the most popular of the doctored up cake mix cakes and it's no wonder really. Chocolate cake, topped with a layer of gooey marshmallow and coconut cream, that is topped with a creamy layer of chocolate and almonds, and more crunchy almonds on top - it's really rich and decadent I promise ya.