Cast iron skillet Southern cornbread made with buttermilk and stone-ground cornmeal.

Real Southern Cornbread

What's the fastest way to stir up a hissy fit among Southerners?

Say to them "a real Southerner would never ... [fill in the blank]," that's how.

I hear it sometimes on social media about my own personal recipes because there are some folks who have set in their heads that to be "Southern," a recipe must be prepared a certain way - the way that they grew up with it being prepared, and only that way.

Russet potatoes, scrubbed, peeled and sliced, tossed in cooking oil and fried.

Soft Fried Potatoes

There are versions of these kinds of fried potatoes all across the country, but most definitely in the South - and, as usual, everybody prepares them differently.

There are two versions that I make the most.

• Southern-style, smothered fried potatoes with onion, made with cubed peeled russet potatoes, that are first steamed, then pan-fried in bacon drippings to crisp and turned, resulting in a tender inside, but with crispy outer edges.
  
  
• Unpeeled red skin potatoes, fried up in a cast iron skillet with sweet or yellow onion and bell pepper and nicely seasoned for a take on Potatoes O'Brien. Great for any meal and versatile - add bacon, ham, sausage, fresh herbs and even mushrooms if you like!

Hand-formed pones of dense and sturdy fried cornmeal patties, a perfect companion for a bowl of greens and pot likker.

Corn Dodgers

If you look up corn dodgers on the internet, you'll find a huge variety of recipes that may differ significantly from one another.

I suppose that's true of a lot of dishes in Southern cooking - like corn casseroles for instance. In truth, it really all depends on one thing, and one thing only.

What you grew up with and how your Mama cooked things!

A baked rice dressing, made with freshly shucked Gulf oysters, with sautéed onion, green onion, bell pepper, celery, garlic, rice and seasonings, and always a holiday favorite here in the Deep South.

Oyster Rice Dressing

Rice stands in for bread and cornbread in this common dish here in the Deep South and is what we refer to as a rice dressing.

A mix of meats or seafood, or sometimes, as with this oyster rice dressing, a blend of them, along with onion, green onion, bell pepper and celery, rice and seasonings, it's very often offered as a side dish, though it is also used as a stuffing at times.

One thing is for sure. It's a favorite here in the Deep South year-round, and super popular for  Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.

A classic, southern-seasoned stewed chicken and gravy, made easy using the Instant Pot!

Instant Pot Stewed Chicken

I love my slow-stewed chicken, but it's just that - a bit of a timely process since the chicken slow simmers for awhile.

Once I gave it a try in my Instant Pot, it was a game changer!

With whole chickens on sale regularly around here, and a faster cooking process, it has become an easy, comfort meal to enjoy anytime.

Classic cornmeal-coated fried green tomatoes with a twist! Instead of slices, these are cut into chunks but breaded the same way, creating bite-sized fried green tomato nuggets with more of that surface crunch we love.

Fried Green Tomato Nuggets

First, a little housekeeping nugget before we move on to the recipe!

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Buttermilk drop biscuits, made with bacon drippings and cooked, crumbled bacon bits, baked in a cast iron pan.

Bacon Drop Biscuits

What's not to love about biscuits? I sure love them and probably a little too much, as I love a wide variety of them. Sometimes, I just get a craving for biscuits y'all. That's it. Biscuits. Just biscuits!

Yes, I understand that when you are new to biscuit making, they can be frustrating and a challenge to perfect, and frankly, there really is only one solution to that. Keep making biscuits! The old rule of practice makes perfect really does apply here.

From scratch, chicken and dumplings, made in a slow cooker and using a whole chicken for a homemade stock, a creamy roux base and drop dumplings.

Slow Cooker Chicken with Drop Dumplings

I love chicken and dumplings. Love it! It's one of my favorite dishes and that goes for any time of the year, not just winter.

While I do tend to follow the same basic guidelines, even with a variety of methods, I'm not married to any one of them. So many folks make chicken and dumplings one way all of their life, but I love playing around with it!

Stewed Blackberries and Dumplings

Fresh blackberries, sweetened and stewed and topped with sweet steamed dumplings. Serve over vanilla ice cream.

Blackberries and Dumplings

Couple years ago, I bought two thornless blackberry plants from Cottage Farms on QVC. Being inexperienced with the plant, the first year, I wasn't sure what was going on with them. They grew like mad, but that's it. Lots of thick vines. Lots of green leaves. But, no blossoms. No berries, and, in fact, after a couple of freezes that winter, I resigned myself that they didn't make it.

Thank goodness I didn't cut them down because lo and behold come spring the next year, I saw new growth sprouting along all of the old canes and before I knew it, blossoms everywhere, followed by the most beautiful, huge, gorgeous and tasty blackberries.

A stew made of chicken thighs, or a whole cut-up chicken, browned in butter and oil, and cooked in a tomato-based Creole sauce with the trinity of veggies and a mix of curry, herbs and spices and rice.

Country Captain Chicken

There are a lot of theories about the origins of this dish, none of which is set in stone, although both Georgia and South Carolina have definitely laid claims to it. Legend has it that it's a dish that a ship's captain carried to America as a result of the spice trade, perhaps through the ports of Charleston or Savannah.

It's a one-pot, butter-browned, curried chicken dish, appearing to be Indian in origin, typically made with bone-in, skin-on, whole cut-up chicken, or most often, only chicken thighs. If you want to cut back on fat, you could get away with boneless, skinless thighs, with the understanding that the loss of bone and fat is also loss of flavor, and you'll need to compensate with cooking time and seasonings.

Hand-formed, extra large, lard-based cathead biscuits, baked in a hot cast iron skillet.

Cathead Biscuits

It's hard to believe from modern-day biscuits, that southern biscuits were once teeny, tiny little things. Not so much anymore, because like many foods, we've super-sized them!

Who can blame us, though. From skillet biscuits, to cream biscuits, to sweet potato, classic buttermilk and everything in between, we do love our biscuits in the south and we pretty much love them large.

Enter, Cathead Biscuits.

Classic Chicken and Andouille Sausage Gumbo (Gumbo Ya-Ya)

A classic light roux-based gumbo, made with a cut up chicken and andouille sausage, served over hot steamed rice.

Chicken and Andouille Sausage Gumbo

I've been making and sharing Miss Lucy's chicken gumbo with y'all for years, but admit, her classic Cajun-style method is not exactly the way that I usually make my gumbo.

Miss Lucy's recipe makes a roux, then adds water to the roux and then adds the chicken, sausage and trinity (onion, bell pepper and celery) to the pot, a classic Cajun one pot prep.

I prepare my gumbo in a way that is more traditional where I live - brown the meats, prepare the roux, cook the trinity in the roux, then add the water or stock and the rest.

However you make it, we eat a lot of it and it's mighty good!

Bone-in, skin-on, chicken thighs and legs, or a whole chicken, cut up, seasoned and baked with cream soup and rice for a flavorful, tender baked chicken.

Old School Baked Chicken and Rice

With the usual errands and chores of life, it can sure make for busy days and I'm happy to turn to the old school dishes like this chicken and rice when days are super active. It's simple - throw it all together and throw it in the oven. This truly is old school y'all, as it's been around as long as I have, but it's delicious too!

Sometimes called "no-peek" chicken, I like to uncover it toward the end of cooking to brown the top of the otherwise pale chicken.

Little bite sized pecan desserts, made with a cream cheese pastry crust baked with a brown sugar based pecan filling.

Southern Pecan Tassies

These little bite-sized treats are popular on the Christmas tray because they are easy to make and, even better, delicious to eat!

Internet bloggers often confuse them as mini pecan tarts or pies, though us southerners know them as pecan tassies. They're similar, of course, to pecan pie, although most pecan pies have a syrup base - most often corn, cane or sorghum are used - but tassies always have a brown sugar based filling.

Seasoned pork chops, seared and baked over toasted rice with beef broth, herbs, onion and bell pepper.

Southern Pork Chop and Rice Casserole

This recipe is a pretty classic preparation of a common baked pork chops and rice dish we all enjoy in some form here in the south.

There are some variations as always among cooks, but it typically involves very basic seasonings, some kind of liquid - sometimes a cream soup, sometimes a consommé or French onion soup, sometimes just a simple broth and water added to double the ratio of rice, and sometimes a packet of onion soup mix and water is used.

Country Green Beans with Ham and Potatoes - Green beans, slow stewed in a ham broth, with chunks of torn ham or tasso and potatoes, and served with a flavorful pot likker.

Country Green Beans with Ham and Potatoes

If I had to pick only one vegetable I could eat for the rest of my life, it'd sure be hard.

While The Cajun's veggie list is very limited, I pretty much love them all. Just take a look at the cover of my cookbook and you'll see one of my favorite meals ever!

Yep, I'm a veggie plate gal and I can make a meal out of just about any vegetable pairing. Well... actually that cover shot was my supper that day!

Deep South Dish Cookbook, available at your favorite local bookstore, or online at Amazon!

Southern style meatloaf, made with ground chuck, onion and sweet bell pepper and finished with a brown sugar ketchup glaze.

Southern Style Meatloaf

Y'all know how I feel about labeling recipes or methods of cooking as "real" or "true" southern. I say it all the time, and I will continue to repeat it as long as I'm sharing recipes here on my blog, that one true reality I have learned in my now about ten years of blogging about southern food, is that there is no one "true" way to cook in the south. We sometimes do things a little bit different from one another.

Truth is, it rests solely on two things - the region of the south where you grew up, and what your own mama did - which was likely drawn from what her mama did. I am a southerner, born and raised, but my way of cooking some things may be potentially far different from your way, though it doesn't make either one better or more "right" than the other.

Fresh or frozen baby lima beans or butter beans, slow simmered in a ham hock seasoned broth with onion, chicken base, salt and pepper, and finished with a nob of butter or bacon drippings - a definite summertime southern favorite.

Southern-Style Baby Lima Beans or Butterbeans

You can use this for both butterbeans or baby lima beans, both of which I love.

Southern Style Hissy Fit Warning... I love all kinds of butterbeans - big and small and speckled - and I don't understand for the life of me, why some southerners get all up in a tizzy about what they think a butter bean is, any more than what constitutes a "real" cornbread or whether a hoecake is flour or cornmeal based.

The internet has opened the south to all southerners and revealed that despite what we thought growing up, there is no one south. Truth is, how you cook in the south and what you call things in the south, depends on what part of the south you grew up in and how your mama did it, which is more likely than not to be different from how somebody else's mama did.

Southern purple hull peas are cooked down with salt pork or bacon, onion and simple seasonings, then finished with a Creole-style stewed tomato.

Purple Hull Peas with Creole Stewed Tomatoes

Summer is winding down and I sure hope y'all put up some purple hulls - I sure did!

Simple process really - good rinse, pick through, toss in some boiling water, boil for about 2 minutes, drain, plunge in ice water till cool, drain and bag. I've tried several methods of putting up, and in my experience, blanching keeps them better and they retain a fresher taste for a longer period of time in your freezer. I use my FoodSaver so I don't freeze them in water, though some folks do. So good to pull out a bag of fresh purple hulls in the middle of the winter, I'm tellin' ya!

Belly warming and hearty, a slow stewed ham bone stock is finished with drop dumplings.

Ham Bone Dumplings

In the south, we'll drop some biscuit dough in just about any dish with a soup or stew consistency - beans, soup, stews, they're all game. All dumplings require is a full-bodied stock and you're in business.

Starting ham and dumplings with a nice leftover ham bone, or absent that, a couple of meaty ham hocks, makes for a beautiful, rich stock base. The freezer preserved leftover holiday ham bone makes ham dumplings a pretty common thing in the first of the new year, especially when the weather outside's been frightening.