A sheet pan meal of fish, shrimp and smoked sausage with broccoli and potatoes.

Sheet Pan Seafood Dinner

A few years back, sheet pan dinners were all the rage.

I never quite got into them to be honest, mainly because with a mix of proteins and different varieties of vegetables, cooking stages are often involved in order to cook everything evenly and not overcook others.

A one pan meal of smoked sausage, potatoes and sweet bell peppers, tossed with simple seasonings and olive oil and topped with pats of butter.

Smoked Sausage, Peppers and Potato Bake

The combination of flavors in this dish is one of my favorites, especially when I'm not much motivated to cook, because it's such an easy dish to throw together.

This version includes a hickory smoked Conecuh sausage, tender yellow potatoes and frozen mixed peppers with onions, seasoned, tossed with extra virgin olive oil, dotted with butter and baked. It's simple, easy, tasty and super flavorful.

With green beans available year round, this green bean vegetable salad with potatoes makes for a great side dish any time of the year.

Green Bean and Potato Salad

Green beans and potatoes go together like hand and glove, and we sure do love that hot dish served in the south.

But... have you ever considered combining this classic southern mix up with a vinaigrette and serving it cold? It's actually a great combination as a cold vegetable salad, though it's also good slightly warm or at room temperature too!

Small red or yellow potatoes, tossed with extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper and dried herbs and roasted in the air fryer.

Air Fryer Roasted Potatoes

While I love all kinds of vegetables, my husband, aka "The Cajun," is not a big veggie eater.

He's more of a "starchy" vegetable kind of guy and specifically the classic meat and potatoes man, so potatoes make a regular appearance on the plate in this house, along with rice, because rice is a big deal in the Deep South thanks to our many rice fields.

In fact, according to Think Rice US Grown, each year American rice farmers sustainably grow roughly 20 billion pounds of rice in Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas, half of which is used domestically, and the other half exported. That's a lot of rice y'all!

But, we're talking potatoes here.

O'Brien Style Cast Iron Skillet Fried Potatoes

Red skin potatoes are fried up in a cast iron skillet with sweet Vidalia onion and bell pepper and nicely seasoned for a take on Potatoes O'Brien. Great for any meal - add bacon, ham, sausage, fresh herbs and mushrooms if you like!

Potatoes O'Brien - Skillet Fried Potatoes

Skillet fried potatoes, also known as home fries and cottage fries in the north, are such an easy side dish, that goes well with breakfast, but also as a dinner side dish. For my classic skillet potatoes I use peeled russets, some onion and that's about it other than the delicious fat used to cook them in - for me, I love using bacon drippings for the extra richness it provides - and the very specific method.

For this version of skillet potato, I prefer to use the smaller, unpeeled red-skinned or new potatoes. The skin is tender, and to me tasty, and they cook up nicely without the steaming process that is necessary for our beloved fried taters and onion. If you prefer to use a russet, rather than a red skinned potato, you certainly can, though I'd click over to that other recipe, because I think that method works best with russets.