Baking potatoes, halved, toss with olive oil, salt & pepper & cooked on a hot grill.

Grilled Baked Potatoes

One of the easiest ways to grill baked potatoes is to simply wrap them in foil and cook them over direct heat until tender. You can unwrap them the last few minutes to crisp them up, but to me, it still tastes more like a steamed potato, which is good, but is missing that "baked" flavor. I don't wrap my potatoes when I bake them in the oven either - just wash, prick a few times with a fork or knife, and bake directly on the rack.  Course you can also cook them on the grill without wrapping but, either way, it takes about as long as it would in the oven.

Instead, treat them basically as you do other veggies on the grill, by slicing them lengthwise and then grilling them right over direct heat.  You get that baked flavor you want with a smaller time investment and the bonus of grilling so you don't have to heat up the oven. Simple. Delicious!

Chicken and Herb Dressing Casserole

 

Chicken and dressing made with a whole cooked chicken, a homemade herb dressing and homemade gravy.

Chicken and Herb Dressing

Okay. Fair warning. This chicken and dressing is a bread dressing and it has a butter roux - puh-lenty of butter. Like 1 full stick of Paula Deen worthy butter. And this one is made with a combination of chicken and herb dressing, meaning bread dressing and not cornbread, so don't go balking at me.

If you love heat, you're gonna love Shrimp Sauce Piquant. Piquant translated means literally "prickly" and that is what this spicy sauce piquant is meant to do, prick the tongue.

Shrimp Sauce Piquant

Most of y'all know that I try to keep the Cajun and Creole recipes I feature here with a slight bite, knowing well that many people will take recipes very literally. It is certainly much easier to increase the heat to taste in a spicy recipe than it is to try to take it away!

So, I try to keep things on the lighter side of spicy here for the general public, and let the reader choose to increase to their own heat level. Sauce piquant is one exception.

Bowtie pasta and peas with bacon, a southernized version of the Italian dish Butterflies and Peas or Farfalle con Piselli.

Bowtie Pasta and Peas with Bacon

This bowtie pasta and peas with bacon dish is a totally un-authentic and highly Southernized version of Butterflies (Bowtie Pasta) and Peas, known as Farfalle con Piselli, a classic Italian pasta dish.

It's a super easy and fast but tasty skillet pasta dish I think you'll really enjoy, well if you enjoy peas like me that is!

Cajun Chicken Fricassee - Smothered Chicken and Gravy

Chicken is first lightly fried, then a gravy is prepared with the seasoned flour and pan drippings, the chicken is dunked right in the gravy and slow stewed or baked.

Cajun Chicken Fricassee

This is not your typical fried chicken with gravy, oh no.

While the chicken does indeed get a quick fry, the purpose of frying the chicken is primarily to season the oil and add body to the gravy, so don't expect a crunchy fried chicken end product here.

Gravy is then made from the seasoned drippings and the chicken is dunked right into the gravy and the whole thing is finished stovetop or slow in the oven. Holy fat grams, it is some kind of delicious y'all.

I love summer tomatoes - there's just nothing like them - and while we southerners would all like to lay claim to our states having the best of the best of them, in my little ole humble opinion, any local tomato freshly plucked from a garden is the best!

12 Ways to Enjoy Summer Tomatoes

I do always lament the passing of summer tomatoes because while tomatoes are available to us the rest of the year, they just have no taste in comparison. They aren't local of course, so they have to travel from far away, they are picked early before they are ripe and then are often shot with things like nitrogen to turn them red and make them appear pretty. While they may look nice on the outside, we all know the insides often reveal a mealy texture and they are often lacking in anything remotely tasting like the tomatoes we are accustomed to out of our own backyards or local markets.

Panzanella salad may not be a traditional southern dish, but it sure fits in with our hot summer days and you don't even have to turn the oven on for homemade croutons - just grill your bread instead!

Panzanella Salad on Romaine

Yeah, yeah... I know. Panzanella salad isn't southern and it usually isn't served with lettuce either, but I like mine that way so that is how I eat it.

I just mix up the panzanella - a salad that was probably originally born out of the need to use up stale bread and whatever else happened to be in abundance in the garden - and then I spoon it over crisp romaine lettuce.

The Absolute Best Homemade Croutons

Garlic infused olive oil is the key to these beautifully crispy and golden brown croutons.

Homemade Croutons

The Absolute Best. Perfect. World's Best. Awesome. I always smile when I see that in a recipe title, because while it may be a bit presumptuous, sometimes we really do think that our whatever-recipe is the best of the best, don't we?

Spicy Sugar Steaks

A spicy rub of brown sugar, paprika, chili powder, Cajun seasoning, garlic and onion powder, perfect for grilled or pan seared steaks.

Spicy Sugar Steaks

You don't see much on this site about steaks and it's not because we don't eat them - we certainly do.

It's because my favorite steak, hands down, is a rib-eye, and to me they just don't need anything much. A quick dousing of Dale's, Country Bob's, Hoover Sauce from the Delta when I have it or even just plain ole Worcestershire sauce (#affiliate) while it comes to room temperature for the grill, and that's about all I ever do most of the time.

Review: Grilled Chicken Florentine for Two from Macaroni Grill

Iced tea and iced coffee have been a "hot" ticket beverage item around this house the past few weeks with this extended heat wave.  I am very grateful for my central air conditioning right now and c'mon fall is about all I can say about that!

Well... to celebrate the end of Deep South Dish's 1st birthday week, I thought that I would host another giveaway courtesy of MyBlogspark and Macaroni Grill, that will help to get you out of the kitchen quick!