A homemade spaghetti meat sauce made with fresh tomatoes and ground beef.

Homemade Fresh Tomato Spaghetti Meat Sauce

There is not a thing wrong with shortcut spaghetti sauce - I use a semi-homemade version of one myself most of the time. It's a quicker version that takes canned pasta sauce and jazzes it up a bit to give it homemade flavor. I've been making it that way forever, and it's a great recipe when you want a good sauce in a hurry. My husband loves it, and that's good enough for me.

 

A country skillet breakfast meal, often called Farmer's Breakfast, made with fried potatoes, onions and peppers, eggs, sausage, ham or bacon, and cheese. Makes a great breakfast burrito filling.

Country Skillet Breakfast

This is a great breakfast meal, but honestly, it's just as good for brunch, lunch or even breakfast for dinner, and makes a great filling for breakfast burritos, a popular addition to the once-a-month cooking forum I used to frequent back in the day.

I'd make a batch of breakfast burritos and wrap them up to keep in the fridge for those busy mornings, making them a great make ahead meal for those hurried school mornings, especially for teenagers who might be more prone to stopping at the corner store for sugar laden sweets on the way to school instead.

Young, tender, yellow summer squash, prepared simple and basic. Sweet Vidalia onion and bell pepper is first sauteed in bacon drippings and butter, the squash is added, and slowly smothered down.

Smothered Summer Squash and Onions

Yellow squash is plentiful in our Southern summers and this is pretty much my top favorite way to enjoy it. It's the same basic way many of our other favorite squash recipes begin anyway, from creamed squash to squash dressing and casseroles, though it sure stands pretty well all on its own too.

7-layer pasta salad includes layers of shredded lettuce, rotisserie chicken, broccoli, cooked pasta, green peas, chopped tomato and shredded cheese. It's finished with a topping of a mayonnaise-based ranch style dressing and a garnish of chopped bacon and sliced green onion.

7 Layer Pasta Salad

Layered salads are great for entertaining and holidays, from baby showers to birthdays, Christmas to barbecue season, and really versatile enough that you can pretty much theme them flavor-wise to anything from basic, to Asian, to Italian or Tex-Mex.

Fresh okra, sliced and tossed in a seasoned cornmeal mixture, and fried in a cast iron skillet.

Classic Iron Skillet Fried Okra

I ran across some of last year's okra I grew and put up, waiting in the freezer for me to use up, so I decided I better get on it and fry some up!

Okra is not hard at all to grow here in the heat of The Deep South, though you do need a nice sized area that gets plenty of sun to have enough to put up. I never manage to get more than a few pods from one stalk before they give up the ghost, but once the pods do begin to show up, they grow pretty quick and harvesting will keep them coming.

An easy cream cheese filled danish made from crescent rolls and your favorite jam or preserves.

Crescent Danish

Y'all know I love Pillsbury crescent rolls for all the things you can create from them and these easy danish rolls are no exception. These are a slight adaptation from the Pillsbury website and they are so quick, easy and downright delicious, you will love them.

 

    Homemade, old-fashioned vanilla custard ice cream, made with a combination of whole milk, heavy cream, half and half, eggs and vanilla.

Old Fashioned Vanilla Custard Ice Cream

I don't treat myself to homemade ice cream as much as I would like to, and when I do, often it's a basic version made in my Cuisinart ice cream freezer, the kind that has the bucket you keep in the freezer and makes a soft serve ice cream in under 30 minutes. That's not counting chilling times and freezing times of course, but it's pretty handy for when you want to make ice cream without all the ice and salt and such... so long as you have the freezer space to keep the bucket frozen.

 

Whole figs, preserved in a thick sugar syrup.

Preserved Figs

I've talked about it here before, but I grew up in a home where the back property line butted up against a heavily wooded field. We had a short, wood framed fence along the back, easy to climb, and we had such fun playing in those woods, building caves and forts out of twigs and branches and using our imagination to entertain ourselves.

Times sure were much more innocent then.

Crab melts, also known as crabbies and crab canapes, are English muffins, topped with a mixture of crab, mayo, cheese, green onion and seasonings and passed under the broiler or baked.

Crab Melts

These are a treat that's a real throwback for sure, because for me they are another recipe that dates back to the 70s. I call them crab melts, though they have picked up a number of names over time, including crabbies, crabmeat bites, crab pickups, and crab canapes, to name a few.

Fresh garden tomatoes, seasoned with salt, pepper, Cajun seasoning, fresh basil and brown sugar, in a casserole made with bacon, butter and the trinity of Deep South veggies - onion, bell pepper and celery - topped with shredded cheddar cheese and buttery cracker crumbs.

Tomato Casserole

I recently shared a recipe from one of my round-up lists of fresh tomato recipes over on our Best Southern Recipes Facebook page and Phyllis, one of our readers there, mentioned in comments that she was still waiting on tomatoes in the area where she lived.