I have an unruly privet hedge.  I know it can look a little shaggy and overgrown.  I know my neighbor doesn’t like it. Landscapers have tried to clean out my hedge, make it neat and groomed.  But at the end of April every year, and again, briefly, in September, that privet is wildly overrun [...]

The spring brunch season starts with Easter, then moves onto graduation parties, wedding parties and long vacation weekends.  That’s where this recipe comes from.  It was a request for Easter brunch – pickled asparagus to garnish Bloody Marys.  I of course complied.  Because quick pickles like these are so easy, but add a very special touch.  [...]

The main attraction in these early days of the farmers markets here is the wide variety of lettuces and salad greens.  But I skip right past those stalls, because this year I have a big beautiful, bed of lettuces in my own backyard, with a little help from Bennett-Burk Farm.  I have eaten lettuce every [...]

Nothing motivates one to get in the kitchen more than a funeral.  We all seem to harbor that primordial need to comfort with food.  And there are fixed ideas – recipes that we keep in mind, or maybe on a card at the front of the recipe box for easy access.  A hearty, comforting dish [...]

I have a funny relationship with coconut.  I don’t buy coconut candy bars, I leave the coconut balls behind in the assorted chocolate box, would order caramel over coconut cake and don’t do coconut rum drinks.  But when I happen to be served a coconut sweet, I always love it, and wonder why I don’t [...]

What’s in a name? I have been pondering how to share this recipe for some time now.  It’s a classic I’ve enjoyed my whole life that I’ve always known as carrot pudding.  But I worried that might be a bit misleading. You see, I want people to be intrigued, and to try this recipe, because [...]

If classic Southern buttermilk biscuits are country music, cathead biscuits are the blues.  Not Hank Williams, but Howlin’ Wolf.  Not Sunday go-to-meeting food, but the manna of hardworking folks using whatever they can lay their hands on to fill the belly. Cathead biscuits are a feature of the Mississippi Delta.  The name comes, apparently, from the [...]

Candy making is not something I typically try my hand at. All that talk about thermometers and stages and testing methods.  Those recipes always look like the kind of thing I don’t have the patience for.  Plus, once you’ve been badly burned by hot sugar, it makes you candy-shy. But this is an exception.  I [...]

This may well be my favorite meal.  At least, it has all the components of a few of my favorite things.  A creamy, rich tomato soup and a biscuit, packed with the flavors of pimento cheese.  A match made in heaven, a pairing perfect for the gloomy cold of January. First off, the combination of [...]

I have stumbled across this recipe in many community cookbooks over the years, and after seeing it so many times, I just had to try it to see if it’s for real.  It’s so easy, I had a suspicion it was too good to be true.  But, lo and behold, it works. I have seen [...]