Main

Pancakes! It is safe to say that besides ice cream, pancakes are my favorite food. Is that entire sentence strange coming from a gluten- and dairy-free baker? Probably. In any event, here it is, a recipe with all the buttery goodness added right in. Please note: I like my pancakes extremely thin, so expect that from this recipe. If you want them meatier, just add 1/3 cup more flour. You want another no-brainer of a recipe to go along with this one? How about the sweet aftertaste and the mildly chunky texture of banana mashed up against the crunchy outlines of the pancake crust and enveloped inside a slight billowy center? Take the day off work already! Personally—and by that I mean in this recipe—I sometimes add pre-mashed bananas so as to create a subtle fruit-to-batter mélange. But if you’re some sort of breakfast bungee-jumper or whatever, you could hack them up rough-like and have a deliciously rocky stack.

Creamy cheese spiked with jalapeño peppers in this roulade of cumin- and garlic-flavored venison keeps the lean meat moist. This is one of my husband’s favorite ways to share his deer harvest each winter.

Not a designation by the church but a given name, Deacon Pattnotte ran the small grocery market on Grand Avenue in Yazoo City. He smoked meats and sold them sliced by the pound, but one of the most popular items in the store was his kibbeh. A Lebanese meatball of sorts made with ground beef or lamb and cracked wheat flavored with spices, kibbeh is quite a popular dish in the Delta. When making these in quantity, as Deacon did, the basic rule is for each pound of meat you need 1 teaspoon spice, 1 cup bulgur wheat, and 1 grated onion.

This can be cooked in a slow cooker, in a Dutch oven on top of the stove, or in a roasting pan in a 375°F. oven. Pick the way that suits you. Any way you cook it, you will find that the sweet pickle relish and barbecue sauce flavor the meat through and through.

This simple batter puffs up in the oven like a popover and envelops the sweet sausage nestled down in it like a snuggly down comforter. This is a family favorite on cold winter Sunday nights.

I love berries and lamb. The deep flavor of tender spring lamb takes on the essence of first-of-the-season berries, blending a perfect combination of sweetness with just enough tartness to make you pucker up.

When tart apple and sweet carrot cook down slowly with smoked paprika they make a savory jam for these fall-off-the-bone tender ribs.

Junior Pepper lived down the road near my great-aunt Carrye, who was a widow. (Almost all the older ladies out that way are widows, it seems.) Junior Pep, as he is known to all, makes the rounds checking on his lady friends a couple of times a week and calling their relatives if anything seems amiss. He has always been a ladies’ man. Junior Pep raised cattle and when I think of pepper steak he always comes to mind.

Since Mexican-made Coca-Colas have gained a cult following, varied myths have sprung up around the south-of-the-border beverage—everything from the notion that it actually contains cocaine (I would think it would be more expensive if it did) to the rumor that only two people have the top-secret formula for Mexican Coke. I know I like it—and kosher Coca-Cola, too. I suppose it’s simply because of the cane sugar used in the recipe instead of the now-standard corn syrup. These drumsticks are ridiculously sticky and messy to eat. Corral any children after dinner to wash their hands, and inspect them well before you turn them loose in the house or fingerprints will be found all about.

A mess of greens is the thing to serve with this golden fried covey and gravy.

Plump country pigeons roost on local grain silos fattening themselves up on the wheat or corn that has spilled. My father is a crack shot and regularly shoots doubles at skeeting events. He occasionally does some practice shooting around the silos, bringing home a batch of fat little birds. In town look for pigeon in the market, not on statuary. Pigeons at the market are called squab. The biggest difference between the two is those squabs have never flown.

The ubiquitous boneless, skinless chicken breast can be the quickest yet most boring, driest meal. Liven up this dinner staple with a bit of lemon zest, moisten it with butter, and crisp it with crumbs.

Chicken coops have sprung up in some of the poshest neighborhoods. Once you become accustomed to eating well-raised chickens it is hard to tolerate flavorless commercially produced fowl. My friends Paul and Angela Knipple raise chickens in their midtown Memphis yard. They feed the chickens protein-rich peanuts; the result is wonderfully rich eggs and a flavorful chicken. Their rooster is named Karen. He was mismarked at delivery. Peanuts and chicken are found together in Asian dishes. Here those flavors infuse a whole roasted bird.

The Florida Sport Lobster Season is always the last consecutive Wednesday and Thursday in July. All one needs to join this sporting scene is a bully net—a regular net with the handle bent to form a ninety-degree angle. Just trap the lobster beneath the ring of the net, and when he kicks his tail up into the net, sweep him up and swoop him into the boat! If you keep some of this butter concoction on hand you can be ready to grill just about any seafood with a slather of citrus butter. (It’s handy to pack some in the cooler for grilling out because it does not leak like marinades and sauces might.)

Freshwater prawns farmed in Mississippi are hatched in the nursery and kept in brackish water for three weeks. After that they are moved to fresh artesian well water in the nursery for thirty more days and then are stocked in ponds when the water temperature reaches the mid-sixties. After about four months they have grown large enough to bring to market. When the prawns are harvested in the fall from the artesian waters I always make a batch of this dirty rice. It is Southern through and through and well seasoned.

Omelets make a wonderful meal any time of day. This omelet is just right for those summer evenings when the next thing you know the sun has just gone down and it’s nine o’clock.

Out in Galveston Bay right around Thanksgiving the flounder run. The channels and passes that head from the marshy shallows out towards the deep Gulf of Mexico are teeming with the flat fellows on their way back to the gulf for winter. A hook baited with shrimp and an angler patient enough to give the hook time to set can come home with the two-fish limit. In Mobile Bay in Alabama the flounder run in the spring is called the Jubilee; the fish are so plentiful they can be scooped up by the netful. A dusting of potato starch and seasoning on these and a belly full of aromatics is a jubilant celebration of the flounders’ run.

Back when I was in high school we hung out at Estella’s Tavern on Moonbeam Street. It had Formica tables, walls covered halfway with variegated shag carpet and then mirrored the rest of the way up, low lighting, and a hell of a jukebox that had the Nat King Cole song “Sweet Lorraine” on it. I remember some very-late-night meals of pan trout (which was most likely whiting) doused with hot sauce, fried, crisp, and served on slices of white bread—completed, of course, by cold beer in a can. Man, oh man, were those delicious! Pan trout are what we call just about any fish small enough to fit in a little skillet. Giving the fish fillets a coating of white bread crumbs and a good shot of hot sauce whisks me back in time and has me humming “Sweet Lorraine.”

Cooking spaghetti squash in the microwave steams the squash and the strands come out nicely—unlike cooking it in a conventional oven, which can cause the strands to bake to the skin. A simple quick fresh pesto is a snappy sauce for the steamed squash.

A mirliton is a chayote squash or a vegetable pear. It is also the name for instruments in which a voice resonates over a membrane, as in a kazoo. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are bringing the kazoo back in style with their unique take on traditional jug-band music. I am mounting a campaign to bring the squash back too.