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| Paula Deen |
I am good cook. No, let me toot my own horn a bit more, I am a great cook. I can throw things together and make just about anything taste good. So it’s no surprise that this weekend I attended the metropolitan cooking and entertaining show in Washington, D.C.
While there we got to see the fantastic country cook, Paula Deen. Now, I consider myself a southerner, but if I say it in front of my husband, who is from Long Island, N. Y., he will always pipe in with the fact that I wasn’t born in the south but New Jersey of all places. It doesn’t matter that I have lived almost my entire life in the South; I am a northerner in his eyes. And yes I have relatives that speak with a New Yawk accent!
No matter what he says, though, I am no stranger to southern cooking. My first husband, Jerry, who died in a car accident, was born and raised in the south. (Thus passing my husbands criteria of a true southerner) Jerry’s whole family was just like Paula Deen, boisterous, fun and incredibly good cooks. Good country cooking subscribes to the theory of waste not--want not. Country folk used what they had. They had to grow their own food, raise livestock, and churn butter…and they used it-- liberally. They were not fat because they worked hard. And they all lived to ripe old ages.
So I consider myself lucky. In my life, I have experienced the cuisine of the north and the south. I have had knishes and Italian ices and I’ve have had hominy (not grits) cooked with sausage, corn pudding, and fresh churned butter, and fortunately for me, I am not fat.
What kind of regional foods do you like? Are you a country mouse or a city mouse?
