A cheesy potato casserole, made with potatoes that are baked twice, and including all my favorite loaded baked potato ingredients - bacon, butter, sour cream, cheddar cheese and green onion - all in a simple casserole form.

Cheesy Loaded Twice-Baked Potato Casserole

Y'all pretty much know by now how I feel about potatoes. Being married to a meat and potatoes man, they are certainly a pantry staple in this house, making a regular appearance on the supper plate in some form. Truth is, being a lover of carbs, I love them too, and pretty much any way you can make them - including casseroles like this, that center around potatoes.

Recipes very similar to this casserole can be found everywhere, but mostly they come in a mashed potato form. When I set out to make my version though, I had some specifics in mind that I wanted it to have.

Green tomatoes, seasoned with a pinch of sugar, salt, pepper, Cajun seasoning, garlic powder and lemon pepper, topped with onion, cheese, crushed Ritz crackers and butter and baked.

Green Tomato Casserole

It's still Hotter than Hot down here in the Deep South, but if you love green tomatoes and you're willing to crank down the air conditioner and use your oven, this casserole is very much worth it.

I know it's getting late in the green tomato season for some of us, but finding a green tomato in a grocery store around here anytime is a rarity really. Grocery stores buy the bulk of their produce en masse from all over the country, rather than promoting much locally. It's sad but true. You can find green tomatoes early in the season at some places, like Jerry Lee's over in Gautier. How can you not love a grocery store named Jerry Lee's, I mean c'mon?

Garden Fresh Salsa, made with juicy tomatoes, sweet Vidalia onions, crisp sweet garden bell peppers, spicy fresh jalapeno, sweet corn on the cob and fragrant garden cilantro.

Garden Fresh Salsa

Here it is running up on mid-August already and I realize that I've got quite a few summer posts like this one to catch up on! So don't go fussin' at me for posting a series of non-traditional recipes that may not necessarily fit into the "Southern" recipe box. Besides our southern favorites and classic southern recipes, like everybody else, we also enjoy a wide variety of other foods too, like this.

Simple syrup sweetened iced tea - refreshing!

Pitcher Perfect Sweet Tea

Summers in the South mean high tea consumption and during this ever present heat wave these past few months, I've been going through ice as fast as kudzu growing on a hillside.

Fried green tomatoes, topped with shrimp in a fresh tomato basil cream sauce.

Fried Green Tomatoes with Shrimp and Tomato Basil Cream Sauce

Recently, I was watching a feature on our local TV channel, where a local restaurant (now closed), was featured. They showed an appetizer dish from their menu, of fried green tomatoes with shrimp, in a tomato basil cream sauce. Well, it looked so good, I knew I had to make my own version of it. I don't know if this is anything like what they have on their menu, but it sure is mighty good and makes a fantastic main dish too.

Sweet Vidalia onions, stuffed with garlic and butter and drizzled with balsamic vinegar, wrapped in bacon and placed in individual packets to be cooked on the grill or oven.

Baked Vidalia Onions

If you're a lover of Vidalia onions like I am, isn't that just a thing of beauty? I mean really! How I love these sweet Vidalia onions in the summer, and I cry, quite literally, when they are gone until the next season rolls around and I have to use those stronger yellow onions. Sometimes I have to step outside just to clear my eyes, but that never happens with my sweet Vidalias.

 

Old fashioned, authentic southern tea cakes are basic, simple sugar cookies in their list of ingredients - butter, sugar, flour and eggs - but they speak so much more to our history, heritage and memories.

Old Fashioned Southern Tea Cakes

Food and memories are so intertwined in southern cooking that just the mention of things like fried pies, drinking custard, picking blackberries for cobbler and preserves, or biscuit bread, can bring back a flood of memories associated with loved ones long past. If there is one single food that invokes that excitement for Southerners though, it surely must be a Southern Tea Cake.