The classic Rotel Queso Dip, but made with sausage and shrimp!

Shrimp Rotel Dip

This is a variation of the classic and ever-popular Rotel Queso Dip, with the addition of shrimp and often ground beef, though ground turkey, pork or sausage or even a combination works well too. I personally love it with breakfast sausage the most, over them all!

Most recipes use a larger shrimp, sometimes whole, sometimes chopped up, but I find the small salad sized shrimp to be a perfect choice. There are lots of them in a pound and they're just the right chip size.

A crisp cookie, made with butter and shortening, brown sugar and pecans.

Pecan Crispies

No time for much chat, Christmas is here and I wanted to sneak in one more recipe! Some of you who scroll past the chatty stuff will probably be happy to hear that! No worries. It's all good.

Y'all already know I'm not super crazy about sweet stuff - oh I enjoy something sweet occasionally, and I do love a good cookie - I mean who doesn't love a handful of freshly baked cookies, right?

Jumbo Shrimp with Homemade Cocktail Sauce

Shrimp Cocktail from Deep South Dish blog. Jumbo shrimp, poached, boiled or oven-roasted and served with a zesty homemade cocktail sauce.

Shrimp Cocktail

Don't you just feel fancy when you're at a restaurant where they still have a shrimp cocktail on the menu? I tend to order one when they are, but even when I don't, I kinda light up when I see somebody else get one delivered to their table. It's a little luxurious to me! Hey, what can I say. Those little small things make me happy! I had a bag of jumbo shrimp in the freezer that I needed to use so thought that it would be a good time to get a shrimp cocktail recipe up.

Sure, there's always basic cocktail sauce, simple lazy man sauce, or even super-flavorful Comeback Sauce, that we whip up in a hurry for our boils, and any one of those works just fine for dipping boiled shrimp. Yes, you can even buy it all bottled up for you at the grocery store, but when we have these nice, beautiful jumbo shrimp that we want to use for an appetizer - like for a holiday menu - well, they deserve a little step up, if you ask me!

Baked Ham, basted with an apple cider, honey, brown sugar, pepper jelly and mustard glaze.

Apple Cider Ham

The Cajun loves baked ham, and I mean he loves it, so much so, that I don't wait for a holiday to cook them - I cook them all year-round! It's pretty good stuff, gotta admit, and it's good hot from the oven, at room temperature, or even cold, right out of the fridge.

There's so many things you can do with ham too, from sandwich fillings to beans to casseroles, that it makes sense to buy a big one for planned leftovers. I also prefer a bone-in ham, just to have the bone, but take into consideration the fact that it can often take up a substantial percentage of the weight of the ham. All the more reason to buy a larger one. I mean you just can't beat the flavor of a pot of ham bone beans!

Green Bean Étouffée - Smothered Green Beans

Green beans with onions and tasso or andouille, smothered in a light roux gravy.

Green Bean Étouffée

Give us the opportunity to smother something in gravy in the south, and we'll sure do it - seafood certainly, but yes, even green beans and peas y'all! Hey, what can I say? Gravy is good stuff.

If you've ever had the opportunity to eat the green bean side dish from Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen - my favorite place for fried chicken when I have a craving for it and don't want to deal with the mess - then you're already familiar with smothered green beans. A simple side dish made from a light roux, sauteed onion, chopped tasso and green beans simmered in the gravy. It's absolutely delicious!

A quicker prep version of meat lasagna, using ground beef, commercial pasta sauce and oven-ready lasagna noodles.

Shortcut Lasagna

There is nothing that can touch a homemade lasagna. Nothing. And let me tell you, when it's made with a sauce made from homegrown, backyard summer tomatoes, it is out of this world. But, like a good classic ziti, it's a labor of love from beginning to end and takes hours. Is it worth it?

You bet it is!

But the time factor pretty much relegates it to being a day off or weekend kind of meal.