Hey!  Where are y’all from?

If we were meeting in real life, that is what I’d ask you.  Then I’d start to ask if you know my great-aunt, or the girl that I graduated from high school with.

 If you were from somewhere foreign like South Dakota, I’d ask you what y’all eat there.  Like, do you have fried chicken?  Have you ever heard of okra?

No? We’ve had okra for a long time.  Since forever really, but when you look in cookbooks, you rarely find an okra recipe.

That is, until now.  New York City thinks they have just discovered a new vegetable and they are selling it in vegetable stands and posting signs about how they have okra, but they spell it “ocra” like some sort of dyslexic whale, but we’ve had it for a long time.

As a matter of fact, we’d call it working class food.  It’s cheap, easy to grow, prolific, and you can hardly kill it.  And it’s out of this world fried in bacon fat.  There’s a metaphor in there.

Anyway, back to where you’re from.

I’m a southern girl.  Always have been.  I live in Tennessee with my family, and most of my extended family lives here too.  I have a husband, a son, a daughter, and an inherited daughter.  We have two dogs, a garden, and various and sundry wildlife.

Coach teaches and coaches football, I teach English and write, the kids are teens, the dogs are middle-aged and the wildlife is unpredictable.

This place and these people are what nurture me.  The South is complicated, but it’s mostly hospitable and works on the economy of kindness.

For most of us, that means:

• Kindness trumps correctness
• Manners are merely to make others feel comfortable, not inferior
• Homes are a soft place to land, not a Pinterest board
• Kitchens are for families
• Farm-to-table isn’t a novelty, it’s just how you eat
• You have a sure-fire pound cake recipe and a meal your kids will bring friends home to eat
• A house isn’t a home without a dog
• A yard isn’t a yard without a garden
• A garden isn’t a garden without neighbors to share it with
• And for the love of all that is holy, it means you can mix a proper cocktail on a moment’s notice

 That’s what being southern is really about. That’s what I’m really about.

 It’s not so much a physical location as a spiritual one.  Our seasons are extreme, our history is complicated, and our people are diverse.  But I think that is the case in a lot of places.

We don’t care what you do so much, but we want to know about your people and your place.

And that’s what you’ll find here. It’s a little bit quirky and we’ll always keep it classy.

I hope y’all will join me.  We’ll share recipes, books we like, stories we love, and maybe we can figure out what to do when humidity attacks our hair.  You can subscribe to receive the posts by e-mail 2-3 times a week.  I promise that your e-mail will never be shared.

And please connect with me on social media!  I am a big fan of a giveaway.  I will always announce a giveaway on social media.  If you look to the right, you can push my buttons and we can hang out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

I’m so glad you’re here.  Grab a glass of tea and let’s just sit a bit.

See Y’all!

Traci