..it's comforting to return to a slower yesteryear, when time felt like it stood still...and memories were made in a sweeter, more mellow time.
My grandmother always made our Sunday dinner (lunch) on Saturday, so we could eat immediately on return from church.
She kept the (usually) chicken & dumplings in the warming container that was recessed into our old stove.--(Grandmother lived with us)
Along with the chicken & dumplings, we had 'greens' (which I never acquired a taste for)...and always, always cornbread, and fresh vegetables from the curb market....
..and homemade pies.
My great grandmother ....after a Sunday meal...use to simply throw a white sheet over the food and let it sit until supper time :^ (Grandmother never did that!)
(Great grandmother had a small icebox for absolute refrigeration!)
And Sunday afternoon, before evening worship, many times we would crumble the leftover cold cornbread into a large glass of cold milk or buttermilk :)
It's an acquired taste :) ....and one you're more likely to find in the South, or Tennessee, where I'm from :)
What Tennessean would ever have cornbread without some buttermilk for a later snack. The cornbread crumbled into the buttermilk.
Yep, both my grandmothers just left the meal on the table, and covered it with a tablecloth. Basically folks just ate all day, and any late comers had everything layed out for them.
Zak's Mom is right, bioled okra is disgusting, it MUST be fried.
Here's my fried chicken recipe:
Pour some flour into an empty bread bag.
Take a cut up chicken and shake in the bag of flour.
Then take the chicken pieces and roll them in a mixture of eggs/buttermilk (mostly eggs to keep mixture thick).
Then place the ckicken pieces back into the flour bag (makes the chicken crispier).
After all the chicken is floured a second time, the buttermilk/egg mixture is thick, so I pour it into the bread bag with the chicken and flour.
At this point your cooking oil should be really hot. Place chicken in the oil, sprinkle with Tony Chachere's Seasoning Mix, and brown on all sides. Then turn the stove on a really low simmer and cover the chicken and cook the inside. Sometimes I brown it again on higher heat before taking out of the pan.
I cook all my fried chicken in my grandmother's big iron skillet, and make my cornbread and bisquits in her iron skillets of various sizes I inherited from her.
I'm getting hungry.
When I was young, she raised chickens in the back yard (and this was not out in the country). I vividly remember seeing her and my aunt chasing down chickens, wringing their necks, plucking them, and singeing the remaining feathers off with a match. I never watched the rest of the procedure until the best chicken and dumplins you ever ate were on the table. [I know she used a pressure cooker because once the lid blew and my mother talked to her dying day of all the fun helping Grandma clean the mess off the applicances, the floor, the walls, the ceiling ... every exposed surface in the kitchen!]. Or scrumptious fried chicken with delicious milk gravy served with either rice or mashed potatoes.
She also cooked something she called creamed corn ... I've never been able to duplicate it or found anything even close to the wonder of that dish. She took 'mature' white corn, barely skimmed the tips off the kernels, then scraped all the creamy stuff off the cobs. Simmered slowly in an iron frying pan with bacon grease, this made a dish certainly fit for royalty. She also cooked delicious collards and made the best banana pudding ever.
I wish I could even begin to match her culinary skills ... not fancy but ohhhhhh so good!
My husband is from Oklahoma and likes his cornbread in sweet milk.