As a small child growing up in the hills of North Alabama, there was always one thing that would always make my ears perk up. That was my Daddy’s announcement that he was making his special peanut candy. “When will it be ready, daddy?” I would ask. “About thirty minutes,” he would reply. “I’ve got
Did you know William Faulkner, the Mississippi native and famous American novelist, bragged to his friends and acquaintances he had been wounded in battle during World War I when, in fact, he never saw combat. Did you know that the Nobel-winning author was an avid golfer who loved to spend hours searching for lost golf
I am retired now; that is, I am retired from working with the public. However, I am not retired from life and I am relishing the freedom to harken to a whim and go sit out on the front porch with a cup of coffee or a glass of cold iced tea, a good book
Believe it or not, baking bread can help relieve stress. Since the day I started cooking as a teenager, I have loved working with yeast. Perhaps you do, too. It’s not difficult, but the yeast needs to be in date or it will result in a useless effort. In this article, I am going to
Don’t most people like macaroni and cheese? Seems so to me. Somewhere long ago some forward thinking cook decided to combine two of my favorite ingredients–macaroni and cheese–to make a delicious and simple main dish or side dish. By itself, macaroni is just about tasteless, but combine it with other ingredients and it can become
Many years ago my mother made a book of recipes to be handed down to her children and grandchildren. The book was a treasure trove of recipes from generations past, many concocted in order to utilize the ingredients on hand and produce tasty dishes. During hard times, such as the Great Depression, my mother and
For the past seventy-five years, residents of Etowah County, Alabama have used Noccalula Falls, a 250-acre campground high on Lookout Mountain, as their primary gathering place for Sunday picnics, family reunions, office parties and social club events. When I was young, my family often went to “the Falls” to admire its grandeur and to hike
In the early sixties, a group of well-known literary pundits got together to decide who were the greatest novelists of all time. Their conclusion was that Leo Tolstoy wrote the greatest novel in “War and Peace”, but they also decided that the French novelist Honore de Balzac was the greatest novelist simply because he produced
A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines examines the complex relationships between whites and blacks during the early 1970s in rural Cajun Country Louisiana. Gaines’ portrayals of his characters come across as earthly, warm and as human as the Louisiana countryside itself. The title of each chapter names the person who is narrating
As a Southern girl I know full well that, on a cold winter morning, there is nothing on this earth like the taste of strawberry jelly and hot, buttered hoe cake bread. My family grew up enjoying this tasty bread along with an assortment of companion foods: sorghum, molasses, syrup, and honey plus all
