Gratitude for What's in the Fridge and Freezer by Barbara Quinn

I like to stock up on food items that I can fall back on during the weeks when food shopping becomes impossible due to too many other obligations. And one of my favorite dishes to make from what I find in my fridge, pantry, and freezer is Jambalaya. I acquired a taste for the dish when my son went to school at Tulane. It was love at first taste and the best part is that the dish can be made so many ways with many different ingredients. I usually have the basic ingredients on hand. Canned tomatoes, garlic, ham, frozen chicken breasts, chicken broth, onions, and the spices are mainstays in my household. I am truly grateful for Jambalaya. Here’s a recipe that you can modify to your own taste depending on what's in your pantry and fridge:

Jambalaya

2 Tbsps. Olive oil
1 Cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, whole
1 cup cooked chicken, cut up
1 cup diced ham
¾ - 1 pound sausage (andouille is preferable. Can mix Italian and andouille.)
2 ½ Cups canned tomatoes broken up with their juice
1 Cup rice
1 ½ cups Lo-sodium chicken broth
½ tsp. thyme
1 tbsp. chopped parsley
¼ tsp. chili powder
1 ½ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp. hot pepper sauce

Heat oil in a large skillet. Add onion and garlic. Cook on low heat till onion is tender. Add chicken, ham, sausage. Cook five minutes. Add tomatoes, uncooked rice, chicken broth, thyme, chopped parsely,chili powder, salt, black pepper, worcestershire sauce, and hot pepper sauce. Put all into a large casserole. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 1 and ¼ hours or until rice is done.

You can add shrimp, clams, green peppers, or whatever else you like. This is a great dish to make ahead for a crowd. Enjoy!

Gratitude for Zucchini Madness by Barbara Quinn

I enjoy going out in the early morning and harvesting my herbs, zucchini, and zucchini flowers. The bright yellow zucchini blossoms definitely are happy, their faces turned up to the sun. This is the time of year when they go into insane production phase so it’s good to have lots of recipes for them.

While I enjoy cooking, I’m a fan of simple, healthy dishes. Here’s a dish that is tasty and doesn’t require you to spend a lot of time over a hot stove. Plus it uses bunches of zucchini. And I am grateful for that.

Zucchini Bisque

2 Tblsp. Olive Oil
1 Medium Onion
1 Cup chopped carrots
4 Cups chopped zucchini
2 Cups Lo-Sodium chicken broth
¼ tsp. sugar
¼ tsp. marjoram
Two or three sprigs of fresh thyme, stripped (or ½ tsp dried)
Two or three sprigs of fresh tarragon stripped (or 1 tsp. dried)
Sea salt
White pepper
½ cup Skim Plus milk

Chop vegetables. Heat olive oil over medium heat and add carrots, zucchini and onion. Cook until onions wilt. Stir in chicken broth, herbs, sugar, white pepper, and salt. Simmer for about 15 minutes. Puree in small batches in a blender. Pour back in pot and add the milk. Adjust seasoning to taste. (e.g., more tarragon or salt). Reheat and serve.

Zucchini Days by Barbara Quinn

I don’t plant much in my garden anymore. I have lots of herbs, and a few zucchini plants. And boy do those four zucchini plants take up room and produce like mad. I grow them mostly for the flowers. I can find good tomatoes and other veggies in my local farm market, but those zucchini flowers are elusive and very expensive if you do find them. Each morning I go out and harvest a bunch.

So what do I do with all those flowers? They are good to add to salads, and to zucchini bisque with fresh tarragon, and also to zucchini fritters which make a great accompaniment to grilled fish or meats. A major treat is fried or stuffed zucchini blossoms. Italians fry the blossoms in a simple thin water and flour batter called pastella which is similar to tempura batter. You sprinkle them with salt and enjoy. Tonight I’m going to stuff half the blossoms with mushroom, breadcrumb, pine nuts, and raisins. I’ll stuff the rest with leftover polenta mixed with a little parmesan. Then I’ll bake them in my toaster oven. What a terrific time of year.

Here’s a recipe for fried zucchini flowers:

2/3 Cup of water
1 Cup flour
Pan with one inch of Canola oil
A dozen or so zucchini blossoms.

Place water in a bowl. Sift the flour into the water and use a whisk to incorporate till mixture is a thin paste. You can experiment with consistency. Wash the blossoms and dry on paper towels. Cut open one side and remove the inside pistil. Leave them whole if possible. If too large cut into two pieces. Heat the oil on high heat. Dip the flowers into the batter and drain a bit, then put into the oil. Brown on one side, then flip to the other. Remove to paper towels and drain. Sprinkle with salt. Serve hot. If done right, they should be crunchy good!

Lovin' from the Oven by Angie Ledbetter

Yeah, I ripped off the Doughboy's saying, but it fits perfectly, so let's just say I'm borrowing it for today. We southern cooks (men and women) really enjoy showing our love by making wonderful meals, preparing delicious baked goodies, and especially by using our tried and true family recipes. I don't know a single person who enjoys cooking who doesn't have dog eared old yellowed recipe cards full of mouth-watering concoctions. The best ones are spattered, splattered, torn and maybe even scribbled on.

My most precious of this type of recipe is in my grandmother's own handwriting, and although I wish she was still around to help me finally learn to make her famous biscuits, my continued failure doesn't keep me from trying it every now and then.

BIGMAMA'S BISCUITS:

Use a medium large bowl that will become your biscuit bowl forever. Fill it ¾ full with sifted Gold Medal Self-Rising Flour.

“Doodle out a ‘waller hole’ in the middle of your bowl,” as Bigmama used to say. Make this well by gently swishing your fist in the flour. It will hold the other ingredients.

Pour in ½ tablespoon of cooking oil. In a standard drinking glass, stir together ½ cup buttermilk and ½ cup water. Add to your well.

Work the mixture gently with your fingers, pulling in as little extra flour as possible. Try not to handle or knead the dough very much.

Prepare your heavy iron skillet by pouring in a thin layer of oil. Roll the skillet around to spread the oil evenly. Pinch off biscuits and place into skillet. (Dusting your hands lightly with flour helps.)

When the pan is full and biscuits rest gently against one another, sprinkle on a small amount of oil to the raw biscuit tops. Put skillet into a cold oven, and set at 400 degrees. Put your pan in the middle of the rack so biscuits cook evenly. When they are light golden brown, move skillet to top rack until darker brown. If your oven is true to temperature, the whole process, including preparation time, will take about 25 minutes. The first few times, watch the biscuits' progress in the oven closely to be sure.

Butter immediately...or cover with gravy...or drown in maple or cane syrup. Any way you like your biscuit, you'll love these!

Cornbread Baking by Kat Magendie

You would think growing up with a mother born on a farm in Arkansas, a biological mother born a hillbilly, a daddy from Tennessee, and from living in Southern States most of my life where the school lunch program more times than not had cornbread (the really sweet kind) on our ugly plastic trays—hey, this was in the day when children didn’t get to pick what they ate, either in school or at home, you ate what was on your plate or you went hungry—that I could prepare a good pan of cornbread.

You think wrong. My cornbread was bad. Not just bad, but inedible. There was the cornbread where I read, “put grease in pan, put pan in oven to heat grease, put cornbread in hot pan.” What I didn’t understand was, the extra grease was to be poured into the batter and stirred in, then that batter was to be poured over the hot greased pan to bake. I poured the batter over all of that liquid, and the result was a cornbread swimming in oil. Ugh. My brothers laughed their arses off over that. The next time I attempted to bake cornbread, I was more careful. I thought. But, when that cornbread came out of the oven, I took my knife to cut into it, and…and…the knife didn’t slice through. What? Huhn? I turned the cornbread out onto the counter—and by now I had an audience of four brothers guffawing—Tommy, or David, or Johnny, or Mike, picked up the “cornbread” and rapped it against the counter. It didn’t break. It didn’t bend. This set my brothers to heights of hilarity only seen on shows like Gilligan’s Island or The Carol Burnett Show. I burst out crying, since that is what girls my age did. My brothers, bless their stinky hearts, felt sorry for me and assured me the cornbread was fine, even as they took it outside and tried to kill snakes with it in the canal out back.

But, what about gratitude, you may be asking? Well, many years later, I stubbornly measured and stirred cornmeal, flour, oil, buttermilk, egg, baking powder, salt, and a bit of sugar, then poured the mix into a hot-greased iron skillet and then into the oven it went. Ding. Deep Breath. I cut it. I tasted. Perfect. Somehow, someway I made the perfect pan of cornbread. The ghost of a Southern Relative took me by the hand and said, “Okay, honey, this here’s how you do it…It ain't hard, child...” Gratitude for good cornbread baking. Why not?