Being born and raised in the deep South, I do not know where my recently developed taste for spicy food came from. I do not remember much spicy food being served at the dinner table when I was growing up. Although life has taken me far from the South, my love for the Southern cuisine has never diminished. And, this new love for adding “spicy” to my Southern dishes has me a little pleasantly surprised.

There is Southern Cooking and then there is SOUTHERN COOKING! You can follow a recipe and still come out with a dish that does not resemble what the recipe intended. The reason is technique and the little secrets that are not included in the recipe.

Technique is as important as the ingredients and proper technique helps you avoid the following common mistakes made by novice cooks. You can find many free Southern recipes on the internet, but few web sites provide the additional information needed to to be a real Southern cook. So when you find a site that does, bookmark it and stick with it for your Southern recipes. (See Resource Box below for recommendation).

You can find hundreds of recipes for Southern Cooking on the internet, but what they fail to tell you is the techniques needed to turn those recipes into real southern dishes.

On the subject of Southern recipes, I’m sorry to say that what is often represented as a Southern recipe, is not. For instance, when you see a recipe for Southern cornbread that includes sugar, that is NOT Southern. I lived all my life in the South and traveled the world but have never met a Southerner that puts sugar in cornbread. We call that “Yankee” cornbread. That is cake, not cornbread.