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.

Are you in need of an easy quick recipe for dinner? No matter how busy you are, your family still needs to eat. If you’re the cook, dinner can become an insurmountable problem on a busy day. Take-out gets boring pretty quickly and puts a strain on the pocket book as well.

Lets face it, half the battle is in planning ahead. When you know the menu, and have the meat thawed, then an easy quick recipe like this one is a snap. If the dinner hour approaches with no plan in mind, then a lot of energy will be expended in the planning and shopping. With a few simple recipes and planned ahead menus you can have dinner on the table in double time.

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.