Easy

This unusual take on chicken salad is a meal in itself, with the rice, fruit, and almonds as well as cooked chicken. Just add bread or crackers.

This is great served with Barbecued Pork Ribs (page 84) or prepared to take to a covered dish supper, because it’s sturdy enough to stand at room temperature for a while without wilting. It also adds great color to a picnic spread.

I am a big fan of Greek salads, but at restaurants I seem to find myself always picking the vegetables and cheese out of the lettuce. One day I thought, why make it with lettuce at all? This recipe is just veggies and feta. I love it!

We always made this to take to Family Night suppers at church. Its official name was Congealed Fruit Salad, but it was known at our house as pink salad, because, well, it’s pink! Besides, anything with the word congealed in the title just sounds gross to me, and this is anything but.

I’m the hick who always asks the uptown restaurant waiter if they have Thousand Island dressing. They usually give me that look (you know the one), then politely inform me it is not on the menu. I know there are lots of wonderful dressings out there, and I’ve sampled most of them, but I always come back to this one. I usually whip it up and pour it over a big iceberg lettuce wedge.

There are as many varieties of coleslaw as there are shades of pink, especially in the South! A lot of coleslaw recipes have sugar as an ingredient, but this one gets that bit of sweetness from sweet salad pickles, which don’t mask the fresh flavors of the cabbage and carrots. We serve this every Fourth of July with Barbecued Pork Ribs (page 84) and Easy Baked Beans (page 133).

The best description I can offer of my sister’s baked potato soup is that it tastes just like the best potato bar you ever tried. I always used to love twice-baked potatoes, mainly because the work of “fixing” a baked potato with the sour cream, cheese, and so on, was all done for you. It’s the same with this soup. It’s like someone fixed the ultimate baked potato just for you and put it into a bowl. All you have to do is enjoy it.

When it comes to potato salad, you like what you like. This recipe is mayonnaise-based, but if you like a mustard-based potato salad, just experiment a little. Add some yellow mustard and leave out a little bit of the mayonnaise. Make these recipes your own by finding out what works for you. Our traditional potato salad uses peeled potatoes, but unpeeled work too, and the skins add some color to your dish.

Some recipes in this book have been passed down from generation to generation, and some are newer recipes discovered in the past few years that have become family classics. This is one of the old-timers. My mom used to make this soup when I was a child, and I remember how much my dad loved it served over biscuits. For me, when a recipe has a great memory attached to it, it tastes even better. I make this soup at the first sign of cold weather every year and serve it poured over Buttermilk Cornbread (page 154).

Chicken tortilla soup became really popular in restaurants a few years ago, but it was never something I made at home. Garth loves this soup and orders it almost every time he sees it on a menu, so I started studying the different versions at each restaurant and questioning Garth about what he liked and didn’t like about each one. This recipe I finally came up with doesn’t actually taste like any of those we tasted in restaurants, but we love it—and now we can enjoy it whenever we want!

I love living in Oklahoma. I do miss my family in Georgia, but luckily I get to travel back and forth a lot for visits. My Georgia family has also made the trek to Oklahoma several times, so now both places feel like home. Only once have I gotten so homesick I thought I wouldn’t make it, and that was because I was really sick with the flu and Mama wasn’t there to take care of me. Sometimes nobody will do except Mama! She made this soup for me, froze it in quart containers, packed it in dry ice (who knew you could get dry ice in Monticello?), and shipped it overnight to me in a Styrofoam cooler. When I got it the next morning, I cried, ate some soup, cried, ate some more soup, and thanked God for the most awesome mom on the planet!

My grandmother, Lizzie Paulk, was an amazing woman. She worked the fields in South Georgia with my grandfather Winnes, raised three children, and somehow still found time to put three home-cooked meals on the table every single day. She passed away when I was in junior high, but I have wonderful memories of her laughter and her love for her family. Mama had always complained she could never get her dumplings to come out as thin as her mom’s, but the first time she made them after Grandma died, she said it was as if Lizzie were guiding her. Maybe she finally decided it was okay for Mama to be able to make her dumplings! They’ve come out perfectly every time since.

I think making someone else’s recipes is a wonderful way to remember them when they’re no longer with us. Garth’s brother Jerry loved my cooking, and he was a good cook himself. He always made me feel he truly appreciated the meals I made for him, and I loved him for it. He had a wonderful smile and a great spirit. Jerry brought these pecans out to the house one day, and I only stopped eating them when they were gone! The butter and sugar make them crunchy, sweet, and rich.

Serve this punch with Cheese Straws (page 20). It’s a Yearwood family tradition—perfect to serve at Christmas parties, because it’s a beautiful bright green and makes a pretty punch bowl.

If you’ve ever driven through a small town in Georgia, you no doubt have seen signs for boiled peanuts along the roadside. I’ve found that they’re a love-hate thing; people are rarely undecided about boiled peanuts! I include the recipe here because I absolutely love them. When I make them at home in Oklahoma, it takes me back to our family vacation trips to Florida, when we’d stop on the roadside and eat the warm peanuts in the car. Yum!

You won’t go to a southern picnic or covered-dish supper and not see deviled eggs. Garth and I grew up eating different versions of this dish, so both varieties are included here. Honestly, I never met a deviled egg I didn’t like, so these are both yummy to me!

A pimiento cheese sandwich made on very fresh white bread is a true southern staple. Nothing goes better with Gwen’s Fried Chicken (page 93). Mama slices the crusts off the sandwiches and cuts them in half for family reunions—very southern belle!

This is my sister’s go-to appetizer for church socials, Super Bowl Sundays, and Christmas munchies. Several years ago, she put too much of the ranch dressing mix into the recipe, and it was hard to serve. My dad renamed it the “cheese wad.” We think Ranch Dressing Cheese Ball sounds more appetizing, but at our house, it will forever be known as Cheese Wad!

Spinach artichoke dips seem to be on every restaurant’s appetizer list these days, and I like them okay but have never been a big spinach fan. Feta cheese, on the other hand, is something I’m very fond of, so I was excited to find this recipe. It’s also one of those really easy recipes that tastes like it must have been really hard to make. You gotta love those!

I’m sort of a snob when it comes to trying new recipes. I just seem to like my old tried and true ones best, and it takes a lot for something new to grab my attention. I had to have the recipe for this dip after I tried it on Super Bowl Sunday 2006. Garth is a die-hard Steelers fan, so it was an exciting day. Everybody always brings something for the party, and this was my friend Kim’s contribution. Being a good southern girl, I love anything with black-eyed peas in it, but for you folks who are right now turning up your noses at the idea of eating black-eyed peas, all I can say is just try it. In fact, maybe I should name it something else for those skeptics. How about Pea Dippy?