Comfort Food

The best part of growing up in the South is the food. My grandmother and my dad were the best cooks when it came to food that I like to call comfort food. Some of my favorites would be Country Fried Steak, Chicken and Dumplings, Fried Chicken, Fried Okra, Cream Corn, Mashed Potatoes, Mac & Cheese and my all time favorite is Biscuits and Gravy or Biscuits with homemade Apple Butter. Well unfortunately both of them have gone to heaven now to cook for everyone up there. So I started thinking Reece is not going to get to experience this wonderful food very often (not that we need to eat all this fried food often) and I want her to know what true Southern food is and how to make it. I can remember growing up and being in the kitchen with my grandmother and her teaching me and my cousin Suzie how to make biscuits. Well Suzie mastered this much better than I did because her and her dad are the only ones that I know that can even come close to her biscuits and to be honest they might even be better. I want Reece to have this same experience that I did growing up so I am going to start learning how to cook many of these meals and as she gets older teach her how to as well. The first thing I have to do is get recipes on as many Southern meals as I can and start practicing so that I know what I am doing. I want to learn how to cook these from scratch like they did and not buy frozen or premade so any recipes anyone has out there send them on over and I will start right away. I will keep you informed on how many things I mess up or burn because I know it will happen often, I love to cook but I am not very good at it.

Georgia Kudzu

So I decided to start a blog that family and friends could see what was going on in our lives that we really do not want to post on facebook or myspace. Then I had the hardest time trying to come up with a URL because some of the really cute ones were gone of course. I wanted something that said something about Georgia and I started thinking about growing up and what I loved about Georgia and there were so many things like Peaches, Pecans, warm springs, long summer nights, cool falls and short winters. But I could not come up with any names to go along with any of that so then I started thinking about the house I grew up in and the yard I played in and all I could think about was the Kudzu in the back yard that took over. No matter what you did it would always grow back, it would kill the trees, it would cover the house and the yard. I can even remember thinking if our dog would lay there long enough it would cover him. So that is where I came up with the name Georgia Kudzu. So then I decided to look up some facts about Kudzu and this is what I found.

The Amazing Story of Kudzu

Love It, Or Hate It... It Grows On You!

In Georgia, the legend says "That you must close your windows at night to keep it out of the house. The glass is tinged with green, even so..."
From the poem, "Kudzu," by James Dickey

There's so much of this fast-growing vine in the Southeastern U.S., you might think it was a native plant. Actually, it took a lot of hard work to help kudzu spread so widely. Now that it covers over seven million acres of the deep South, there are a lot of people working hard to get rid of it! But kudzu is used in ways which might surprise you...

*The State of Georgia promoted the use to of the vine to stop erosine

*It can grow a foot per day during the summer months

*People have made baskets out of the vine

*One lady in South Carolina even made paper out of it

Well growing up Georgia I never found Kudzu to be a wonderful vine I found it more annoying like most but I think you just learn to deal with it.