I started cooking with my Southern grandparents on the weekends. They started me off running with liver and onions for breakfast one morning and pork shoulder roast, dirty rice, buttermilk cornbread and blackberry dumplings for supper(that's dinner for you city folk). After that, I was hooked. Every weekend was an adventure in their kitchen. Whatever was freshest at the open air market or looked good is what we fixed. And the history lesson was the best. They both would share stories of what is was like growing up in the south the tradition or what they lacked that us kids have it so easy by. It was great. I now am the owner of this beautiful home that I spent weekends in as a child. Same kitchen table. Awesome!!! I am in love with Curries. I have a recipe book with over 600 hundred of them and it is my favorite thing to peruse and find out what I will experiment with next. I also love breakfast foods. But on any given day you will find greens and cornbread in my refer. I always have those two southern staples. My boyfriend travels and loves to come home to a steaming bowl of greens and a slice of homemade buttermilk cornbread! My favorite cooking tradition is Christmas Dinner. It's not the amount of people that come over, it was always a big deal to my grandparents to cook a lavish southern style Christmas feast, replete with ham, turkey, chitlins', greens, macaroni and cheese and all the fixins. Homemade breakfast sausage with natural casings. It was a lot of work. I did it without the help of my grandfather that I watched do this once a year for those that requested. I supposed that he was looking down on me and guiding my efforts, but I now am getting requests for some. I will be cranking up the grinder and filling them. A standing rib roast. Our family loves to eat beef that is always, always well done. No pink anywhere. Well, trying to follow a recipe by Tyler Florence didn't go over so well in my household. I had to stick it back in the over and delay dinner for another 45 minutes; forgot about it and charred the heck out of this poor piece of meat. I was mortified that we had no main coarse for dinner and equally mad that it was 78 bucks down the drain. Not an inch of meat was salvageable.