When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (best short novels TXT) 📕

3. Some sort of starch (potatoes, rice, or pasta)     

4. Bread. Granted bread, in whatever form you have it, is starchy in some way. But in my house bread, like gravy, was essentially a food group in and of itself.  And my father would make fresh country white bread, sweet corn bread, and buttermilk biscuits all from scratch. (Oh, dear . . . my mouth just started to water as thoughts of how wonderful the smell of those tasty food are crept into my head!)

5. Dessert.  Now we didn’t have a dessert all the time. No, no. But once a week or maybe twice, we’d always have something sweet from the kitchen. He’d make homemade cakes, pies, and cobblers.  To be honest, I loved the cobblers best of all thanks to all that buttery, fruity, sugary yumminess that came together in a way that made my taste buds explode! 

Today, when I make a cobbler, my husband who love, love, loves cobblers gets all excited as does my mother (who’s diabetic so for her to get cobbler is a MAJOR treat) and my daughter (whose eyes sort of glaze over when I mention it!) It boggles my mind that we’re all not big as houses because when I get to cooking . . . I go all out!

My motto is No pot shall go untouched. No skillet shall be left alone. When this Belle throws on her Magnolia Blossom apron (and yes, I really do have an apron with magnolia blossoms on it) she goes four-to-the-floor for broke.

Sorry - went off on a little tangent there!  Getting back to the road this story was traveling on before that little turn . . .

My Daddy knew how to make a feast fit for a king from the simple fixins we had on hand. For those of you who may be up in arms at my apparent misuse of the word 'fixings' - I hate to tell you, but in this case you're wrong! Fixins is spelled correctly!  In the South, we fix food and you need fixins to fix food!  

And to make the very best foods you need really fresh foods. Meats were a grocery store sort of thing but not our veggies . . . those were best if they came from the Farmers’ Market. If they came out of your own garden that was even better! Unfortunately, we didn’t have a garden (save the tomatoes we grew!) but, our cross-street neighbors, the Kirks, they didn't just have a garden, they had a full-scale farm and they were two of the nicest people I ever knew. My father called them 'salt of the earth' sort of folks.

Mrs. Kirk was a farmer’s wife through and through. She was a plump woman who spent her days baking, canning, pickling, and making most of their clothes. Mr. Kirk was a lean, hearty man who woke up at 4AM each morning to deliver bread from Bost’s Bakery all around  our small town and then came how to do his real job as a farmer. The Kirks had a full-working farm with what Mr. Kirk called a 'little garden' that was about 4 acres deep and wide and required a tractor to work it. Needless to say, when people today talk about their 'big backyard gardens', I just grin because their version of 'a big garden' and my version of 'a big garden' are a wee bit different!  

I was such a lucky kid because I was able to help out in the garden and with the animals and all that other ‘stuff’ one has to do when on a farm. What great fun I had at Mr. & Mrs. Kirk's house! Of course, most kids today might not agree with my version of 'fun'. Because the fun I had required a lot of physical labor especially when we were in the garden where we had to do things like hand plant row after row of seasonal vegetables. Sure it was hard work, but it was well worth it!

And Mr. Kirk didn't care one iota that I was a very small little girl. Nope. Instead of saying I was short, he used to say I was lucky to be so much closer to God's beautiful Earth. He also told me that God obviously made me the way I was so I could be a good gardener. Now when someone tells you God thinks you'd be a good gardener - you try your best to do your best!

Apparently I impressed Mr. Kirk enough that he actually taught me how to drive the tractor when I was all of ten years old. Yes, he let me drive a giant orange, stick-shift tractor with a tiller and plow attachments. Mind you, I could barely reach the clutch to change the gears but I did it. Now come on - you've got to admit that at ten years old that's cool. Now that I'm older, when I look back on those days, I know the Kirks were helping me simply be a kid amid the chaos of the cancer treatments my father had to undergo. 

But getting back to those green beans. Whenever the sting beans would 'come in' over at Mr. Kirk's, he'd call my Daddy and tell him, "Steve, I've got me about 4 rows of green beans I won't be able to get to and I was wondering if you'd mind sending that nugget of yours over to pick a couple of rows to take home? It would be such a shame to let them go to waste because Margie won't be able to can 'em before they go bad." 

What a lovely man Mr. Kirk was.  He knew our family didn't have a lot of money around that time because the treatment for my father's cancer was quite costly. 

And offering use those green beans, which weren't expensive at all, wasn't meant to be some grand gesture . . . rather it was Mr. Kirk's way of saying 'Hey neighbor, my brother in God's eyes, I want to share this bounty with you because I care.’ Yes, that's the sort of people I grew up around. I suppose I was a rather lucky young lady.

As for the beans that came into the house . . . my father took great care to instruct me in how to make them so that one day I might be able to make them just like he did and I could think of him while I did it. He taught me very well, too. Because today one of my daughter's favorite foods is the Southern Style Green Beans my Daddy taught me to make back when I was just a kid.

Of course, all this talk about how good those beans are probably has you wondering if I'm pulling your leg. And I'd hate for you all to think I was just talking to hear myself talk . . . so, I thought I might share the recipe my Daddy taught me so long ago.

After all, this IS a book about food - I figure it's only polite to throw at least one honest to goodness Southern dish in it for you to make on your own! Besides, my Daddy wasn't one much for keeping recipes secret. He'd say 'Why hoard something wonderful when you can share it?'

Southern Style Green Beans (From my kitchen to yours)

The Fixins:

*1 to 2 pounds fresh green beans (cleaned with the ends clipped and the 'rib strings' pulled.)

*4-8 slices of thick smoked breakfast bacon (I never said it was a healthy dish!)

*1 large sweet onion chopped into quarters (no smaller, trust me on this one and look for Vidalia onions, they're SO good!) 

*4 tablespoons of salted butter  (And do NOT use margarine. GROSS! Real butter is natural and our bodies can process natural a thousand times better than that fake stuff!)

*1/4 cup apple cider vinegar (Yes, it MUST be apple cider vinegar. And don't rush to put it back in the pantry because you might find that you need more!)

*1 tablespoon dried Rosemary (You can use the fresh stuff if you want but the dried works just as well) 

*Salt and pepper to taste.

*** You NEED a DEEP cast iron skillet or cast iron Dutch oven for this dish ***

    Actually, if you don't have either you REALLY need to get at least one of them. Every home should have at least one (I have 5) because NOTHING beats cast iron for cooking.  If it's seasoned 'just so' and taken care of properly, food will NOT stick to it . . . ever! 

You'll also need a stove top for convenience (this I say because you can actually cook these over a camp fire or on low-n-slow grill but I'd wait until you master the stove top method first)

Putting the Fixins together

1. Put all the fixins into the deep cast iron skillet (that you may have run out and bought because you don't want to ruin these amazing beans with anything other than the 'perfect' cooking vessel) 

2. Cover your fixins with water. 

3. Put a lid over your fixins 

4. Set the burner to medium high and bring the beans to a boil. 

5. Turn down the temperature to low and let those beans slow cook for about 4 hours. Yes, at least 4 hours (Sure, you can cook them faster but it requires a lot of tending...this low-n-slow method is guaranteed to make people beg for dinner)

6. Every 30 minutes or so, check to see if you need to add more water. Taste the beans every so often for 'doneness' the longer they simmer the better they become. As they cook down, you might want to add in a bit more cider vinegar. With the bacony goodness you need to add a bit of a 'bite' to draw out the best of that smoky flavor.

7. You'll know your beans are ready when the bacon is stringy and falls apart, the onion has practically disappeared and the beans have a soft body that melts in your mouth.

**Hints**

1. Don't over stir the beans when they get close to being done or they'll turn to mush. 

2. Make sure you've always got enough water to cover the beans or they'll burn.

There you go. Hope y'all enjoy them as much as we do at my house. Land sakes, now I'm feeling absolutely famished. I think I might just have to see what fixins I've got in my pantry so I can fix something to take away the hunger pangs that have suddenly made themselves known! 

Ice cream. 

Some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around hot summer days when my family would go to the Cabarrus Creamery to get ice cream cones topped with scoops of the frozen treat so high, I’m sure they defied the laws of gravity. I used to always get one scoop of fudge ripple, it was my all time favorite, but apparently the people that were employed by the creamery’s scoop shop had issues with counting because their version of one scoop always looked like two to me.

In fact I remember being seven years old and putting my hands on the glass partition that separated me from the pimply faced scooper and counting out loud as he or she would scrape the scooper