This popcorn will set your soul on fire.

That’s a good thing if you’re like me, and you like to crunch mass quantities of things when you are a.) anxious, b.) stressed, c.) frustrated or d.) home with the sniffles, watching the all-day Elvis movie marathon on TMC. You can’t eat a ton of this popcorn without gulping several glasses of water (or, even better, a glass of milk), since it’s tossed with a searing mix of spices: chili powder, cumin, paprika, cayenne, salt and pepper. A few pieces are pleasantly tingly. A few handfuls will turn your mouth into a blazing inferno.

If super-spicy isn’t your style, you can still experiment with other spice mixes to add loads of flavor to your popcorn. Replace the chili powder and cumin with garlic and onion powders for a Cajun corn. Take out the hot stuff, and add Italian seasonings and a little Parmesan for an Italian version. Try wasabi powder. Curry. Pumpkin pie spice. Your choices are only limited by your imagination. And if you draw a blank, there’s always butter. Read More…

Once you’ve had three Thanksgiving meals in three different cities, you enter a zone where your next meal needs to be the complete and total opposite of turkey and dressing. A light palette cleanser, perhaps? Maybe a crisp, refreshing sorbet?

Oh, HELL no.

When you’re serious about hitting the reset button on your palette and your appetite, you’ve really got to go with something like a Philly Cheesesteak. Something packed with beef and onions and peppers and, yes, Cheez Whiz. DON’T YOU JUDGE ME. I’m not a huge fan of processed foods, either, but an authentic cheesesteak requires an ample slathering of the orange stuff. ‘Tis the season. When in Rome. Oh, just do it.

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“Our meal is free to any members of Division 194. We are with you till hell freezes, and when it does, we will furnish blankets to keep you warm.” – Bennie and Clovis Martin, owners of Martin Brothers’ Coffee Stand and Restaurant, birthplace of the po’ boy

While everyone else counts down to Turkey Day, the clock on the New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival website is marking the seconds until Sunday, Nov. 22. The day historians, chefs, musicians, artists, craftsmen, volunteers and fans will take to the streets to celebrate the poor boy (or po’ boy), New Orleans’ most famous sandwich. A crisp baguette split and barely hanging on to piles of fried seafood or roast beef and gravy, freshly shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes and mayonnaise, remoulade or Creole mustard.

It’s time to save a culinary treasure from being lost in the swelling sea of torpedo-sized fast-food sandwiches. And if you don’t live near New Orleans, saving the po’ boy means making one.

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Visions of sugarplums might have danced in other kids’ heads, but we dreamt of a Christmas morning with a kitchen table piled with homemade buttermilk biscuits, butter, jams and jellies, eggs, bacon, country sausage, ambrosia, grits, orange juice, coffee with real whipped cream and, at the center of the table, Mama’s red-eye gravy and fried country ham. Country ham that Daddy fetched every fall from a farmer’s smokehouse. A farmer who’d spent at least a year on that ham – curing it in dry salt, smoking it for up to two months and hanging it up to age – just as farmers have been doing in the South since at least the mid-1600s.

Country ham is an art born of salt, smoke and sweat. But competition from the commercial ham industry has made all of that smoke and sweat a lot less appealing to many farmers. The tradition was dying until a few years ago, when authentic country ham was rediscovered by American chefs looking for a domestic alternative to European dry-cured hams. Soon, some farmers started marketing their product as “American prosciutto.” According to the The New York Times, the quality and flavor of these hams are comparable to the more respected (and expensive) hams of Spain and Italy.

The first time I saw that label, “American prosciutto,” on a country ham, my jaw dropped at the genius of the idea and the new price, about $1 an ounce. Luckily, these Pretzel Bites with Cheddar and Country Ham require only 3 ounces.

I hope we find a new ham bootlegger before Christmas.

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A few weeks ago it started raining in Nashville and hasn’t stopped, so we now have a small pond in the backyard  that might be able to support life. One of our neighbors helpfully pointed out that the pond wouldn’t be there if I stopped backing into the yard and parked in the garage. Like a normal person. And I’m all, BUT WHERE WOULD WE KEEP THE BODIES? Kidding! But the rain and all that comes with it have given me a sinus infection that’s starting to inhibit my ability to function as a normal person.

So, since I can’t go around town speaking my mind and shaming my mother, I decided to heal myself a truckload of soup. Not a healthy, restorative, vitamin-packed soup, like a minestrone or a country vegetable. Oh, hell no. It had to be something I could eat with Fritos®. Preferably while watching “The Biggest Loser.”

Through her entire pregnancy, my sister craved onions with an intensity typically seen only during Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Once, Chili’s ran out of Awesome Blossoms just after she and my brother-in-law got there, and she tied the waitress to her back bumper and drove around the parking lot until she went into labor.

But about three days before the baby came, I made this Pan-Fried Onion Dip for the magna mater. Caramelized onions folded into a mixture of cream cheese, sour cream and mayonnaise. Since I didn’t want my niece to be born needing a stent, I used low-fat versions of everything, and no one could tell the difference. Really, it’s all background to that pronounced onion flavor. If you’ve ever inhaled an embarrassingly significant portion of Lipton® Onion Dip, you will love this stuff.

P.S. Laney Katheryn was born Thursday afternoon. Her breath is remarkably fresh for a human who must be at least one-third onion.

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Every few months, our grocery will have a big Meat Madness sale, and you’ll see people wrangling two carts piled high with whole chickens and steaks and pork tenderloins. Once I saw a guy pushing a cart loaded with tailgating meats (i.e. brats, drumsticks, wings), and his little boy was toddling behind him, pushing a kiddie cart full of beer. They’re probably burping the ABCs together right now.

Anyway, last time I went to the grocery, I didn’t realize it was Meat Madness Week, so the case was empty except for a few odds and ends. And then I struck carnivore gold: a 16-ounce rib-eye someone had stashed among the pork chops. There was only one, so I decided to stretch it like a rubber band by cubing it and making some Rib-Eye, New Potato and Portobello Kebabs.

The recipe makes four skewers, with about 3 1/2 ounces of steak per skewer. That might seem a little chintzy, but since the rib-eye and mushroom pieces are marinated together, the recipe makes the most of the mushroom’s “meatiness.” Plus, the grilled new potatoes are crunchy and starchy and nicely filling. Of course, you also could eat two kebabs. And then burp the ABCs.

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When I was in college, my hometown was hit by a roof-lifting, glass-shattering, building-leveling tornado that cut right across the downtown. What matters most is that everyone was safe, and if you took a drive through the area now, you’d never guess how much has been rebuilt. The only casualties were some of the businesses, including a feed store whose seeds, driven into the ground by the tornado, produced a lot full of sunflowers in the middle of all the construction, and one of Jeff’s favorite restaurants, Moose Creek Beer & Bait House, home of the Rattlesnake Burger.

Moose Creek’s Rattlesnake Burger wasn’t actual rattlesnake but a spicy combination of ground chicken and andouille sausage. One night Jeff and I were talking about the tornado, and he mentioned that burger. With a tone of wistfulness and reverence. So, we picked up a pound of ground chicken and a pound of andouille and spent the next couple of hours experimenting with spice mixtures and making quarter-sized burgers.

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