The best thing about embarking on a mission to perfect one's biscuit making? You end up with an awful lot of delicious biscuits to eat. The worst thing? Holy heck, that's a lot of biscuits. I'm lucky enough to be married to an enthusiastic biscuit eater, but I don't want to try his patience too badly this early on, 'cause there are dozens more batches to be rolled out before the year is up.

Solution -- adapt one of his most dearly beloved dishes, his grandmother and mother's Memama and Mimiwag's Chicken & Dumplings a bit to accommodate extra biscuits as ersatz dumplings. The original recipe employs long, rolled strips of dough (which some have argued render it as a much more regionally specific Chicken & Pastry formation, but that's a whole 'nother post), but in lieu of that, I halved the biscuits (from the best batch thus far -- #6 White Lily All Purpose with 50/50 Lard/Butter) and stewed them into the sumptuous broth of a whole, cooked-down chicken until they were softened, but not soggy. That night, with a side of sauteed, vinegar-dashed Swiss chard, it was heaven. Two days later, plated with tangy collards -- otherworldy.

Have a favored use for extra biscuits? I beg of you, share it in the comments below.

Recipes is after the jump.

What could be more Southern than eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day? How about sweet tea, deviled eggs, pimiento cheese, ambrosia, three-bean salad, shrimp boats, red beans and rice, corn pudding, fried okra, red eye gravy, cream doughnuts, cup custard, lemon icebox pie and divinity? If your mouth is watering from that recitation of down-home specialties, you'll like Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, a Southern cookbook which escalates the competition in a crowded field.

According to her bio, author Martha Hall Foose is a Mississippi Delta cook who studied in France, and the cuisine bears this out. True Southern fare -- heavy on the influences delta and soul -- is approached with reverence and then presented with signature spin: Foose is not the first cookbook author to prepare banana pudding (page 198) in individual servings, but she may be the first to suggest you do it in canning jars. As far as I know, she is definitely the first to make sweet tea pie (page 203) -- a recipe so crazy and that it would have made my grandmother applaud and so good that, according to the head note, it got Foose into the state fair pie baking contest. She didn't win, but then again, the winner probably didn't go on to write a cookbook as good as this.

Happy New Year, all! Hope everyone had a warm, festive Eve and is relatively headache-free and rested post-revelry. Now, there are as many ways to prepare the cowpea and rice concoction of Hoppin' John as there are squares on a calendar, but in many parts of the American South, the definitive date to simmer up a big ol' pot of it is New Year's Day. While the name's origin is still the subject of some debate -- some scholars asserting that it's a corruption of "pois a pigeon," a Carribean dish enjoyed by Southern slaves while still in their native land, and others claiming it's derived from a 13th century Iraqi dish called "bhat kachang" -- the dish's fans maintain that eating it ensures good luck for the coming year. This may well be superstition, but I'm inclined toward any angle that's gonna get a bowlful of it in front of me on a chilly January 1st.

My grand revelation of the day (though likely hardly news to many of you) is that cowpeas are the genus for the group that contains blackeye peas (most commonly used in Hoppin' John), catjang, and yardlong beans. They're also called crowder peas.

Some recipes for Hoppin' John contain tomatoes or okra, and the swap in of okra for the beans makes it a Limpin' Susie.

Got a favorite variation? Share it below, and peruse my favorite recipe after the jump.

Kind little rituals seem to go a long way toward making marriage work, so almost every weekend, I make my husband some sweet tea. He's a Southern boy by birth (Brooklynian by marriage), and having a big ol' pitcher easily grabbable in the fridge seems to right any Mason Dixon imbalance he might be suffering at the time. I've got it down to a science, proportion-wise, but this past weekend, his itch for a sugar fix kicked in while I was at the grocery store. What he made tasted divine, but there was just too much for one pitcher, and not enough refrigerator room for a second.

If nothing else, the nuns at St. Scorpacciata instilled in me the mortal fear of wasting food, and seeing how I'd been at the store to buy milk (which neither of us usually drink) for a Bolognese, I decided sherbet would be what saved our souls from eternal damnation. I suppose we won't know for a while if that worked, but it did taste pretty damned delicious.

I first heard of Edna Lewis's The Taste of Country Cooking while reading Orangette a couple of weeks ago. Molly's description of this cooking classic made me think that it sounded like a book I needed to own. Only a few moments later, I had completed my amazon transaction and the book was on its way to me.

It arrived a few days later, and I've been reading it straight through, like a novel, ever since I got my hands on it. Nearing the end, I'm slowing down the pace of my reading because I know the time is coming when there won't be anymore new-to-me words in this text and that looming reality makes me sad.

I bought my copy used, and so it opens to the pages that the previous owner visited most frequently. They must have liked the fried chicken section, because when left to its own devices, that's where this book goes. However, I don't think that anyone actually cooked from this book, mostly because it is devoid of those telling splatters that accidentally occur when you bring a book into the kitchen.

Foodies who love the written word, hear my words. This book is a must have. Do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy, settle down with a beverage and read until you are compelled to leap up and head for the stove.

What Fried How?

"I could really go for some chicken fried chicken right now."

"Huh?"

"You know!  Chicken fried chicken."

I recently had this exchange exact with Hannah Pandolph, a Texan friend of mine.  You can guess who said the incredulous "huh?"  Even us Yankees love and indulge in fried chicken, but chicken fried chicken?  How is a chicken fried any way other than in the manner of a chicken?

"There's also chicken friend steak," Hannah piped.

Edna Lewis, author of highly regarded cookbooks on Southern cuisine, recently died at the age of 89. In her time, Lewis penned such titles as The Taste of Country Cooking and The Gift of Southern Cooking. The latter was co-authored with her friend, and later, caretaker, Scott Peacock. Today's New York Times has an obituary by food writers Eric Asimov and Kim Severson. The Southern Foodways Alliance also has links to several other articles about Lewis.

My weekend breakfast life has gone through phases. For a very long time, all I ever ate on lazy Saturday and Sunday mornings was waffles. I didn't have a waffle maker, so going out for brunch and getting thin crisp waffles drowning in maple syrup, or thick chewy Belgian waffles topped with fruit was a treat. Then I went through several years of pancakes - all kinds, but thick, light and fluffy were my favorite. Of course, eggs play a role almost every day, but for big breakfasts, I was always an omelette girl, and even went through the "egg-whites only" period.

However, I've never gotten into Eggs Benedict of any sort, though other people go bonkers for them. I don't mind them. I don't think they taste bad. I just never order them myself, and only three or four times in my life have I actually made them (and it seems always to be around a holiday). I think the super runny yolk freaks me out a little.

But these are a twist on the traditional Eggs Benedict. People have made Benedicts with crabcakes, with spinach, smoked salmon, but this is a southern fried version that, if you really read into it, isn't a Benedict at all. It's a fried egg on sausage instead of Canadian bacon, biscuit instead of English muffin (the one pictured is not a biscuit - use your imagination), and drowning in gravy instead of Hollandaise.

Yes, it does sound a bit like a Sausage Biscuit from McClownburger, but this one is on a plate. And since you have to eat it with a fork, you can serve it for brunch, daaah-ling.