Vermonters are so confused about banana pudding, bless their hearts. They think it is a banana-flavored pudding. Banana pudding is actually a vanilla pudding layered with vanilla wafers and sliced bananas. You must dig down through all the layers and spoon out a whole section like a lasagna to get the full effect. It is a very traditional southern dessert made from sugar, milk, flour, eggs, and bananas that was somehow altered into a weird concoction made from boxes of pudding, cool whip, canned milk, and boxes of 'nilla wafers.

My mother was known for her incredible banana pudding that graced many potluck, picnic, and dinner tables. This is her recipe, and like many of her recipes it is from Bell's Best 2, which is a cookbook that was put together by the Mississippi Chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America in the 1980s. I cannot even begin to guess what the connection is between telephone pioneers and recipes, but the two volumes of this cookbook are a nice foundation for home cooking in Mississippi.

It is true that you can make banana pudding from the boxed Vanilla Wafers, but I don't know why you would. This recipe is simple and with minimal ingredients and the result is exponentially better than the boxed ones. This recipe is hand-written on a slip of paper that stays in my Mama's cookbook. I don't know who to credit with it because I don't recognize the handwriting.

Even though it's a Saturday night we are still working - so tonight's dinner had to be fast. This is my favorite quick meal to throw together. What could be better than incredibly spicy chicken, simple grilled potatoes and strawberry chutney?

When we first started this blog, I was terrified of frying. In fact, one of the first posts that we did was about frying chicken for the first time. At the time I thought that I had found a great starter recipe. And I had found a good beginner recipe, but recently I saw an episode of "Down Home with the Neely's" about frying chicken that was more complicated.  But it wasn't insanely complicated. In fact, the most difficult part of the recipe was trying to find a place for the fried chicken to rest for half-an-hour before frying it.

Side note: I love that show in general, because Pat Neely has the most lascivious laugh, and can make even the most tame recipe sound bawdy. “Heh, heh, heh.”

But his recipe for fried chicken is far from tame. Basically, the trick is to put the spices directly on the chicken and not in the flour. And it calls for four types of pepper. This is not a recipe for the weak of palette. And ironically when we had the chicken for dinner the other night, Jedd made a “Rated R” noise when he bit into it, which is unusual.

Good job, Pat. Heh, heh, heh.

I did make some changes, though.

My father calls me “The Freezer Queen,” because I have a borderline obsession with cold storage. In our freezer right now is a bizarre combination of little plastic bags and containers that are storing a multitude of items including: lasagna, chorizo, soups, stews, herbs, dried fruit, cookies, turkey gravy, pesto, tomato paste, chipotle chilies in adobo sauce, flour, apple crisp, cherry tomatoes and brown sugar.

It's a small freezer, so it can get pretty crowded. And a couple of weeks ago a claustrophobic package of Jimmy Dean sausage rolled out of the freezer, and onto my foot. Which angrily inspired to me to make room in the freezer, and to make gumbo for dinner.