Southern Food | The Dinner Special podcast

058: Erika Council: An Introduction to Southern Food

July 13, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Southern Soufflé

Erika was introduced to the art of biscuit-making at the ripe old age of four and was nicknamed Southern Souffle in college when she was dishing out meals from the hot plate in her dorm room. On her blog Southern Soufflé, she shares her love of Southern soul food through not only her recipes, but the warmth in her writing and stories.

I am so excited to have Erika Council of Southern Soufflé here on the show today.

(*All images below are Erika’s.)

On Growing Up Around Food and Cooking:

My paternal grandmother owns a restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and it’s been there since 1976. A lot of my summers were spent in the back of that kitchen, not always happily, but you learned how to make things like biscuits and fried chicken. She owned what we call a Southern style meat and three, and that’s where you get the meat and three vegetables and side of cornbread or biscuits. So you can imagine how much meat and three we’re turning out on a daily basis.

It was really kind of a drop biscuit that she taught me. It’s kind of a wet dough and you use the scoop and just drop it. You make a lot of batches at one time like that and that was my experience actually just scooping it and dropping it on the pan.

Then my mother’s mother made fancier angel biscuits, which use yeast and rise real high.

When you’re 13, 14, 15, you don’t really appreciate it as much as I do now that I can make fried chicken with my eyes closed. I will say that I learned a lot of valuable lessons just working back there and meeting the average people that wash the dishes, not a lot of the top chefs you see that live this glamorous lifestyle on Food Network. It’s just so far from that actually really running a restaurant and just trying to maintain success over a decades’ worth of time.

I think I learned more about the importance of food and how it was important to the people making it, rather than the whole glamor, a beautiful picture of food, you know.

She (grandmother) is older now and my uncle does most of the cooking in the back, but we do go and visit.

I’m in Atlanta so it’s about seven hours from here. I’ll go every now and then and visit her at home, but she doesn’t do a lot of actual cooking in the restaurant. You can find her every now and then sitting at a booth in the front when you walk in drinking coffee. She kinda makes it her way to introduce herself or speak to everybody, but if you’re from the North Carolina area and around there you know who Mama Dip is.

On Southern Culture:

I guess Southern culture, in my opinion, is kind of the backbone for a lot of things that you see everywhere. I’ll go to San Francisco for work and see someone rolling up collard green wraps and I’ll think about, just actually picking those collard greens out of the ground and hot liquor which is the liquor and the juice from the actual greens boiling down.

The South for me is just so many things. This is where I was born and raised and lived the majority of my life. It’s the people who have a complicated past, but I mean the most hospitable. Everyone says Southern hospitality but you would think it’d be a bunch of disgruntled angry Southerners, but we’re far from that.

It’s a lot of things you don’t see, where communal tables with all different kinds of people sitting together. It’s a melting pot, which is what the South has always been.

On Southern Food:

I think that Southern food is a mix of all cultures. From the very beginning, without getting into historical aspects, you have plantation cooking, which is a combination of European and African, West African cooking, and you’re seeing this sort of Southern revival, everywhere, but here, I think a lot of people are getting more back to the roots, which is, Southern food really was a plant-based diet.

So you think fried chicken and greasy and all this, but it was really the plants, like the greens, and the onions, and things of that nature. And I see a lot of people just getting back to that and just having the greens and their vegetables being the focus of their dish.

I would say that soul food is Southern food. I think that anything that you cook, and you put your heart and soul into it, that is soul food. So whether it is a Boston Cream Pie that you’ve taken your time, you’ve sat down and you made it from scratch, that’s your soul food. When you look at the definition of it, it’s a term actually that came around about the 1960s to describe African American Southern cooking, but the actuality of soul food is, it is the origins of Southern food, because Southern food started out with plantation cooking and you have to look at that and then you look at soul food as being fried chicken, collard greens, and cornbread. Which commercially it is, but a lot of African Americans will say if you’re cooking something from the heart and soul, that’s your soul food.

I absolutely love fried chicken and I love crawfish. It’s hard to get crawfish here in Atlanta like I could get it in Louisiana, but definitely those two items. Any way you got em’, I’ll take em’.

On Some Resources to Learn More about Southern Cuisine:

So my grandmother wrote a cookbook. It’s an older one, Mama Dip’s Kitchen. It’s a great basic book. The basics, she’s got a good forward in there about her life. A huge one is Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking and that’s by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart. Nathalie Dupree is the grand dame of Southern cooking. She’s actually been nominated for Who’s Who James Beard Award this year and that book was nominated for one of James Beard’s Awards. So I definitely would say that book, it’s like 730 pages of Southern food and it’s talking about Southern food.

There’s so many. Charleston Receipts is another one, that’s a Junior League cookbook. It’s an old school book from Charleston. A friend of mine, Adrian Miller, he wrote a book called Soul Food. So that’s a great book to read about the origins of soul food, it won a James Beard Award too.

On Her Blog:

My mom actually never was a cook, and she mentioned to me one day she was reading someone’s blog and she sent it to me. She was like, “Hey, you know what? You should do this.” So when I started out, I just kind of was doing the recipes. I used to email my mom recipes that I would cook and she would try it. So I would just type up a recipe and it’d be a really short little passage or whatever.

Actually, what kind of turned it around for me was, I went to a food blog conference and it just was everything I didn’t want to be. And that kind of made me turn my back towards what I thought was cool and just kind of go with what was actually me. I hate to say that, it’s awful, but it’s just the reality.

I used a different camera, the camera I was using to take pictures of my kids, before I was using my iPhone. You know, I started out kind of, staging the food, but that really wasn’t me either, so now it’s more just taking the pictures as I go and just how I cook it, because that’s really what it’s about to me. If I could make elaborately beautiful layouts of food, then I would do it, but I can’t, so I’m not even going to try.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t. I used to watch Top Chef.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

So I’m obsessed with Two Red Bowls and Lady and Pups. Those two blogs are amazing. I guess from learning about different types of Asian style cooking, just how they incorporate different things, I love that.

The Bitter Southerner, if you like to read. They post a kind of journal entry every Tuesday and it’s something that’s about the South. Sometimes it upsets people and sometimes it’s beautiful, but I would definitely recommend reading The Bitter Southerner.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook that make you happy?

What makes me happy on Instagram, Megan from Take A Megabite, because her food is so happy with the animals and the different flags. So definitely Take A Megabite on Instagram. She definitely makes me happy with all her photos.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

The most treasured item I have is my grandmother’s apron. It’s in a lot of the photos. My maternal grandmother passed away a few years ago, but she was a history teacher back in the ’40s, ’50s. She and my grandfather were huge civil rights activists. I learned so much from her as far as just African American history and just things that they don’t teach in school, things that you wouldn’t even know, just having to have been in her presence, learning how to make cakes and along with the struggles of the past, and her apron was always what she wore. So that is probably my most prized possession in my kitchen.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

I like beets and I used to just be extremely anti-beet. The rest of the people in my family, not so much, or in my house, but I’m trying to slowly get them into it. I definitely would say beets.

I think that when they were made for me, they weren’t made right perhaps, but gosh, this was probably about ten years ago and someone made these little appetizers with goat cheese and they had pickled beets on the top. And it sounds disgusting, right, but it was so good, and I think then on, I’d say, “Well, you know what? Maybe I can find a way to make it better.” In the South, we pickle everything.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

The Joy of Cooking is a good one. Right now, I’m kind of on a baking kick. The Bread Bible is one I’ve been using. Definitely those two have been helping me.

So there’s a chef in Kentucky named Edward Lee, and he’s American or he’s Korean-American and his book is Smoke & Pickles and it’s a great… I hate to say fusion because I don’t like that word. It’s a combination of Southern and Asian food, and he’s just done an impeccable job. It’s an older book but I’ve been kind of cooking my way through that just lately. There’s so many. I have a lot of cookbooks but definitely those.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Right now, Rihanna. I won’t say the name of this song because it’s explicit. I’m a big hip hop fan. We listen to a lot of rap music. Kendrick Lamar and Drake are really kind of on repeat. They make me want to cook. I listen to that all day.

On Keeping Posted with Erika:

I do better on Instagram. I’m on Twitter, and then Southern Soufflé on Facebook.

023: Emily Hilliard: How Pie and Folklore Mix

April 8, 2015 by Gabriel

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Nothing in the House

Today we are talking about pies. Emily’s Nothing in the House is a pie blog and a finalist in The Kitchn’s 2014 Best Baking and Sweets Blog Homies Awards. Emily’s writing and media work has been featured on NPR, PBS Food, and American Food Roots, just to mention a few. And her interests in food folklore, history, and music is a recipe that makes her blog awesome.

I am so excited to have Emily Hilliard of Nothing in the House here on the show today.

On the Idea Behind Her Blog:

This was actually about ten years ago now; I’m sort of aging myself. But it was the summer after I graduated college and my friends and I, a lot of women friends, were finding these berry trees and bushes all over Ann Harbor where we went to school. We started getting into pie making and I never really made a pie before. My mother was always sort of the pie maker in the family.

It sort of became this social pursuit. We would get together and bake pies and have friends over and eat on the porch. And then that summer, I got a job in Vermont. When I moved my friend Margaret, who was sort of a partner in crime, she suggested that we start this blog so we could stay in touch through the pies that we were making. So I really just started not necessarily for the public, and just as a thing between friends, and as I made more friends in Vermont, they started contributing.

It’s sort of evolved from there and at this point I’ve been the sole writer for a few years now but I still like to pull in other contributors and friends and bakers. But that’s really how it got going. I never really set out to have a blog necessarily, a food blog. But it’s kind of grown with me as I’ve developed different interests.

On Naming Her Blog “Nothing in the House”:

When we started the blog, I was developing an interest in folklore, which I later went on to study in grad school. But I was reading a book. I think it was called The Study of American Folklore. And in it, it was talking about Depression Era pies. So pies that were made with little ingredients or whatever was around. And those are things like mock apple pies, which are made with crackers. Or green tomato pies or chess pies, which often use vinegar, which was kind of a replacement for lemon. And another name for that other than desperation pies is “nothing in the house” pies. So Margaret and I thought that was a cool name. So it became Nothing in the House.

On Her Inspirations:

Well, there’s a lot. I guess in the food world and folklore world, I would definitely say my professor and thesis advisor, Marcie Cohen Ferris. She’s written a great book recently called The Edible South, about the history of southern food. Ronni Lundy, who’s another food writer. She has a book coming out, Sorghum’s Savor. Molly O’Neill, a great food writer who used to write for the Times.

Then in writing, I don’t know. I can list so many names right now, but I think I really look to women creatives who have been working in the fields that I’m interested in for a long time and really put the time in. I really feel like I am looking to my elders. Not that they’re old but these women who have put in a lot of work and done some really profound things.

I’ve brought pies to classes with Marcie and I was working for Molly a few summers ago and made some pies up there. Sometimes it’s a little intimidating. But it’s also sort of… I see baking as a type of gift or sharing.

I remember making a North Carolina peanut pie for Marcie. This was for a graduate seminar class and I think I also made some sort of nothing in the house pie, I think it was a vinegar pie, for a big lecture I was in of hers. At Molly’s, I think I made a peach pie because it was summertime in upstate New York.

Tips on Making a Pie Crust from Scratch:

For the crust, one of the key things is to keep everything cold. I don’t really keep my dry ingredients, like flour and salt, cold but definitely you want to keep your butter or whatever fat you’re using; maybe you’re being adventurous and using lard. But you definitely want to keep that cold because those butter chunks won’t disintegrate and will add to the flakiness.

Also, another thing I would say is it’s really hard to roll out a pie crust when it’s hot out. So maybe make sure if you’re trying a pie crust for the first time, don’t do it in the heat of summer if you don’t have air conditioning because it can stick to the surface.

Another thing I would say is sometimes you will think that you need to knead the crust but really you want to work it as little as possible because it’s that thing with the butter. You don’t want to melt the butter because then it will be tough and you won’t have the flakiness that you really want in a good crust.

On How to Make Cooking More Fun:

Lately I’ve been getting a CSA or a farm share and that’s really nice because I’m not necessarily someone who can just go to the store and have an idea. But when I have a set framework of like, “Alright, I have onions and broccoli and potatoes and I have to do something with that.” So I think that adds sort of a limiting factor so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Another thing I like is I really like cooking with other people, and that’s always been present in my life with family. I’ve taught at this program where communal cooking is a big part of it and just having friends over and cooking together. And I also like having music or the radio on while I cook.

On Her Book “PIE. A Hand Drawn Almanac”:

Elizabeth is a local illustrator in DC and I’ve admired her work. And I noticed that she had some food drawings and one of them was a tart illustration. And so I contacted her a few years ago and asked her if I could post about it on my blog. We started emailing and had the idea of collaborating.

So we got together a few times and had a few ideas and the book kind of stuck. I basically had all these seasonal recipes all ready so I drew from the blog; I gave her the text and she went to town and just pulled out images and things from the text.

We self-published it and printed it and it was great. We got some great press for it and we’re thinking about either reprinting or doing maybe a savory version. We worked together a lot and we have some other ideas we might follow up on. Maybe pie related or maybe not. This holiday season we made some pie tea towels together.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I have been interested in A Chef’s Life and I’ve heard some great things.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

Well, definitely American Food Roots. That was started by a group of four women who are all established journalists and it’s great. It explores food traditions all over the country.

Another one would be the Southern Foodways Alliance. They explore traditional food ways all across the south.

Biscuits and Such is a great southern food blog.

There’s so many to name. Witchin’ in the Kitchen, Jess Schreibstein’s blog. That’s food and sort of delves into herbalism and such, too. I could go on and on.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Well, on Instagram I would say those women, Jess, and Elena. And Yossy Arefi of Apartment 2B baking. She’s just a beautiful photographer. She takes just stunning photos of food and baked goods.

And also Tara Jensen. I think her handle on Instagram is Bakerhands. She’s a bread baker and pie baker, wood fired. She lives in Marshall, North Carolina. She’s also a great photographer and artist. She brings a lot of art into her baked goods with her stencils and decorated crusts.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

Well, I think one thing I use a lot is my Tupperware rolling mat. Not that it has to be Tupperware but it’s one of those old, vintage Tupperware mats that is just so helpful for biscuits, pie crust, anything you’re rolling out to keep things from sticking to the counter.

You don’t have to wash down the counter all the time. And I’ll even travel with mine.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Salt is maybe too easy. Maybe I’ll say butter.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, one that just came out by a great pie maker on the west coast is Kate Lebo’s Pie School. She’s a really brilliant writer and pie baker and so it really comes together in the book.

I would also say Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. It’s not really in the pie realm but all fermented foods, pickles and vinegars and everything. That’s been a big inspiration.

The River Cottage Preserves book is really great for jams and pickles. It has some traditional recipes like beech leaf tincture. Sort of these older recipes.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Wow. There’s so many to choose from. Well, I’m just going to go with the thing I can see on my record shelf right now. The Silly Sisters album with June Tabor and Maddie Prior. It’s a bunch of old English songs, but it’s just a favorite and I often have it on while making food.

Keep Posted on Emily:

Definitely follow the blog, nothinginthehouse.com. And yeah, I’m pretty much on Facebook. Instagram as TheHousePie and Twitter, Housepie. So whatever is your fancy for social media I suppose you can find me there.

004: Elena Rosemond-Hoerr: How Southern Food Stands Out From Other Cuisines

February 23, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Warning: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable in /home/gabri555/public_html/thedinnerspecial.com/wp-content/plugins/email-before-download/includes/class-email-before-download-db.php on line 56

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Biscuits and Such

On her blog, Elena shares her love of southern cuisine and southern culture, and apart from the amazing recipes, you'll find gems such as her Cast Iron Chronicles, which is a series that documents the restoration of a seriously rusted cast iron pan.

She co-authored a cookbook called The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes, contributed recipes to The Meat Cookbook, and has a new book coming out in April called The No Time To Cook! Book, which you can preorder.

I am so delighted to have Elena Rosemond-Hoerr from Biscuits and Such here on the show today.

On Missing Home:

I graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art which is an art school in 2008. I graduated right at the beginning of the recession which meant that I took a job that I didn't really want just to sort of float along. I was living in D.C. with my then fiancé, who's now my husband, and the apartment was decorated with all of his stuff which meant swords and dragons.

I was so out of place and I felt so homesick.

I just kept telling myself that if I could only make food that reminded me of home, I would feel better and it would be the way to get myself through this stretch.

I really wanted to make my grandmother's country-style steak, but I couldn't remember the whole recipe and I was a little dodgy on it. So I looked online because food blogs were starting to become a thing and I felt like I might be able to find some resources and there were no southern food blogs.

It was just a total lack of availability; there was nothing representative of the south online.

So I was complaining about it to Dan, my husband, and he was like, 'Well, you could just do it.' I was like, 'Oh, yeah, that's a good point.'

So I have a degree in photography, that's my background, and he is a web developer. So we put together Biscuits and Such and the first post, which was Country-Style Steak went up in October of 2008.

I have gone back and updated a lot of the photos and a lot of old posts. But, I have left the photos on that post because they are horrible and since they're so bad I think it's nice to look back sometimes and see how far I've come.

It's a good indicator of how much the blog and I have progressed over the past six years.

On Cooking:

My family is very passionate about cooking, all sides.

My mother is from New Jersey and her mother is very Sicilian and her father is very Irish; both families are recent immigrants and food is the way that they give love and the way that they nurture each other.

My father's family is very, very southern and on that side, also, food is how you comfort. You bring food to friends and relatives and families; potlucks for funerals, potlucks for weddings. It's the way that we nurture each other. So I grew up in a family where even through a lot of passionate fighting, the way that we connected and the way that we communicated was around the dinner table.

So I'm definitely not a chef. I learned from my parents and my grandparents and from experimenting. But food is something I've always been very passionate about.

I cook for my family pretty frequently. When I first started the blog, the person I was thinking of most was my grandmother, my father's mother, Barbara. We just spent a ton of time together throughout my childhood and my teenage years.

She cooked with me a lot and both of my parents were not super keen on having us in the kitchen when we were growing up because it got in the way of the productive things. But my grandmother would let me make JELL-O with her and let me dabble with her. It's really where I learned how to experiment.

I do love cooking for my family, now. My dad and I cook together all the time and it's really nice to talk to them about food and to feed them and to share traditions. Especially because what I focused the blog on is our southern food culture. So I really had a great opportunity to connect with my family about our family food traditions and foods that they grew up eating, and that they still love, and that I grew up eating and that I still love. That's been really nice.

On Southern Cuisine:

The thing that stands out about this so much, to be both in southern cuisine and southern culture, is just the sense of warmth and a sense of community. I feel so loved everywhere I go in the south. The grocery store, my vet, the parents at the school where I teach. Everyone is just loving, and friendly, and welcoming, and warm and that's one of the things that I missed the most when I was outside the south.

Southern food is kind of the same way. It's home food, it's comfort food. It's not overly experimental or fancy. It's just good, quality ingredients made with care and that is something that I think is really special.

It definitely has its roots in sort of frugal, simple, farm-based, agricultural-based communities. They didn't have a lot of many things, but what they had was the time and energy to put into the ingredients and to really cook with quality and care.

On Being Fearless in The Kitchen:

I was definitely always fearless.

It’s a really important quality, especially during recipe development.

I learned a lot of techniques, both with my parents and grandparents and through trial and error, just by sort of seeing what would happen if I combined these ingredients or if I tried this method.

I drew a lot of inspiration from watching them and from cooking with them. But a lot of my progression has just been through seeing what would happen and a lot of times failing and being cool with that.

On Kitchen Disasters:

The first Thanksgiving after Dan and I started dating, we had his sister, her husband and their then two-year-old daughter, our niece Meredith, over for dinner. It was the first time that I'd ever cooked for them.

There was a lot of pressure because I had just started this blog and I bought a pumpkin to make a pumpkin pie. I was super excited to make it from the pumpkin and to do it from scratch. I made it and I was so proud. It had taken me hours.

Meredith and I whipped the cream together and we put it out. She took a bite and she started to bawl.

I was like, 'What happened?'

Then, I tasted it. I realized that in my excitement, I had forgotten to put spices in the pumpkin pie and sugar in the whipped cream. Two super essential ingredients. Pumpkins don't really taste like anything without the pumpkin pie spices. You need those. It was awful, it was so awful, I was so embarrassed.

The next year for her birthday, I made Meredith a chocolate mousse pie and she said it was 'pony magical.' That's about the highest praise a three-year-old will give you.

On Co-authoring – The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes

I got a call last June from someone at DK, which is a publisher based in London. They have U.S. and international publications and they're part of Random House.

They said that they had been interested in doing a cookbook about American cuisine, but that the author that had pitched the idea was from London. They didn't think it was a great idea for an English author to fly solo writing an American cookbook, so, they were looking for an American author to work with her.

I was super interested and it turned out that Caroline, my co-author, lives in Durham, which is about two hours away from where I live and is where I'm from. I drove up to meet her and we just really hit it off. We spent the day coming up with a list of all the recipes and dividing it up.

Then I spent about three and a half, four weeks cooking, writing recipes and cooking like crazy. The whole book was cooked and tested and re-cooked and written in about three and half, four weeks.

It was a really cool experience for me.

I had obviously been writing recipes and developing recipes for the blog for a number of years, but it was my first experience writing for a book where there are standards for how the recipes need to be written. It's UK-based, so I had to measure and weigh everything because it's the metric system which I am not familiar with.

There was this huge learning curve which was really challenging and also really fun. I'm very fortunate that my first cookbook was in such a wonderful environment where I had Caroline holding my hand and the editors holding my hand and everyone sort of showing me the ropes.

I'm very fortunate that since the American cookbook, DK has asked me to come back and work with them on two additional projects. So I did The Meat Cookbook and then we just wrapped on The No Time to Cook! Book, which has been fun.

The Meat Cookbook came out this past September so it's available. It's 300 recipes and so much more. It's a really great, solid cookbook and I contributed 50 recipes to that book.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

None. We don't have cable.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

Nothing in the House is one of my favorite ones. Not Without Salt is great. Those are probably my two favorites.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Instagram is great. I follow a ton of food bloggers but then also, a lot of lifestyle bloggers. One of my favorites is Hey Natalie Jean.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

Red pepper flakes.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Red pepper flakes.

I love them because they add a really subtle heat. They add a nice undertone of spice that isn't overpowering and that you can use in any dish.

I put them in everything.

You never notice that they're there, but they add just a really rich and subtle heat, which I think is important in pretty much all savory dishes.

What are a few cookbooks that have made your life better?

I just bought Not Without Salt's new date night book, Date Night In.

I love her blog and I love that 'Dating My Husband' series, so I'm really excited to dig into that one.

When I was first learning how to cook, my husband bought me Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef. It's amazing because it teaches you processes, not recipes, which I think is so important, especially when you're first starting out.

Ratio is another one that's similar that's really great.

That teaches you how to make things… like the ratios for making cookies, the ratios for making cakes. The sort of standard recipes for all of these things that you can then adapt to your own needs.

That is absolutely what made me the recipe developer that I am now. I have a foundational understanding of how to make different kinds of dishes.

Keep Posted on Elena:

The blog is called Biscuits and Such. It's BiscuitsAndSuch.com. I am on Twitter and Instagram as @ElenaBrent. On Facebook as Biscuits and Such.

So you can find me and follow the blog and see new posts and updates on all of those places.

On Growing Up Around Food and Cooking:

On Southern Culture:

On Southern Food:

On Some Resources to Learn More about Southern Cuisine:

On Her Blog:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Erika:

On the Idea Behind Her Blog:

On Naming Her Blog “Nothing in the House”:

On Her Inspirations:

Tips on Making a Pie Crust from Scratch:

On How to Make Cooking More Fun:

On Her Book “PIE. A Hand Drawn Almanac”:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Emily:

On Missing Home:

On Cooking:

On Southern Cuisine:

On Being Fearless in The Kitchen:

On Kitchen Disasters:

On Co-authoring – The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Elena:

Have Elena's Special Dinner Dish Recipe Sent To You Now: