5. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, rotating the pan 180 degrees halfway through, until golden brown. Remove from oven and immediately brush with melted butter.
Tip: I put a snake of dough on the outer edges to prevent spreading.
SERVES 6 TO 8
Shrimp and Grits
* * *
The combination of creamy grits with slightly spicy, tomatoey shrimp is a classic coastal dish in the South. It’s comforting and hearty, but in an elegant serving bowl it can also be a perfect meal to serve at a dinner party.
* * *
FOR THE GRITS
11/2 cup grits (not quick-cooking—I like stone-ground)
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter
FOR THE SHRIMP
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 small green pepper, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes with liquid
1 teaspoon Cajun seasoning (I like Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 pounds medium-large raw shrimp, peeled
1/2 cup water
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
Salt to taste
Chopped fresh green onions for garnish
* * *
TO MAKE THE GRITS
In a medium saucepan, bring 3 cups of water to a boil over high heat and stir in the grits and salt. Bring back to a boil, stirring occasionally, then reduce the heat to low, stir in the butter, and simmer for about 15 minutes. The grits will absorb all the water, so you will need to stir them occasionally, and you can add more water if they become too thick. The grits are easy to keep warm on very low heat, just adding water when needed, but you must stir them every now and then to keep them from sticking to the bottom or clumping.
TO MAKE THE SHRIMP
In a large skillet or sauté pan, combine the olive oil and butter over medium-high heat until the butter is melted. Add the onion and green pepper and sauté until they begin to soften, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 more minute. Stir in the tomatoes and their liquid, the Cajun seasoning, and the tomato paste. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes and add the shrimp, stirring for about 2 minutes, until the shrimp turn pink. Add the water and Worcestershire sauce and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes until heated through but not boiling. Taste for seasoning, and add salt if needed. Serve immediately over the warm grits and garnish with chopped green onions.
SERVES 6 TO 8
Sautéed Baby Kale
* * *
Hearty greens are such a good side dish—healthy and easy to make quickly. There are so many wonderful greens available in the market washed and ready to use. You can buy packages of organic baby kale to keep in the fridge. Or plant some! I always have kale in my garden because it’s so easy to grow. This recipe calls for two 9-ounce packages of baby kale. It seems like a lot, but when you start to sauté the kale it will wilt down significantly. No matter what, a good rule of thumb is to figure on a big handful of greens for each serving. After sautéing, a little squeeze of lemon juice or a sprinkle of a fancy vinegar, such as balsamic or a fruit or champagne vinegar, is a great way to finish off the dish and add a bit of acidity.
* * *
2 tablespoons olive oil or vegetable oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 (9 oz.) packages prewashed baby kale
Salt and pepper to taste
Lemon juice or vinegar to sprinkle on top
* * *
In a large sauté pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Throw in the garlic and stir for 1 minute, being careful to not let the garlic turn brown. Toss in the baby kale in batches, allowing the first few handfuls to wilt a little so that you have room to add the rest of it. Sauté the kale and garlic together until the kale is just wilted and still bright green. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze a little lemon juice over the greens or have some lemon wedges or a fancy vinegar available on the table for guests to sprinkle on top.
SERVES 10 TO 12
Mud Pie Trifle
* * *
Mississippi Mud Pie is a church cookbook favorite, typically layered with (gourmet purists, stop reading now!) chocolate pudding, Oreo cookies, and Cool Whip. It’s a guilty pleasure of semihomemade decadence. Layering the ingredients in a fancy trifle dish is the ultimate “high-low” hack.
This recipe always makes me think of Miss Betty, who ran a little Nashville restaurant in Sylvan Park. When I was a little girl, my parents worked late on Thursdays, so my grandparents would take me and my brother there at five o’clock for dinner. Oh, we loved it there.
“Miss Betty,” we’d say when we arrived, “what pies do you have today?”
And Miss Betty would list some eight or nine pies that she’d made that day, from lemon meringue (my grandmother’s favorite) to Mississippi mud (my favorite). And every pie would have a mile-high meringue on top.
After my grandmother died, I took my kids to eat at Miss Betty’s. I’d been holding it together okay until then, but Miss Betty came up and gave me a big hug and I instantly burst into tears.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” she said to me. “Every Thursday I think about you and your grandparents.”
Miss Betty has passed away now, too. She fed her community and made so many people happy. I think about her often—especially when I see a cheerful dessert.
* * *
1 (8 oz.) container of Cool Whip
1 (5.9 oz.) box of instant dark chocolate or fudge pudding
3 cups coarsely crumbled chocolate cake (you can make a quick chocolate cake from a mix)
2 cups crushed Oreo cookies
* * *
Defrost the Cool Whip according to the directions on the container. Make the instant chocolate pudding according to the directions on the box. In a trifle dish or deep-sided bowl, create a 1-inch layer of cake crumbles on the bottom of the dish. Top with about an inch of the pudding, and then top that with a layer of crumbled Oreo cookies. Spread out a layer of the Cool Whip. Repeat the layering process, using all the ingredients, and top with a layer of Cool Whip. Decorate the top if you like with more cake crumbles or Oreos or a combination of both. Serve immediately, or keep chilled until about 1 hour before serving.
MAKES ABOUT 3 DOZEN
Cowboy Cookies
* * *
Some people prefer these with chocolate or no coconut or extra nuts or whatever, and, as in the Wild West, there are no strict rules. It’s easy to omit or change up ingredients, because this basic dough is very forgiving. One other tip: I find that once you have the cookie dough in the pan, if you put the pan in the freezer for 15 minutes before baking, the cookies won’t come out too flat.
* * *
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon baking soda
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
11/2 cups light brown sugar
11/2 cups granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
11/2 cups softened butter
3 eggs
2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
2 cups Rice Krispies cereal
2 cups shredded coconut
11/2 cups chopped pecans
11/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
* * *
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. In a large mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. In a separate mixing bowl, cream together the brown sugar, granulated sugar, vanilla extract, and butter with a mixer until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, to the butter mixture and mix well before adding the next egg. In batches, add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix until just combined. With a spatula or wooden spoon, fold in the oats, Rice Krispies, coconut, pecans, and chocolate chips.
3. Using a spoon o
r a small scoop, drop spoonfuls of dough onto a cookie sheet about 11/2 inches apart. Place the cookie sheet in the freezer for about 15 minutes.Take directly from the freezer to the oven and bake for 10 to 12 minutes until golden brown. Bake them slightly less if you like chewier cookies, longer if you like them crispy.
Table Settings
Nowadays, no one expects to see a perfect table setting at a regular old dinner party, but I think it’s helpful to know the old-school rules, if for no other reason than if you find yourself at a formal meal, you’re not undone by a cake fork. For those who are curious, here are the traditional southern ways to set a table: you use the acronym FORKS, where the dinner plate is the O:
Fork, O for plate, Knife, Spoon.
Yes, I know that spells FOKS. Just go with it.
Tip: If you don’t know which side the bread plate or drinks go on (or which bread plate or water glass is yours when you’re seated at the table), make the okay sign with each of your hands. Your left hand will make a lowercase b for bread. Your right hand will make a lowercase d for drink. I taught my kids this and they use it all the time.
Seating
The guest of honor is traditionally seated to the host’s right and is served first. Try to mix up seating so couples aren’t always together. They already see each other every day! And you want to give them something to talk about on the way home.
Serving
A buffet is considered a bit more casual. For a seated meal served at the table, plates are served from a guest’s left side and taken away from their right. Serving moves counterclockwise, with the host served last. For family-style service, platters are passed from left to right. Each guest should hold the platter for the guest on his or her right.
CHAPTER 5
If It’s Not Moving, Monogram It
Southern ladies have a reputation for loving all sorts of embroidery, and I’m here to tell you that this reputation is 100 percent based in fact. Even my brother, John, knows how to needlepoint. It’s something my mother taught both of us at a very young age. Towels, bedding, bags, cocktail napkins, dog collars—nothing is finished without at least a couple of initials in colorful stitching. If there’s a wedding or a new baby on the way, don’t stand between a southern woman and a monogram store; you’ll get knocked down. We have a saying in my family: If it’s not moving, monogram it.
My love of monograms started early. When I was a little girl, my best friend, Ashley, had white towels with pink embroidery that matched the wallpaper in her bathroom. The towels also matched her pink floral coverlet and her pink floral pillows. Everything was piped in the exact same light pink. To me, that was the ultimate southern-lady décor. The chicest thing ever. I ran home and told my mother I wanted monograms, too, so then every year she gave me a monogrammed towel or monogrammed beach bag.
I think a monogram says to people, “Hello, there. I’m southern.” Or maybe it says, “Don’t steal my stuff.” All I know is I hardly ever see monograms in New York or LA, but I can walk into almost any nice house in Nashville and there will be monogrammed sheets on the bed. It’s just how we grew up. You take really good care of them, and you keep them forever. One of the very first things I bought after I had my daughter, Ava, was monogrammed pillow shams for her bed.
I can spend hours in a monogram shop with my mother—and have. We love to discuss which colors and fonts and styles are our favorites. To the untrained eye, all monograms look the same, but once you’ve spent some time around them, you start to see the variations. Some are formal, while others are more contemporary.
At this point, if you are not from the South, you may be thinking, “Uh, monograms come in different levels of formality and different styles?”
I’m so glad you asked. Why, yes! There are many subtleties, even when it comes to which letters you choose to embroider. Traditionally, your married-name initial goes in the middle, with your maiden initials on either side. So, for instance, I have a typical long southern name: Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon. I married someone with a last name starting with a T. So my current, more modern monogram is, reading from left to right: R with a large T and a W. A more classic monogram would be L, T, J. There are also nuances of font. A curlicue script is traditional and formal. Some wild and crazy young upstart monogrammers use bold, modern fonts. Fascinating, right? Well, to me it is! I know . . . I’m weird.
My grandmother had monogrammed silver and china, some of which I inherited. My mother has her mother’s silverware, and though it doesn’t have the Witherspoon monogram, it’s a nice family heirloom with her maiden name on it. I’m also obsessed with stationery because I write a lot of thank-you notes. Do you doubt my obsession? I have formal stationery and informal stationery. Yes, there is a big difference. The formal is on sturdier stock, and the monogram is in a more traditional font.
The monogram’s gift potential is limitless.
For a baby, I think it’s nice to do a monogrammed blanket with the date of birth on it. Alternately, you could do a traditional silver cup or spoon, a frame, or a rattle. You get the idea.
For a wedding or housewarming, the list is even longer: towels, sheets, plates, barware, a cashmere or cotton throw, desk accessories, pretty wastebaskets, frames . . . you name it. A chic wedding gift would be four linen cocktail napkins with a beautiful monogram detail.
One of my favorite possessions, and favorite gifts to give, is a monogrammed keepsake binder. I’ve kept monogrammed birthday binders for Ava, Deacon, and Tennessee since they were born. Every year on each of their birthdays, I sit down and write a letter from my heart. They grow up so fast, and this is an easy and meaningful way to mark the passage of time. On their eighteenth birthdays, they will get their binders and can look back at all the personal messages I have written to them. It’s nice for us all to have this remembrance of their childhood.
You could do this for a bridal shower, too. All the guests could write a letter to the bride and groom. Then the bride and groom could write letters to each other on their anniversaries. How special will that book be on a fiftieth wedding anniversary? With a monogrammed cover, of course!
Monogrammed Scrapbooks
I love preserving family memories. I keep my favorite recollections and photographs in a special monogrammed scrapbook. In this, as in so many things, my grandmother led the way. Sadly, she died about a year after my oldest, Ava, was born, but that just makes me all the more grateful for the memoirs and photographs and records I have of her. For example, I was so glad she got to hold baby Ava before she passed. I’ll never forget what she said, smiling down at her: “That baby’s just sweet as sugar.” I wanted to make sure we recorded that moment with a photo and detailed caption so that Ava would know she’d had that all-too-brief connection with her great-grandmother.
Here are a couple of pages from our family scrapbook. I feel so fortunate that my grandmother kept these careful records.
Dorothea loved keeping records like I do. When I got into movies, she kept scrapbooks with every newspaper clipping about me. She had scrapbooks going all the way back to her own childhood, and we would spend hours sitting on the floor going through them. She had beautiful penmanship and on the back of each photo wrote everyone’s name and the date. We don’t always think to include dates and full names on our photos, because of course we know who the people are and roughly when each picture was taken. But decades from now, our family members will come across the photos and be baffled unless we’ve taken a few seconds to annotate them.
To this day, I’m grateful for Dorothea’s detailed scrapbooks. Thanks to her, I know so much about our family tree and can identify everyone in the old photos. This year, I took it to the next level and had all of it digitally archived. And I try to keep it up, because I want my grandchildren, should I be lucky enough to have some, to remember me and Dorothea and my grandfather Jimmy and my parents, and all the rest of our family who came before them.
Nonmonogrammed Gift Ideas (If You Must)
I alw
ays love to give hostesses those little cheese knives and butter knives—the little ones that are specifically for hors d’oeuvres. Who doesn’t need those? Yet I feel like nobody ever thinks to buy them for themselves.
For young women, I vote pearls. They say diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but my grandmother Dorothea always said that pearls are a southern girl’s best friend. A string of pearls is symbolic, a token typically given to mark a rite of passage—confirmation, sixteenth birthday, graduation, or engagement. At church on Sunday, you can glance from pew to pew, and all around you’ll see women wearing their best pearls.
One tradition in my family was to give Add-A-Pearl necklaces, whether tiny natural seed pearls on a delicate chain or starter strands of cultured pearls. Those were special-occasion gifts it seemed every girl I knew growing up got. I got mine for my confirmation. Pearls are a particularly great gift for a niece or goddaughter.
Whiskey in a Teacup Page 4