Radioman's boiled peanuts thread is making me hungry for some southern cooking.
I'm stuck up here in Wisconsin. Moo.
You need to come to my house Amelia. I try some gourmet stuff and even a little "yankee" cooking now and then and we do a lot of Southwestern, but the comfort food staples here are:
Fried chicken or steak fingers or pork chops
Chicken fried steak
Mashed potatoes and gravy made from the pan drippings
Collard greens or turnip greens with a little vinegar
Sweet potatoes every way you can think of to fix them
Potato salad made with a sweet mustard sauce
Pinto beans with just the right amount of savory juice and flavorings
Ditto black eyed peas.
Pot roast with stewed carrots, potatoes, and onions
Fruit salad
and yes, fried okra.
When we moved to southeastern Kansas from West Texas, our next door neighbor, originally from Oklahoma, taught at a school in a teeny town close to our larger town. She came home one day to announce to us all that they had received black-eyed peas in their school commodities. The cooks didn't know what they were, so they made chili out of them. The okra they didn't have a clue what to do with that so they chopped it up very fine and added it to a vegetable stew.
I got you covered on all of them too! And you forgot the sweet tea!
Just a good ol southen gal... from san francisco
Yup, gallons of sweet tea.