Every time you eat Southern cooking like collard greens, do you just feel good?

Did you like eating down home southern cooking when you were a kid and now you prepare it for your family?  My mother, being a native of Georgia always presented the best of southern cooking.  If your family is like mine, then I’m sure the dinner table is the avenue by which all of the good conversations start and you find out about each other’s day.  We definitely learn a lot about each other around our dinner table.   For me there’s nothing like talking and laughing with family to some good southern cooking prepared with love.  On occasion I try to make my husband’s favorites like baked macaroni and cheese, collard greens, cornbread, and black eyed peas.  If the occasion’s really special I will make fried chicken and my husband’s absolute favorite Carrot cake. Southern cooking doesn’t always have to be the slave labor we may have seen our mothers or grandmothers making when we were kids.  I personally have found many ways to prepare it without sacrificing taste and the better part of the afternoon. Southern cooking also need not be the worst food you could possibly stuff into your mouth due to the incredible amount of fat that we have seen it prepared with in times past.  Sometimes you need the fat in southern cooking but most of the time I have found that you don’t. I decided when I got married, those many years ago, that I wanted to continue to have the taste of my southern cooking without ruining me and my husband’s health.  Now that I have a daughter I am teaching her how to create good meals without sacrificing the taste as well.   After I got married it was then that I began to experiment with less fattening products that you would normally use in your traditional southern cooking.  Much to my surprise, after all these years, no one knows I have changed my recipes.  My family and friends are still shocked when they find out what I put in my potato salad.  I can never make enough.  But most of all I feel good knowing that I can continue to make my favorites in a way that is not only good but much healthier than the southern cooking that I ate growing up.