When I was in 5th grade, the mother of a friend of mine used to make tortillas and put a small amount of butter and a bunch of grape jelly on them while still warm. HMMMMM!

My mother used to add a little peanut butter on our BLT sandwiches. I never knew that it was WRONG! :bs2:

So I guess i'm saying "try it, you'll like it"! The bottom line is simple, if SHE likes them that way, let HER eat them that way.

Doug

 

My first 'exposure' to grits was back in the '70's on a trip to the Navy base in Norfolk, VA. We were having breakfast in a diner and one of the guys I was with (we were all from the North) asked the waitress "How do you eat this stuff?" She replied "Just put oodles and oodles of butter and salt on it."

He was the same guy that had a chef in an Italian restaurant come out and start yelling at him because he asked for ketchup for his pasta dish...

 

My first 'exposure' to grits was back in the '70's on a trip to the Navy base in Norfolk, VA. ...

My first exposure to grits...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWC0sKCS5oA

 

"How to eat grits"? Didn't you mean "why"??:veryhappy

 

If you eat them "right" then they are great! I wouldn't suggest eating grits with jelly, though. ?

 

I've eaten with Italian folks 'round here who regard pasta as so holy that they eat it seperately on it's own plate BEFORE eating the main course. These are the kind of Italians that call spagetti sauce "gravy", even though the can clearly says "sauce". But they don't put it on their spagetti. No, that's holy stuff. They eat a giant pile of it unseasoned, finish it, then eat whatever the main course is and put their "gravy" on that.

Conversely, I've eaten spagetti multiple times with a large family called the Kennedy's and they pre-mixed the spagetti sauce with the spagetti so that the spagetti turned pink with no extra sauce left over. Eeeew! I hated eating with them.

I can't stand boiled hot dogs. Grosses me out. Fried, baked, or broiled doggies for me.

And wassup with sunny side up eggs? Yuck! Scramble them or make an omelet as God intended.

:veryhappy

 

With jelly or jam?

 

That's why I started this thread. I saw Yvonne put grape jelly in her grits this morning.... that's nasty...

Butter and pepper is the way to go! :bigok:

 

Since we are on the subject of southern foods, how about boiled peanuts? Bill

 

Since we are on the subject of southern foods, how about boiled peanuts? Bill

Bill, that is "bawld" peanuts. I was in South Carolina and it took me 10 minutes to figure out what the guy was saying (while quietly trying to figured what made them "bald"!)
:yup::yup:

My family will start to laugh if you just say "bald peanuts", until they remember the taste (or lack of it) and the slimy feeling in your mouth! Been there, done that, DON'T want the T-shirt!

Doug

 

ill never understand sunny side up, deviled eggs, etc.... or liver, or cannibal sandwiches.

but gluckmuggle, that stuff is the shiz!

 

LOL, never had grits. Where I come from, it's all about that chile. We put it on everything. NM is one of the spiciest states in the country, due to the majority of the state being Hispanic. Locally, if you grew up here and have never eaten green chile or Blake's, you pretty much are shunned until you do. The nearby joint knows me by name... a Blake's breakfast burrito is my drug in the mornings. Screw coffee when I can eat a 5 lb breakfast burrito for $4.17, and I won't need to eat until dinner.

 

Don't have it in Canada. Seen it in my travels south but it looks kinda gross like poutine. Possibly it tastes better than it looks. Maybe next time.

 

Funny, I've never had poutine. I've tried grits though. Didn't mind them at all.

What you put on them might be a regional thing. Coming from Canadian roots, both sides of my family ate a traditional Acadian meal called rapure (or rappie pie). However my mom was from Nova Scotia, and my dad's roots are from New Brunswick. So while they both ate rapure, the toppings were completely different.

In Nova Scotia, it was butter and salt. In New Brunswick it was sugar. So my mom had a look of disgust on her face seeing my dad put sugar on his, and my dad had the same look when my mom put salt and butter on hers. To each his own.....

 

I'll bet Norbert puts mayonnaise on his french fries!

 

That's the way they ate them when I lived in The Netherlands a long time ago. Bill

 

I've tried grits and really didn't like it, but take the corn and make meal out of it and turn that into mush and now you are talking. You cook the corn meal in water and put it in a pie plate. It firms up enough so you can cut it then fry it in shortening (no oil or butter). Brown it up which form a crust and serve it with butter. The crust comes off and are saved for last and the inside is mush. Cook it outside on the side burner on the grill because it does make a mess. My wife put maple syrup on hers but she's from New Hampshire so what to expect. And then there are Johnny Cakes. Now Johnny Cakes do require maple syrup.

 

 

'Round here, one of the most intense things you can eat is what I call "Super Italian Hoagies". Only a few very elite Italian sandwich shops make them and they cost like $15, are 12" long with a 3" diameter cylinder of "meat" inside. I say "meat" with quotes because you've never heard of the exotic Italian lunch meats that many have inside. The aged provolone cheese is so old, dry, and valuable that they weigh it on gram scales and sprinkle crumbs of it on the sandwich. The flavor intensity of these hoagies is so strong that the first bite is like putting a shot gun in your mouth and blowing the back of your skull out. In 40 years I've never been able to eat more than 3"-4" of one in one sitting.


:yikes:

 

Well, damn.. do you get a "to go" box? Don't need a "to go" box with grits! :banana:

 

Yup, scrapple for breakfast all the time growing up.

Until I was old enough to read the list of ingredients, then never again.

:no:

 

I grew up on a small farm in PA Dutch country. In the fall some of the neighbors would gather and butcher several animals, so I didn't need to read any ingredients. Nothing was wasted. The small intestines of the hogs were cleaned and used as sausage casings. Intestines are the ingredient in chittlins or chitterlings eaten in the south. Even with this, my least favorite food item is one I encountered when eating in a university dining hall in Wales. It was called "black pudding" which I quickly realized was what my father had talked about as "blood pudding." No, thank you mam. Bill

 

LIVER!

EEEEeeeew!

Mom made that nasty stuff once a week and ate liverwurst in between.

Yuuuuuuuuck!

Tastes like dirty buttocks!

No amount of hot sauce, fried onions, Worcestershire, vodka/tequila, etc. can make liver taste good!

Barf! Barf! Barf!

:no:

 

EEEEeeeew!

Tastes like dirty buttocks!

Umm, okay...

 

Grits are a potato substitute and you can eat them with almost any dish. But they have become a mostly breakfast food. And its hard to beat them with a couple or three fried eggs, toast and bacon for breakfast. A little salt and pepper, butter and kind of mixed together with the yolk from the eggs along with toast to scoop it all up with, yummmmm!

 

Us uber classy folks up here in the Northeast are used to eating everything with specific silverware and we almost never touch food with our hands, except Cheesesteaks, hot dogs, and potato chips. When you sit down to eat a traditional holiday meal 'round here, every person has like 20 pieces of silverware and multiple plates and glasses in front of them. Salad forks, dessert forks, a special knife for spreading butter, coffee spoons, fondue forks, forks for picking stuff out of your teeth, a special plate for bread rolls, the list goes on and on.

'Cuz we're so classy, we ain't got a clue as to how to eat exotic food like tacos that you eat with your hands. Oh, we try to get the special knives and forks out to eat'em, but it's tough to tell which ones to use. Do ya cut a taco with a steak knife that looks like a chain saw or do ya use the special knife for spreading Cheez Whiz? What size special plate do you put tacos on? Are tacos an appetizer, a main course, a pre-dessert palate cleanser or.......????

We might be classy as heck, but we're as dumb as day old turds when it comes to eatin' finger food. But all sorts of Latino restaurants with names like Chupucabra and El Gordo Grande keep opening up, so we need to learn how to eat food that requires you to use your hand as your plate and somehow manage to not bite your fingers off. Since there's no Mexicans 'round here, only Puerto Ricans, we ain't got no one to tell us how to eat that stuff properly. And because we're all self-taught hand eaters, everyone does it differently. Heck, no two people eat a slice of pizza the same way.

I, therefore, have evolved my own method for eating a taco:

Never put it down.

Once you pick up a taco you're commited. You have to finish it before you do anything else. Since the shell breaks on the first bite, if you put it down it will fall apart like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. You have to hold it upright, otherwise the corn-based U-shaped plate that holds the cat-based meat and mushy beans lets all the guts fall out. Therefore you have to turn your head sideways to get the sucker in your pie-hole. When you're done eating your taco, you have a big decision to make: Have another taco immediately or use up all the napkins on the table wiping cat guts and mystery sauces off of your face and fingers.

Am I doing it right?

Curious Gordos want to know!


:veryhappy

 

Gordo,

Try a soft shell taco.

 

Ing grits and other southern dishes

Gordo, your posts often remind me of funny events and memories. When I was working for a big GM Dealership in Virginia Beach I was doing outside sales for the wholesale parts division, my official title was sales rep for the wholesale parts division. I established accounts with repair shops & body shops and done fleet bids along with accounts with smaller dealerships to supply GM parts. I covered a radius of about 250 miles from Virginia Beach. I went into the dealership one morning before leaving out to make some stops in northeast North Carolina and the Peugeot Factory rep (we also sold Peugeot) had showed up from New Jersey and wanted to ride along with me and watch me in action to see if he could pick up a few pointers. He offered to drive but when we got into the parking lot I seen he was driving a Citroan (the only one in this country at the time) and I could see us broke down in Tarboro, NC in that thing with that dude standing there with the water hose saying "I always wanted to work on one of those things" so I passed and drove my company car (a Pontiac GP). Lunch time came and I took him to a BBQ buffet restaurant in Ahoskie, NC to give him a taste of some down home southern dishes. The first clue I got was when the young lady came to the table and wanted to know what we were drinking with our meal and he said he wanted iced coffee, you should have seen the look on her face like, "you ain't from around here are you" and she said "I'm sorry but I don't know what that is". I orders sweet tea and told her just to bring him a cup of coffee and a glass of ice and some coffee creamer if he wanted that. We go up to the buffet and he is ahead of me in line, he scoops up some fried Okra and ask me if those were hush puppies, I said "no" and I expained about the Okra thing down south. But he was a nice fellow and we made it through the day and parted friends.

 

If you want to know the truth about all this, here in North Carolina, a breakfast ain't breakfast unless you have grits AND liver mush. The liver mush is fried and I personally like to top it with ketchup. Mmmmmmmmm :biggthump

When we have the Nationals at Charlotte in 2019, I will serve up some grits and liver mush to everybody! Hee Hee Hee

 

I ain't eatin' no liver mush!

I don't care if you put it under or on top of the grits or serve it in a soup bowl filled with ketchup.

Liver belongs under the table on the floor where the dog can git at it.


So, is liver mush liver that has been run through a blender? My dad married a woman who had this cat that she only fed blendered liver to. Every meal liver. That cat was a nasty biitch who spent her whole life hiding under the bed hissing at you. In 15 years I never laid a hand on that cat. I guess I'd hide under the bed and hiss at people, too, if I had to eat liver every day. But, that cat lived for 20 years, so maybe there's somethin' to all this liver eatin'.

:veryhappy

 

To be honest, I'm not too sure how it's made. The "correct" term is liver pudding. It is ground up but other "ingredients" are added in. I've been told it's made from stuff shoveled off the floor after everything else is made. Don't know about that but if you grew up in it, it's pretty good!

 

My First Grits

Year ago when I was a smart kid I left VT on a motorcycle headed for Orlando.
It was November, and I got to Orlando before Walt D.
I stopped for breakfast somewhere in Georgia, it was warmer than Vermont.
The waitress asked me if I wanted grits with my eggs.
I didn't know what grits were, being a damn Yankee, ( Well I didn't know that either, yet )
So I said " I'll have just one ".

 

My Dad was a poor Yankee boy from Indiana who had been a cook in the Army, Mom was an Alabama girl. Grew up eating some different stuff. We did have Hominy but I do not remember having it as grits. Mom always grew Okra in the back yard along with Tomatoes and peppers. Lots of fried green tomatoes and fried okra, both are great. Boiled okra not so much. Dad knew how to find wild greens. Remember eating fried polk in KC MO. Like Gordo I had all the liver I ever want growing up, also can no longer stand navy beans or oatmeal. Mom got us started early on peanut butter and banana sandwiches. To this day I have no idea why Elvis would fry them. As others have said, different tastes in different areas. Chicago folks think it is sacrilege to eat ketchup on a hot dog. In my family there were dam few things you could not have catsup on. When we had left over mashed potatoes Mom made fried potato pancakes. Catsup was about the only way I could get them down. When working in Texas saw things like Cajun Boudan and Mexican chorizo, never got the taste for either. Did get the taste for the breakfast burrito with hot sauce, Red not Green. Real TEX-Mex food and BBQ Brisket are hard to beat. Probably the worst I ever ate was some stuff we got while my family was getting public aid in the late sixtys, early seventies. Back then you got surplus commodity's, no food stamps or link cards. The Government put out a canned meat that had the consistency of Spam without the taste. You had to slice it thin and dose it with catsup to get it down.

 

John talking about eating poke, reminded me of some of the things which we gathered and ate in the spring. We did not eat poke, but I think that my mother did after I had left home. The first greens in the spring were dandelions. This accomplished two things, we did some weeding and put food on the table at the same time. Then there was the narrow-leafed dock and lambs quarters. Those are both weeds too. Also, we collected water cress near the spring. (Water source, not season.) There was also spearmint growing wild in the pasture. That was collected and dried to make mint tea. I did some trapping as a teenager. We ate a few *****, a muskrat or so, as well as few groundhogs, a lot of rabbits and pheasants, and a deer or so which my father hunted. One thing which we never did eat was possum. As a kid, my father walked by a dead horse carcass on his way to school. One winter day, he kicked the frozen carcass and a possum ran out, so we never had to eat possum. In my profession, I taught biochemistry, so now I know that all of the proteins in these odd foods are made up of the same 20 or so amino acids. Most of the other components are similar in the various foods also. Bill