Welcome to Southern Fried Veggie

Reposted from new blog -- Southern Fried Veggie. I'm a southern woman in a long line of southern women who are delicious cooks. I grew up on biscuits and gravy, eggs over easy, cornbread dressing, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese with ranch beans, fried catfish and hush puppies. My Granny was a good southern cook. We called her Big Bill. My favorites were strawberry cake with about a pound of confectioner's powered sugar as the icing and pineapple upside down cake. I'd stay with her during the summer and every day at lunch, we'd enjoy a bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup, peanut butter mixed with Welch's grape jelly on 2 slices of white wonder bread. Of course, that was after the fried eggs and bacon breakfast we had earlier. Hmmm, that was some good eating. Now, Granny was a good cook, but my Momma is a phenomenal southern cook. Chocolate pie with mile-high meringue, coconut cream pie with crust made from scratch, banana pudding eaten straight from the bowl while standing with the refrigerator door open. (What? You know you've done that too). Where I come from food is love, comfort, and hospitality, and warm wishes. Food is everything. For a southern woman like me, food is life and I'm a true foodie. I wake up thinking about what I'm going to eat and rate if my day was decent or not by the tastiness of what I ate. Of course, along with all of this is a scale that goes up and up and up and feelings of having no energy or that good 'ol hidy-ho zeal for life. I wake up tired and fall in bed exhausted. Cranky, grouchy, sleepy, hungry.., don't mistake these as members of the 7 dwarfs, it is me on a typical day. Harrumph. There's got to be a better way, right? If there is, I'm determined to figure it out. This blog is to document the journey I am taking to capture the same southern fried deliciousness that is engrained in my DNA and eat a more plant-strong, whole-food, non-processed, environmentally conscious diet. Is that even possible? Who knows. Here I will try out recipes, read and review books and documentaries, etc. You get the idea. In addition to my "would you like fries with that? Oh hell, yeah" outlook, I'm a workaholic with a 1.5 hour round trip (on a good day) commute, and mom of Miss Anna-Jane my 5 year old so there's not a lot of time to fool around shopping for odd ingredients and slaving the day away in a kitchen. So basically this social experiment boils down to this: is it possible for a 40 year old southern woman to make real health differences with food quickly, efficiently, cheaply and still taste as good as coconut cream pie? Well, let's get started and find out.