I'm from South Georgia, so my mom, she always cooked some dang good food when I was growing up.
A lot of people don't know, but I love soul food. I love fried chicken and pork chops, all of that.
People come to Nashville where I live and they say, 'What's a great Southern restaurant?' Well, you got to know the right grandmother, because there's a lot of magic to good Southern cooking.
The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person's culture.
When I get down to Louisiana, I get to have a taste of some of that great food.
I can still enjoy the foods I like I just eat much smaller portions now. And of course Ive had to give up that southern style way of cooking.
Stone-ground grits are wonderful, but because they take so long to cook, I usually go with quick cooking grits - which I also love. But I never make the instant kind - some things a Southerner just won't do!
I grew up loving okra.
The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.
Back in the day, I used to watch 'The Cajun Chef' with Justin Wilson. His mixing would go one way, and his stomach would go the other.
Mama was a natural cook. At harvest time, she would whip up a noontime dinner for the men in the field: fried chicken with milk gravy, ham, mashed potatoes, lima beans, field peas, corn, slaw, sliced tomatoes, fried apples, biscuits, and peach pie.
Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.
There are a couple of different types of food I eat a lot. I was raised in the South, in Tennessee, so I’m going to go with comfort food, soul food. I would probably start with collard greens and candied baby carrots and then have some biscuits and white gravy - and for dessert, probably blackberry cobbler.
Down South, even our vegetables have some pig hidden somewhere in it. A vegetable isn't a vegetable without a little ham hock.
My mom's collard greens. No one else in the world can make them like hers. I'm not just saying that because she's my mom. She's got some Mississippi secret. I could seriously eat them every day.
In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.
I can eat a lot of pizza. And I can cook. I'm from New Orleans, so it's just in my blood.
I'm from Texas, we fry everything.
My mom makes the best Cajun stuff. I'm a big gumbo guy. I've lost a lot of my Louisiana accent, so now when I say 'gumbo,' I feel like someone who's never said the word before.
New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.
No self-respecting Southerner will eat something baked, broiled, grilled, stewed, poached, sauteed, or flambeed when it can be deep fried.
In '71 or '72 I returned to New Orleans and stayed there. I started cooking Louisiana food. Of all the things I had cooked, it was the best-and it was my heritage.
I like pork chops and country ham, creamed potatoes, stuff like that. Redeye gravy. It comes from ham, bacon, stuff like that. It's the grease that you fry it in. I eat a lot of Jell-O. Fruit Jell-O.
Catfish's mild taste adapts well to a wide array of flavors, especially strong assertive ones, which is why you used to see it 'blackened' Cajun style on so many restaurant menus - a trick which soon became a tired cliche.
I found that when I went from Albany to Savannah, that I needed to put that white rice away, and I needed to turn that into Savannah red rice because they were big into that sausage, tomato-y, bell pepper-y rice mixture.
