Simply Vicki

Yes, my friend Christy from Southern Plate is so cool we are giving something away.  What is it?  Well you’ll just have to wait until the end of this here interview to see what it is.  Trust me it is worth it.

I am not even sure how I actually met Christy, but it happened recently, lol.  I checked out her blog and well, that was it.  I am a big fan of Southern cookin’ and her blog is dedicated to just that.  I love how she combines the recipes with family stories.  It makes the food even better, I think.

I have tried several of her recipes and want to share a few.  My family loved the baked macaroni and cheese.  I made the crock pot apple butter for our Christmas open house and it was a hit.  And I don’t know how in the world I missed this recipe, but it is my next to try once the cheesecake I am making today is gone.

1. How did Southern Plate come about?

I had a friend up north who had never tasted homemade banana pudding! I was horrified at such a wasted life (I am kidding – but only partially ~winks~) and wanted to teach her how to make it. The thing is, she wasn’t experienced in the kitchen and making a pudding from scratch is kind of one of those things you need to see to be able to do so I got the idea to take photos of every step and post it on my little Vox blog.

The day after I posted it, Vox put it on their front page! So my wheels started turning. Next, I posted a tutorial on how to make my mother’s Mandarin Orange Cake and the day after that, Vox put THAT post on their front page!

After a few more posts and a few more front pages, I started to think I was on to something and bought my own domain so more people could find the tutorials.  So basically, it all started because I wanted to make sure everyone got to taste homemade banana pudding. That’s still my goal and hey, that Home Ec degree was getting awful dusty just hanging on my wall.

2. If you had to pick an all-time favorite post on Southern Plate, which would you pick and why?

That’s a tough one! Most of my recipes are old family favorites, so they are very personal to me. I love getting to share the stories behind the food, why it is so special to me and how we as southerners got started with a particular recipe. I guess the favorite of my heartfelt posts would have to be “Seven Cakes”. It’s the story of how my great grandmother used to stay up all night long on Christmas Eve making seven different cakes so that her kids would have a different cake each day until the New Year. My grandmother is in her seventies and she still lights up when she talks about those cakes. I was very close to my great grandmother when she was alive and that story means a great deal to me.

My second favorite post would have to be my Coca Cola Cake post. On that post, I learned how much fun it is to make sure my readers are included when I laugh at myself. My camera strap kept falling down in front of the lens and showing up in my photos so I removed it. In the middle of the tutorial, I dropped my camera into the chocolate cake batter! I quickly retrieved it and managed to complete the tutorial with that camera, despite the slight blurring in the lens and stickiness. I needed a new camera anyway and now my son is the only kid I know whose hand me down digicam is chocolate scented.

3. What is your favorite part about blogging?

MY READERS!!! Southern Plate readers are the nicest people on earth. Every single day when I wake up to find someone has left a comment or sent an email which just starts my day off with the biggest smile and keeps it going all day. I have never known a group of better people and I am truly in a permanent state of gratitude to each and every one of them.

I get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of Southern Plate as well.  I often get comments saying things like “I could never cook before I found Southern Plate, and now people brag on my cooking!” or “We thought we’d never taste chocolate gravy after our grandmother passed on, your recipe is just like hers!”. Most of the comments just touch me and really make me feel like I’m somehow making a difference. Last night, I had to call my mother and wake her up to read one comment; we both shared a great laugh!  “I have never really enjoyed cooking and did it as little as possible.  After stumbling across the website I’ve been cooking more and more and my family is amazed! It helps when you know that what you are cooking is really gonna be good and that is what makes cooking enjoyable! My son said to me the other day ‘Mom, what has gotten in to you lately? Your food really tastes good!’ I had to laugh.”

I love it when folks develop confidence in their own ability to cook.  Everyone has talent and everyone is able to be a great home cook. It just takes the right recipe and believing in yourself. I try to instill that into everyone who comes to my site. That’s why I include so many pictures with my tutorials. I want to make sure no one comes to Southern Plate and
leaves feeling lesser because they didn’t understand a term or how to do something in a recipe.

A big passion of mine is to preserve our southern food heritage. There are so many recipes in our food history which have been passed down through hands on teaching, never having been written on paper. Already, generations have passed on and treasured recipes have been lost. For some families, they’ve found a recipe or two on Southern Plate which they had loved as a child but not been able to duplicate. I have many of these “lost recipes” which I plan on posting to Southern Plate in the future so stay tuned!

I love doing what I am doing and I love that there are actually people who want to read my ramblings and tangents! They’re the salt of the earth, I tell ya!

4. What is your favorite color?

You know, I’m not one to give a simple answer and to me this is a question of many layers!

Black and Navy – for wearing because they make me look slimmer

Yellow – for flowers, because yellow flowers make me happy

Pink – because my daughter says it has to be my favorite color (she is going through her “all girls love pink” phase.)

5. How do you feel about our current economic situation? Just kidding.

hehe.
I feel my current economic situation could be vastly improved if my taste
for Starbucks would subside a bit…

How do you like your eggs?

Scrambled in a tablespoon or so of bacon grease, with plenty of salt and
pepper (Because my Mama raised me right!)

And that, dear readers is my friend Christy.  Now about that giveaway.  Christy is so very cool that she offered to give away one of her Southern Plate cookbooks to a lucky reader!  So very cool.  The cookbook has over 300 recipes in it.  There are many recipes included in the book that will not be offered on the website.

Here’s how you can win:

Visit Southern Plate.  Browse around, then come back here and tell me what your favorite recipe is and why.

Want some extra chances?  Here are a few more ways to enter and win.

1.  Stumble this post using StumbleUpon.

2.  Write up a blog post and link it to this post AND Southern Plate.  Then comment here again to tell me where to find the post.

3.  Twitter about the giveaway and link to this post, include @simply_vicki in your Tweet so I can track you.  Then comment here again with your Twitter name just to make sure I don’t miss your tweet.  One tweet per day will count.

The drawing will be done on Friday January 16, 2009.  So hurry and get your entries in!