Everything’s a little slower in the South, but it isn’t due to the heat, and it isn’t laziness, either. What it is is a kind of mindfulness, an awareness of the proper Southern way things should be done and the importance of the manners instilled by family and community. It isn’t something reserved for special occasions. Southern Mindfulness is a daily ritual equally intrinsic to family, community and business. It’s a way of being.
Those ma’ams and sirs are genuine — as essential to a Southerner as sunshine and sweet tea. Hospitality and grace under fire are keynotes of the Southern experience, and the expression of respect even a simple gift conveys speaks volumes about the giver. In the South, the gift is often food, and food is far more than sustenance: It’s the language of the South.
Foundations of Tradition, Family and Community
Forget today’s bustling, high-rise metropolitan cities, like banking giant Charlotte, N.C., jazz capital New Orleans, La., or capital city and industrial-technological hub Baton Rouge. At the turn of the twentieth century, life in the South was a rural existence of long months of unrelenting heat, roving sickness and fever, endless agricultural labor and often loneliness and isolation. Harsh conditions meant large tracts of land were necessary to support farms and plantations. Those acreages to the horizon, however, also made visiting family and friends a social event anticipated for weeks – sometimes, all year. Family meant community, and community was family. Continue reading Southern Mindfulness – Gifting as a Part of Southern Culture
There’s nothing worse than opening a container of pecans you stored months earlier to find them rotten or rancid. If you picked all those pecans, all of your hard work would seem pointless. Fortunately, there are a 
Pecans should not appear just around the holidays as a treat or in a warm pecan pie. They should appear all year, in all kinds of food, because they are incredibly nutritious and can add just the right amount of flavor and crunch to a dish. How do you make sure you have pecans to last all year? Stock up! Here are the reasons why:
We are all familiar with the desire to make proactive changes to our lives and relationships. We make grand promises with ourselves about how we are going to change and get that body we always wanted. But truth is, we are also oh-so-familiar with the feeling of failure from not achieving what we were so pumped about at the end of the previous year. What are the solutions to this perpetual problem?