Intro

Hello friends and neighbors!

Welcome to my new blog for Foods of the Southland! You'll be delighted to know that this improvement will help you all by allowing you to send the newsletter, our updates and recipes, and everything else we intend to post (even videos!) without the possibility of them deleting it as spam! You can just send them the link to this blog! After all, you know I don't cook with SPAM!

As a matter of fact, to start out this new adventure and in the next few days, I'm going to post a recipe that none of you have EVER seen before!! So stay tuned!!

The best is yet to come!!

But first -- I must introduce myself -- So I wrote a little something for all of you:

I am David (Dave) Franks, Author, Pit Master and Flunky!!!

This is my first time at bloggin’. For all of you that have been getting our newsletter, a lot of this will be sour grapes. But the new ones might get something out of it. I was born in Whitehaven, Tennessee. That is now part of Memphis. I went to Whitehaven School; the grammar and high schools were all together. My Grandmother was the first teacher hired there. My Grandfather was the first doctor there, and my great uncle was the first dentist. I started cooking (helping) when I was 4 or 5. The biggest thing that I did was bring in the wood, keep the fire going, and the stirring. We raised, canned, dried and cured a lot of meat by using sugar, salt, red pepper, black pepper and smoking. We would sit around the fire and listen to the battery radio and shell corn to take to the grist mill the next day on the back of our mule to make meal. We would take butter and eggs to the country store and they would credit us for them. Then, when we needed some things, they would debit our account.

When I was growing up, there were only three Bar-B-Q joints in the Memphis area that I can remember. The one in Memphis is where I got my eating sauce recipe from, the one down at Bullfrog Corner, Mississippi is where my basting sauce recipe came from. I learned how to Bar-B-Q at J.C. Harbin's while working for him because he was our sponsor for the Doc Hollom River race. We would swim 5 or 10 miles down the Mississippi river. As most of you know, I have a cookbook out, Foods of the Southland, with over 250 good Southern recipes.

We are putting our Lil' Red Barn Bar-B-Q sauce on the market real soon. We plan on getting into competitive Bar-B-Q’ing next year. I am building a new pair of smokers that are trailer mounted and enclosed in a Lil' Red Barn.

If anyone would like a good old southern recipe, just let me know. If I don’t have it, I can get them. Something that I forgot to mention was that I now live in Maynardville, Tennessee. Just in case someone does not know where that is, well it is about 12 miles northeast of Knoxville, TN. The University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge, and Gatlinburg are all within a stones throw of our house. Maynardville is located in Union County, and was the home of Roy Acuff, Carl Smith, and my wife, Betty, and me! Ha!

I try to do a lot of cookouts (just for fun, not for hire). And being that the gardens and a lot of fresh veggies are plentiful, let’s talk about cooking them. Let’s start with fried green matoes. (You will be getting some Hillbilly now and then). We may not talk good, but we sho’ do eat good.