Good Grits! (SOUTHERN BOY COOKS)

Jim Shirley, the author of Good Grits: Southern Boy Cooks, has chosen for the book the best recipes from Good Grits!, his weekly column in the Pensacola News Journal. He tells a brief, entertaining story about the origin of each recipe, and excellent photographs illustrate each dish. Recipes include appetizers, soups, salads, seafood, poultry, pork, beef, lamb, rabbit, and desserts. Shirley, who is now executive chef of Pensacola's upscale restaurant, The Fish House, grew up in a Navy family, traveling the world over, and often spent summers on his grandmothers' farms, eating down-home southern cooking of fresh tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, lettuces, corn, okra, collards, peas, turnips, mustard, onions, butter beans, and new potatoes that his grandmothers grew and cooked. He creates these delicious dishes by combining his cooking and eating experiences as a world-traveler interested in a wide range of cooking styles and flavors with the cookery of foods he ate as a young man in the Deep South. Some examples of this eclectic array are Porcini Smashed Potatoes, Chook Pot Pie Way Down Under, Grandma's Southern-Fried Okra, Collard and Artichoke Dip, Red Snapper Tuscano, Duck with Chocolate Shrimp Relish, Vietnamese-Style BLT, and his signature dish, Grits à Ya Ya, which is, by far, the bestseller on The Fish House menu. Most of the recipes are easy, but making Grits à Ya Ya is more complicated than just cooking up a batch of cheese grits, for it combines the flavors of Gouda Cheese, applewood-smoked bacon, portobello mushrooms, shrimp, heavy cream, and once-secret spices and ingredients known only to Fish House chefs. This recipe alone is worth the price of the book.