About Southern Spoon

The Reed & Barton silver spoons that my grandmother started giving me when I was a child are still tucked away in Texas, polished and ready for entertaining family and friends gathered for good food and fellowship.  Meanwhile, I'm a Tex-pat living in London Sydney Los Angeles with my awesome husband, working daily to build on treasured traditions that have flourished in my family for generations. Cooking delicious meals and eating together as a family, as often as possible, have been an important part of my upbringing.  We travel for miles to visit family and are always greeted with a hot and delicious meal in Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, or Virginia. Gatherings of friends in the South inevitably include a range of homemade dishes, and the evenings always seem to end with swapped recipes being scribbled into notepads or promised via email.

Now equipped with a kitchen of my own, I enjoy poring through recipe books and food blogs, browsing on Saturday afternoons in the cookery section of the bookstore, picking up tips for the night's dinner.  I am creative in the kitchen and always eager to experiment with new ingredients and methods.  My point of reference is always Southern cooking, but my husband's Australian upbringing and English heritage have gradually infiltrated my sense of home-cooking.  I'm also inspired by the international range of tastes represented in London, Sydney, and now Los Angeles' restaurants, cafés, and foodstores.  Soon we'll be moving to Australia, where another Southern culinary world awaits exploration.  Sydney's diverse flavor palette, café culture, fresh produce, and quality meats are have been an amateur foodie's dream.  The city has countless one-of-a-kind restaurants and locally-owned cafes, fish markets and farmers' markets galore.  This Southern cuisine was a delicious addition to my developing repertoire. We've now relocated to Los Angeles, California, where I continue to explore the awesome variety of food cultures in this southern city.

The hubs and I make a point to spend a little time each day to prepare a tasty, healthy dinner and to sit down and enjoy it together (we're also big on late, lazy weekend breakfasts).  We have food intolerances to a range of ingredients, including artificial colors / flavors / preservatives, high concentrations of salicylates (including tomatoes), and peanuts... so the food we make is, by necessity, based on a real-food / whole-food / clean-food mentality. We care a great deal about what we put into our bodies, but we also simply love to cook from scratch. Creating delicious, nourishing recipes in the kitchen with the hubs, music playing in the background, is my daily dose of bliss. My mission is that this blog will inspire you, too, to make informed and healthy choices about your diet. We truly are what we eat. 

In 2014 we were referred to a nutritionist by our doctor to help manage high cholesterol and blood pressure. At the advice of the nutritionist, we began eating a diet that focuses on reducing inflammation in the body for optimal health (especially heart health). We now eat a diet more focused on high-quality proteins and fats and a huge array of vegetables. We eat a lot less grains and legumes, and we still eat dairy, including cheese, yogurt, and milk. We've also cut out a lot of our sugar intake (but still indulge in homemade treats every now and then). This lower-carb diet has resulted in more mental and physical energy, much more stable blood-sugar levels, and just feeling better all around. 

Even though my silver spoons haven't yet made it over the pond to the Southern Hemisphere to SoCal (thanks, Mom, for storing my keepsakes!) and I find myself rationing the Texas fajita seasoning in my pantry (Cali-Mex still can't meet these Tex-Mex standards), I am intent on preserving the traditions of culinary goodness and homemade, whole food hospitality that my family holds dear.  I hope you enjoy the recipes on this blog and that you, too, will make time to prepare delicious, wholesome meals and share them with the ones you love.

xx  Southern Spoon


PS: Follow along on twitter @southern_spoon and instagram @southernspoon

Looking out towards the Pacific Ocean from The Getty,
one of Southern Spoon's favorite places in Los Angeles.