This is my favorite country meal time of year.  My mouth waters just thinking about Mama scratching around those Irish potato plants to get enough red and golden jewels to boil a pot.  The skins were easy to remove with that special potato scraping do-hicky (Mama had - I think since the beginning of time) so we wouldn’t have to waste any with the peels.  Then she would cover them with water, plop in a whole stick of butter, and boil them until they started to fall apart which made what we called the pot liquor thick with the potato starch.  http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1638,131181-252199,00.html

While they were boiling she would have me slice the squash, mince the scallions, and coat them with a thin layer of cornmeal.  After heating the oil in the fry pan, she gently rolled this glorious mixture into the hot grease --   I can still remember the sizzle  By the way, today for health purposes, I leave out the cornmeal.  Then, I helped by slicing an entire fresh cabbage, nothing was wasted --  I would even eat the raw core.  Again she would heat oil but this time in a deep pot and sizzle the cabbage – what we called frying the cabbage – before adding water to boil.  

            After grabbing a piece of Mama’s pan-fried chicken (if only the Colonel knew how to cook chicken that good), a handful of Mama’s hot biscuits, and a fresh scallion, I would sit down and totally lose myself in a country-boy’s heaven.   

            Yesterday, I got, as Mama would say, “a mess” of new potatoes, squash, and scallions from a local farmer and  now I am waiting for enough time to fix and enjoy my slice of heaven – how did Mama and Daddy ever have enough time to grow and fix enough to feed all nine of us kids.   Today I am thankful for Certified SC Grown – Nothing Fresher Nothing Finer.  We have an abundance of great SC farmers ready to provide us with the freshest locally grown produce. It’s simple  -- always look for the Certified SC Grown sign and ask, “Is this locally grown?” when you are buying produce.   Also, we now have a new website called SC MarketMaker (www.scmarketmaker.com) that connects folks interested in the SC food supply chain. http://sc.marketmaker.uiuc.edu/index.php

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