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| Baked Vidalia Onions
These tender, cheese-frosted globes of sweet onion dress up dinner the way a top hat crowns a formal suit. And yet, the moment you lay knife or fork to one, it unravels all over your plate and looks a horrid mess. The good news is that the mess is entirely delicious, and its textural balance of silky-tender onion and crumbly cheese and croutons is sheer pleasure on the tongue.
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| Basic Risotto
Risotto was virtually unknown in America until a few decades ago, but it has become one of the most popular items on fine Italian restaurant menus. It is also called Arborio rice, and it differs from ordinary rice in that it is always slow-cooked with flavored broth (and sometimes other ingredients) until it attains a thick, creamy consistency and the rice is saturated with the flavors of its cooking media.
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| Black-Eyed Peas
Black-eyed peas are a familiar sight on the Southern table – a good companion for country steak and mashed potatoes or a welcome fourth on an all-vegetable plate of collard greens, stewed apples, and okra. They are an essential dish for New Year's celebrations, as eating them will bring you good luck for the next twelve months.
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| Collard Greens
Of all the vegetables served at the buffet line of the Blue Willow Inn, proprietor Louis Van Dyke may give the most thought to collard greens, which he calls, "God's gift to the South." He believes that they are always best when cooked a day ahead, chilled and reheated – a process that gives them the opportunity to mellow, and for the good pork flavor to thoroughly infuse the leaves.
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| Fried Green Tomatoes
Fried green tomatoes are especially dear to the people at the Blue Willow Inn because it was this dish that made them famous. A few months after opening, when they were still struggling to make ends meet, humorist Louis Grizzard came to dine in Social Circle. He was thrilled to find a restaurant that actually served the hard-to-find delicacy of fried green tomatoes, an old-fashioned dish his grandmother used to make. After eating ten slices, he wrote a column about them. "incredibly pleasing," he declared.
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| Fried Okra
The full name of Ruth & Jimmie's, of Abbeville, Mississippi, was Ruth & Jimmie's Sporthing Goods & Cafe. Here you could buy a rod and reel, shotgun shells, live bait, gas from the pumps out front, and sacks of White Lily flour for making biscuits. And you could also have a great meat-and-three lunch. Ruth & Jimmie's is long-gone now, but we recall the old wood-frame shop every time we make the crunchy fried okra for which they supplied the recipe.
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| Garlic Mashed Potatoes
The only two reasons we would consider NOT ordering garlic mashed potatoes with a Harry Caray’s steak are the alternative Vesuvio potatoes and the huge baked potatoes that are also available. Despite such temptations, mashed spuds are impossible to resist, especially if you get a whiff of an order being carried from the kitchen past your table.
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| Green Beans
"In the South, mama always canned green beans from the garden," says Louis Van Dyke of the Blue Willow Inn. "That is why we always used canned green beans, even when fresh-from-the garden are available. "People come to the Blue Willow Inn to eat food like mama or grandmother made; and when it comes to beans, they have to be canned."
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| Haystack Potatoes
We first heard hash browns called haystack potatoes at a great steak dinner in a tavern/restaurant called The Gardens in Walnut, Iowa. You can make these as crisp and crusty or soft as you wish.
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