Super Soul Food with Cousin Rosie

Introduction

Welcome to my house, where everyone is welcome and we do big, bold, soul food flavors that might surprise you…with that little something extra you’ve come to know, love, and crave from your Cousin Rosie. In this, my second book, I’m building on my Cajun and Creole Louisiana roots and mixing them up with my Pacific Northwest love for seafood and fresh flavors. On my blog IheartRecipes.com, my YouTube channel (I Heart Recipes), and in my first book, I brought my Southern roots into my Seattle kitchen and shared with the world everything my mom taught me, everything my grandmother taught her, and all my inherited, long-nurtured love of soul food. The recipes in this book represent a time in my life when I am growing and changing, and I’m going to share that journey with you. Here you’ll find brand new and fan favorite recipes, all of them classic soul food with a little Cousin Rosie twist. My first book, I Heart Soul Food, contained all the traditional dishes of my youth, and classic recipes we know and love, and in this book, I’ve taken the soul food classics I love so much and made them sing--they’re brighter, bolder, saucier, and the volume has been turned way up! You’ll be asking yourself why you never made a cheesesteak lasagna before! And you’ll certainly be adding my grandmother Rosa Mae’s waffle fried chicken to your weeknight lineup.  

I was just three or four when my aunt Frances first brought me into the kitchen and let me cook alongside her. I just did what she did, playing and learning at the same time. I’d pat pork chops into the breading and hand them over to her to fry. Eating this food, then beginning to make it, set up a lifelong love for preparing dishes that both feed the body and warm your heart.
 
My mother was a hardworking single mom. She’d bring me along with her, my grandmother, and my aunties to the Parkside Nursing Home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, where they whipped up giant batches of macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, and gumbo for the residents. I would sit in the corner of that grand commercial kitchen and mimic what I saw them doing, taking scraps they handed me and building my own pretend dishes. My mother, grandmother, and aunties were in charge in that kitchen, and this inspired me. I would rather have been nowhere else than in that kitchen with those great ladies showing me the way, the smells of soul food all around.
 
By the time I was five, I stepped up to the stove to make real food, cooking up a big ol’ batch of my favorite spaghetti, and that became my signature dish. Everyone in the family makes something they’re known for. For my mom, it’s her potato salad. These are the dishes we must always bring to family picnics and holiday parties. These are dishes that the family looks forward to! To this day, I make my spaghetti just the same way I did at five. It’s a winner.
 
As I grew it became my job to get dinner fixed while my mom was working. At first, I’d follow her recipes to a T, no adding or taking away. But as I grew in cooking, I started to experiment and add a little here and there. My mom would tell me, “No playin’ in the kitchen!” She’d tell me how the older generation doesn’t want anything messed with in their classic dishes. “Leave those recipes alone and stick to the plan!” But I just couldn’t help myself! I started adding more spices, more flavor. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mom, she is incredible, but I can still hear her saying: “Cornbread is NOT SWEET!” But there I went, making it all kinds of ME! My sweet cornbread is incredible, I might add. I’d add cheese, fresh corn, or herbs to come up with something not only delicious but different from the dishes we saw in our community. That’s where Rosie’s Doctored Cornbread came from. I was looking to doctor up any recipe. I’d dig into the freezer or pantry to see exactly what we had on hand, and I’d use what we had to make food that no one could touch flavor wise. That was the beginning of my food style, my culinary journey. I’d taken my food education from my family, then began mixing it with who I was as a cook and a woman.
 
Fast forward to my husband Anthony. I wanted to cook him food he loved and integrate my style, and let me tell you: that man is always happy when I fix him anything! When we had our son Giovanni, I knew I wanted him to cook like I had when I was younger. When he was just 3 years old, he saw a man cooking on TV, and that really helped him. I can remember him saying, “Mom, he looks like ME!” He is now a teenager and so good in the kitchen, and that makes me proud. When he wants to make something his own, I am all for it.
 
Where we come from plays such an important role in our cooking styles. My grandma RosaMae--my mom’s mom, my namesake, and after whom I’ve named my seasonings company (RosaMae Seasonings), was a strong woman who accomplished what she set her mind too. I have a natural entrepreneur’s spirit that I know has been in my line for generations. I am always looking to find ways to improve my family’s life and I believe that started with cooking and has spilled over into my companies. I inherited tenacity from my grandmother. I learned to be all about my business and work hard. Flavoring my food has always been a cornerstone in my cooking so the seasoning line was a natural step for me. We have an opportunity and obligation to leave a legacy for our children and I want my son to know he can do anything he sets his mind too. My grandmother did this for me simply by living her life. She--and her husband, my grandfather, left Baton Rouge during the Great Migration and headed north for a better life, pregnant with the first of what would be eighteen children--six girls, twelve boys. You’re beginning to see why I had so many aunts who made sure I knew how to cook! They landed in Seattle, and as the family grew, my grandmother became the queen bee of an always-busy kitchen. She was a real Southern belle, constantly whipping up Creole and Cajun dishes to feed her expanding family (and some of the neighbors, too). Eventually, all those children began having kids of their own, and that’s why I’m known as Cousin Rosie. Though my family was now firmly rooted in the Pacific Northwest, all that soul food helped us to remember our Southern roots and where we came from.
 
With a giant family like that, every gathering was an event. We all looked forward to Sunday supper, for sure, but was there was one day of the year that took even our family’s big appetites beyond their wildest dreams, Christmas! So many of the recipes in these pages are perfect for family gatherings and holidays. Christmas with my family was the biggest, most delicious celebration you’ve ever seen. We would have a turkey, a ham, and a giant pot of gumbo on the table. There were collard greens, candied yams, and my mom’s famous potato salad, which might be the best ever--except for mine! There were cornbread rolls and my grandma’s special fried chicken made with waffle batter. But the best part was dessert. Or, rather, all the desserts. See, my grandparents didn’t have much money, and they couldn’t possibly afford gifts for all those children, so the present was the Christmas dessert table. You could always find me, little Rosie, stealing a pinch from the sweets table before we served up any of the cakes or puddings or pies. By the time the next generation rolled in--my cousins and me--the tradition had solidified, and anything less than every dessert imaginable would have let the crowd down. Tradition has this way of bringing back the good things about the past and opening our hearts to welcome the future. I know that I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Tables full of sweets and food that bring back and honor those lean times are what I’m all about. I am going to find a way to make something out of nothing and keep moving! Keep those gifts and pass me the red velvet cheesecake! Set another place at the table for the fresh cousins coming up and give me all the laughter.
 
My beloved grandma passed when I was only two, but I carry on her legacy as a cook in my kitchen and in my name: She was Rosa Mae, and I was named Rosemary after her. Funny, the name Mayes comes from my husband! Her husband, my grandfather, cared for me and brought me up, showing photos of my grandmother and telling me all the stories about her, stories revolving around the fantastic meals that came from her oven and stove. I grew up eating dishes made from recipes that had been passed down to her daughters, but somehow I ended up as the only kid in my generation who stepped into the kitchen to follow in her footsteps. When my cousins need a taste of home, Cousin Rosie is the one they call.
 
When I was growing up, nobody really wrote recipes down; they were always passed around by word of mouth and by watching granny whip up magic with very little. So, by the time I grew up and tried to make all the dishes myself, I had only tidbits and lessons passed on by aunts, and tastes nabbed at family reunions back in Baton Rouge. I decided it was time to recreate each recipe, making them over and over in the kitchen until they matched my memory of them--and the uncles and aunts all gave them the thumbs up. Then I would share them with my online audience.
 
It is immensely rewarding to share this passion for soul food with my online “cousins.” But at some point, I noticed that a lot of my friends didn’t know their way around the kitchen. They never patted biscuit dough on the corner of the counter at the Parkside. They weren’t fortunate enough to get their grandmother’s oxtail recipes from their mom or to learn to fry pork chops with their aunt Frances. So I became the friend and cousin that everyone could call on for help in the kitchen. Eventually it grew into beyond a hobby, and my husband suggested I do something more with it. And he was right. I was burnt out working 12-hour days as a CNA in end-of-life care, and my life needed a shakeup.
 
One day I recorded myself making dinner. I made fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and peas. My brother came over (he’s always over if there’s fried chicken around) and recorded it on his girlfriend’s brand-new camera. When I posted it on my video channel at the time, the internet went nuts.
 
It all made perfect sense. There weren’t a lot of soul food blogs out there--it was almost like soul food didn’t exist online, but people were hungry for a taste of home. They wanted to know how to make food their grandmothers made. There were baking blogs everywhere, seventeen million different diet blogs, and all sorts of niches that were filled, but not this one. Soul food wasn’t being represented the way I know it needed to be at the time. I knew that there had to be an audience for authentic soul food recipes--and that first video proved it. I just needed to call on the lessons that my mom, her sisters, and--indirectly--my grandma had taught me, and I could put it all to good use.
 
I created my blog and YouTube channel and focused on Southern and soul food. The first five years that I had them, I was juggling the blog and channel with my full-time job. But then big companies took notice, and people wanted to pay me for what I had created out of my love for my food roots. They saw what I was doing and knew it was a worthwhile investment. It was all a bit of fate mixed with luck, kind of a total accident that changed my life.
 
Still, I wasn’t going to complain about it--I was going to jump in with both feet. I’ve gained a lot of online family members via YouTube, my blog at IHeartRecipes.com, Facebook, Pinterest, and even Instagram. My family was big to start with, but my following makes even my seventeen aunts and uncles and their families look small in comparison.
 
And that’s why I’m always Cousin Rosie--online and in person--and I’m still sharing old-fashioned, authentic soul food like my grandma made, along with anything else that I can cook up. I’m putting my spin on just about every dish I grew up with. I find recipe inspiration everywhere and anywhere I go.
 
When it came time to write this book, it came naturally. These books are really an extension of who I am at the time and who I have always been. Folks visiting my blog and Facebook page looking for fresh recipes really nudged me in getting into the book-writing world, and I am so glad I did! The idea that my roots and traditions are now a part of the cousins’ families is a gift. It was the obvious choice to do the second book with my takes on the classics--not your mama’s soul food, but Cousin Rosie’s twists through and through. My fans know what they like, and that always includes me re-mixing the classics. Like Creole loaded potato skins, or steak omelets, or my smothered turkey wings, or Jamaican oxtails…who is getting hungry? I know I am! Let me tell you, you haven’t had a smothered turkey wing until you’ve made my slow cooker smothered version!  
 
Over the last few years in this cooking game, I’ve learned that I love seasonings and spices. I love quality ingredients and freshness. You will see fresh herb and seasoning blends in this book, and you are going to see spice used in an unexpected way in these pages. Say goodbye to simply using salt for flavor boosts! You are going to cry happy tears after trying my blackberry glazed ribs! Yes, I said blackberry and ribs, and I can’t wait for you to get to it! The sweetness from the fruit mixes so well with a juicy pork rib! I want you to make these dishes for your family and to use them as inspiration to do your own thing in the kitchen. Spice up that family recipe, use the cuts of meat you like and see what happens. Spoiler alert, I’ve seen how it goes--it’s pretty good. You’ve got a friend and cousin in me, so get in the kitchen and start feeding the people you love.