Hey Y'all.... and Aloha

Welcome, friends!  As promised, and thanks to the encouragement of my foodie friends who share my love of cooking, I've started The Southern Spoon blog to dish about my adventures in cooking and baking while I'm far away from home living in Hawaii.  My biggest challenge so far is grocery shopping here on a budget, so it makes my weekly meal planning a bit more time consuming.  Ingredients that were commonplace and inexpensive in South Carolina can send me on a wild goose chase here, only to find that they are cost prohibitive.  But it makes me a more creative cook, and I'm quickly learning how to find substitutions to make the kind of meals our family loves.

I'm still relying on my favorite Southern Living and Cooking Light recipes, and coming up with my own on the fly, based on ingredients currently in my pantry.  My goal is to share a couple meals a week that were particularly successful with the boys, that were fairly easy to make and that can be made on a tight budget.  (And let's face it, that will be most of what I cook here, considering the cost of food on an island!) 

I'm a fan of classic Southern food with a fresh and modern approach... no pan- frying here, just hearty, good-for-you meals that pull from various food groups and will make you look like a gourmet chef.  I hope you can find some great meal suggestions here... read along with me, and let me know what you think!

Stay tuned... up first will be a recipe for Lemon-Dill Tilapia that I made this week.  Really quick and tasty, and easy on the budget.