Southern Food and Hospitality!

Fried chicken, mac and cheese, sweet tea, hash brown casserole, banana pudding, cold oven pound cake....yum!  Who doesn't love southern food? 

This past weekend we hosted a Southern foods party for our friends here in Vancouver.  It was so nice to practice hospitality and have friends over! When we first moved here to Vancouver a good friend of mine from Wilmington encouraged me to start practicing hospitality as soon as possible to start making it feel like a home here. Great advice...it is indeed good for the soul to open up your home to others!

In preparing for the supper, I found it's hard to find some common southern ingredients:  White Lily Flour, Pinto beans and Luizanne tea!  Especially the tea!  I went to Safeway, Walmart, Superstore, and a few other places and couldn't find "normal" black tea anywhere.  All I could find were flavored teas and "Orange Pekoe" tea! I was pretty disheartened and shocked that they didn't sell the tea I needed.

After doing a little research though,  I came upon an amazing discovery...apparently "Orange Pekoe"  tea IS normal tea!  Who would've thought?  I thought it was an orange flavored Asian tea.  I'm happy to know I can make sweet tea here in Vancouver.  Hope any other southern sweet tea fans living abroad can learn from this mishap. :-)

Here's the one picture I took from our southern evening.  I need to start taking and posting more pictures!

I found these flowers at a local produce store/market on the way home one day.  What do you think they are??  (I'll post the answer after I have a few guesses!)