Charleston was a delight and the food was absolutely wonderful and shrimp and grits is one of my favorites.
Shut my mouth! I declare! Butter my biscuit! I feel like I should be saying all these things about these Shrimp and Cheese Grits.
My daughter and I just returned from Charleston. This was our 4th mother/daughter trip and this year we shared it with my twin sister and her son.
Born and raised in southeast Missouri, which is right on the Arkansas and Tennessee borders and the Mississippi river, I always thought of myself as a southerner. We ate southern food like black eyed peas, hog jowl, fried green tomatoes, fried pork chops, fried chicken (everything good and fried) but I never had grits growing up.
In fact, I didn’t have grits until I lived in Kansas City and a neighbor from Atlanta brought me over a bowl of buttered grits one morning. They were so smooth and creamy I fell in love with them. After that, I experimented with shrimp and cheese grits and they are my favorite to this day.
Upon arriving in Charleston we had a late lunch at Fleet Landing down by the water. I had a wonderful fried green tomato stacked with crab salad, which I plan to try to make soon. We got into the laid back pace of Charleston pretty quickly. Sailing, champagne, wine, oysters, shrimp, fried green tomatoes— ahhhh!
Our first night we all took a low country cooking class at Charleston Cooks. There were 11 of us in the class and we all pitched in and by the end of the class we had before us a beautiful plate of Lime, Tomato and Grilled Corn Salad, Pulled Pork BBQ with Sweet Mustard Sauce, Carolina Red Rice, Blue Cheese Slaw and the yummiest Fried Peach Pies with vanilla ice cream. We ate it all!.
This particular recipe for shrimp and grits came from a 1990’s Bon Appetit magazine in what use to be there RSVP section. Not sure if they still do this but back then people could write in and request a recipe from a restaurant they had visited. Usually one was printed either from the restaurant or one that the magazine tested. This recipe was a request from Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, NC. Only thing I changed was I used cheese grits instead of plain grits.