Drink It. National Iced Tea Day.

Get refreshed with iced tea today, National Iced Tea day!

Our favorites:

Honest Tea

Tazo "Zen" iced green tea

Homemade Southern sweet tea

Bottoms up!

-- Leslie Anne Wiggins

Photo credit: Southern Living

Check It. Southern Biscuits.

Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart's new cookbook, Southern Biscuits, is out just in time for strawberry season. Strawberry shortcake is definitely a favorite spring/summer dessert, and fluffy fresh biscuits make all the difference.

In this gorgeous southern cookbook, chapters include Easy Biscuits, Traditional Biscuits, Embellished Biscuits, and even a condiment chapter, "Gilding the Lily", that has recipes for citrus butter, fig jam filling, and sausage-bacon gravy, among others.

-- Leslie Anne Wiggins

Photo credit: nathaliedupree.com

Eat In. Jambalaya.

Southern cuisine is something that is definitely not in my common repertoire of cooking, but I definitely enjoy it. Baked mac and cheese, blue cheese grits, cornbread, the list of delicious (albeit fatty) Southern comfort food is practically endless.

But without thinking about it last night I made delicious jambalaya. It's really just a medley of veggies, with broth, meats, and rice -- kind of like paella.

Most jambalayas come with chicken breast, sausage, and shrimp, but I opt for just veggie sausage. Should you want a little extra umf! in your jambalaya though, you can just cook these as you normally would, chop up the chicken breast into cubes, and mix into your medley. Here's what I did.

What you'll need:

- One packet of rice, about 1 1/2 cups. I really liked the Trader Joe's Basmati Rice Medley, which has grains of wild rice and herbs already mixed in.

-4-5 cremini mushrooms

-1 zucchini, sliced lengthwise then chopped into quarters

-6-8 cherry tomatoes

-bell pepper, I used only a quarter but you can add as much as you want. Chopped.

-Spice of some kind. I used merken, but cajun spices are available at the market. If you don't want to have to venture to the store for one spice, red pepper flakes or any other spicy flavoring would be fine.

-veggie or pork sausage, cut into 1-inch cubes.

-Onion would work well in this too. Chop finely.

What you'll do:

-Saute vegetables in the order that they cook in a pan with a bit of olive oil or butter. In this case, bell peppers first, then mushrooms, zucchini, tomatoes.

-While veggies are cooking, have your meat/protein cooking, ready to add when the veggies are cooked.

-Add rice dry to absorb some of the flavor and brown a bit.

-Toss in your protein to also absorb some of the rice.

-Add vegetable or chicken broth in proportion to the rice, about 3 cups. If it seems that the rice is still dry, add in some boiling water. Turn off the stove and let the broth/water absorb.

-- Lauren Williams

Eat Out. Loveless Cafe.

Hello from Nashville, Tennessee! The Loveless Cafe stands out even among the abundance of delicious food available in the south. They're famous for their biscuits made from scratch by Carol Fay. Check her out (and her Got Biscuits? T-Shirt) on Conan. The buttery beauties are served before every meal at Loveless, with homemade preserves--strawberry, peach, and blackberry. Breakfast is served all day, but their lunch and dinner options are enticing enough to turn down pancakes for. Juicy fried chicken, salty country ham, fried okra, hash brown casserole, macaroni and cheese, hush puppies, catfish ... the list goes on. I had a BLT (toasted pale wheat bread, mayonnaise, deep green lettuce and a generous helping of crisp greasy bacon) with fried green tomatoes (yum!) and sweet iced tea--something I can't get enough of. You literally have to say "unsweet tea" here if you want what we in L.A. consider "iced tea". The whole menu is comfort food precisely how you hope for it in Dixie.

If you haven't had enough by the time you leave the cafe, there's a gift shop next door which sells everything from magnets to preserves to RC Cola and MoonPies, and of course the famous biscuit mix!

-- Leslie Anne Wiggins

Photo credit: www.amyengland.net