breakfast blogger

The lady and I were recently in Charleston, South Carolina to attend a wedding. Since downtown Charleston is a peninsula, we were surrounded by salt water -so I knew we would probably be eating a lot of seafood. What I didn’t know was that we could eat seafood 3 meals a day, every day!

We were extremely lucky to know, and stay with, an actual Charlestonian, who invited us to stay with him and his wife at his mother’s home in Mount Pleasant, just across the Arthur Ravenel bridge - the longest suspension bridge in the Americas. Not only did we save money by not staying in a hotel, but we were fortunate to be able to enjoy the southern hospitality of our friends mom.

On our first morning in Charleston, when I stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen, I heard voices coming from the back porch. I wandered out in my PJs to discovered that our hosts were already awake, sipping coffee and enjoying the view. This is what we woke up to every morning:

After about an hour of relaxing with a coffee and the New York Times, as well as some serious amateur birdwatching with some binoculars, breakfast was served. Shirley, our lovely hostess, made us a real Charleston breakfast: Shrimp ‘n’ grits.

Some people don’t really like grits, which is basically corn porridge, and very similar to polenta, an Italian specialty. The real difference here was that Shirley didn’t make regular grits, she made a cheese grits casserole, so it was gooey and savory - like what you’d imagine grits to be if they were really good, which these were.

Here’s the recipe, straight from Shirley’s copy of Charleston Receipts:

And, of course, my empty plate.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Breakfasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.