"Once a year, I travel with the International Caterers Association on a Culinary Learning Journey.  We have been to all sorts of places like Italy, New York, and California.  This year we started in Memphis, Tennessee, and traveled down the Mississippi River and ended in New Orleans.  What a journey through the Mississippi delta and the heartland of America! In Memphis, we visited the famous Central Barbecue and tasted more things BBQ than I thought possible....smoked, dry-rubbed, mopped, sauced, and grilled!  We ate catfish, crawdads, grits, and collard greens!  To cook Southern, you start with bacon, then bread it, deep-fry it, and then serve it with gravy!!  One of my favorite little bites was the "Tomada" Sandwiches...has to be said "tomada"....not tomato.   Southern Caviar is black-eyed peas and they even deep-fry their dill pickles!  We took a stop at the Viking Cooking School and had a most wonderful evening of instruction and blues music.  A visit to the south would not be complete without stopping in where Elvis made his first recording at Sun Records and our final night was a traditional southern dinner in a grand antebellum mansion!  This was truly an adventure of a life-time and I'm ready to cook "Southern"!!