This book was compiled from the recipes the author has grown to love as her small family of two sons grew up. She went from knowing how to bake a pone of cornbread (and that was all) when she married to being able to prepare many tasty dishes of country foods over the years. She believes in using the freshest ingredients she can find for her foods and prepares the best dishes she can to feed her husband and family. Always married to an avid gardener, if his garden fails because of heavy rains or something, she has her husband—who does all the grocery shopping—spend a lot of time in the perimeters of every grocery looking for the healthy fruits and vegetables which she then prepares for the two of them now that the sons are grown and gone. Except for cans of beans and tomatoes that she uses to make chili, almost every dish she prepares is made from scratch using only fresh or frozen vegetables. Do not look for fancy cooking in this book because you will not find fancy. What you will find is good down-home healthy recipes which do not take a lot of time to prepare. Every young person leaving home should take a copy of this book with them so they do not have to live on fast food and will find the joy of eating like home cooking. She can only wish now that she had access to this type of cooking when she was learning to be a wife and mother.

From Beanblossom to Gnawbone, this book gathers recipes to show the true character of Brown County. It helps you prepare some of the homey favorites such as fried frogs, clover tea, paw paw pie and dandelion jelly. It captures the pleasure and essence of true country cooking.

As far as I know, no one else has done such a book as this one giving the history of the whole of Brown County, so I did it myself with the help of Rhonda A. Dunn. I cover most of the happenings in Brown County for more than 220 years up until the present time. To do this I had to make the book into two parts, the older parts are from the 1800s and that section is called simply, THEN. The stories of what is in Brown County since that time but up to today, is simply called, NOW. Then when we added the new history center, we went to three parts for this book to keep it simple to keep the history together for easier handling and reading. Brown County has changed so much in 220 years that it is amazing. But most of what we are today is what we started from actually. I think you will find this to be true if you read the book in its entirety. Most of the early settlers were from the states of the Carolinas, Virginias, Ohio and Kentucky. Many of those people or their offspring are still here today but we are having an influx of what some call “furriners” today. People today come from the cities to visit, decide they like it here as much as we do and buy up a piece of land and build a log home and stay here. It takes all kinds to make a homogenous group. I think we have done our best to accomplish that. So, pull yourself up a chair, grab a cup of coffee or iced tea, and set a spell and read all about us in this first ever fairly complete history of Brown County. Ya’ll come back now, ya hear!!