Tupelo Honey Café: Spirited Recipes from Asheville's New South Kitchen

Travel budgets may still be slim, but you can take an armchair vacation to the wonderful, wacky — and delicious — town of Asheville, NC, with this feel-good cookbook.

Kim Sunee writes lovingly about the Tupelo Honey Café, a place “that will always welcome you back — with sugar and bacon, pecans and cream, grits and dredge, pimento and greens.”

The chapters that follow take you on a virtual tour of all those foods and their quintessentially Southern applications. You'll find hospitality in the form of fried tomatoes over cheese grits, a Southern fried chicken BLT, sweet potato pancakes and more. In many ways, pretty indulgent, but the authors have made an effort to include some healthful takes on the classics as well.

Innovative flavor pairings also figure strongly, as in the Chicken Apple Meat Loaf with Tarragon Tomato Gravy…or the Root Beer-Molasses Glazed Pork Tenderloin with Smoked Jalapeno Sauce and Apple Salsa. Recipes like these must be where the “New” in the “New South” of the title comes in.

The Tupelo Honey Café gang considers themselves to be “Foodtopians,” believers in diversity in people and ideas, agriculture, bluegrass and microbreweries.

Alongside the recipes and appealing photography, readers will enjoy slowing down and taking in interesting tidbits — like an excerpt from Asheville author Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel:

“At the midday meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage…”

Truly, this town is a place that makes people wax poetic about food, and taking a mini-vacation, just flipping through the cookbook can certainly prove inspirational.