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As fall rolls around, pumpkin patches pop up across the South, full of an orange harvest ready to be carved into jack-o’-lanterns and set on our front porches. While they are pretty, the unfortunate reality is that a carved pumpkin’s lifespan is notoriously short. If you carve them too soon, they’re likely to succumb to squirrels or rot before Halloween, and that’s no fun. As carved pumpkins are, at best, viable for a week or two, hardier plants are often the solution to our fall décor conundrum....

Nothing can ruin the joy of having fresh fruit in your home like a swarm of annoying fruit flies. Seriously, they seem to come out of thin air, don’t they? And try and squash one of them? Good luck with that! These tiny, torturous bugs seem to be hard to dispose of, but there is a way to lure them in and disable them. Why It’s Hard To Get Rid Of Fruit Flies Turns out fruit flies are escape artists....

So you got a ring for Christmas and five minutes later, Mama wanted to know if you had set the date (and made sure it wasn’t on a playoff weekend), found a preacher, picked your colors, hired a caterer, booked a soloist, registered for china, ordered invitations, and mailed out save-the-dates. If Mama’s about to send you over the edge, repeat after us: Valentine’s Elopement Event. That’s right. It’s not a romance package....

Charlotte Russe has long and delicious history on some Southern tables, especially for holidays and formal parties, yet some dessert lovers have never heard of one. So what is a Charlotte Russe? Charlottes are a category of chilled desserts made by pouring some type of mousse into a flat-bottomed mold lined with cake strips or often ladyfingers. A Charlotte Russe features a whipped cream mousse set with gelatin that’s known as Bavarian cream....

Mama taught us the art of always looking put together, but who has time for twice-weekly salon blowouts anymore? Even if our outings currently consist of a once-daily jaunt over to the mother ship (aka Target) for a drive-up order, it’s still no excuse not to put on a little concealer, a swipe of mascara, and pull that hair together in some sort of tidy fashion. Mama would have no part in it if she caught wind that we had rolled up looking like the hot mess express....

Aluminum foil is a staple in the Southern kitchen. For good reason, too. It’s an incredibly versatile tool that can be reused and recycled. It can be used to make easy dinners, like Cheesy Green Chile Pork Chop Foil Packets that clean up in a snap. It can double as the lid to a pot, cover a bowl, and be used in the oven, backyard grill, slow cooker, and air fryer....

There are plenty of great places to cycle around the South. Thanks to multi-use paths winding through state parks, rails-to-trails projects, and mapped cycling routes, the region is becoming a destination for cyclists in search of adventures among picturesque scenery. Some of the best stretches for exploring by bike are former railroad lines that have been transformed into multi-use trails for hiking and biking, and there are some great ones on this list....

There is an old saying that anyone who has gone on a road trip through the South should know: There’s no pitstop like a Buc-ee’s pitstop. The chain of Southern convenience stores and gas stations is one of the best things about driving through Texas. Luckily, their sprawling stores decked out with their cartoon beaver mascot, Buc-ee,, have been spreading past the borders of the Lone Star State for a while now....

Michael Nastasio was exploring the ocean floor off Venice, Florida, last week when he came across something that made him cut his dive short. Captain Mike, as he prefers to be called, is captain and owner of Black Gold Fossil Charters. He has been an aquatic fossil hunter for nine years, but this time he hit the jackpot. Nastasio told WFLA that he was about to take his three customers back to shore, when they asked him to make one more dive....

Attention Betty White fans! In celebration of the legendary actress’s upcoming 100th birthday, insurer Choice Mutual is seeking someone who loves White to watch 10 hours of her greatest work in exchange for $1,000. “We’re looking for someone who adores Betty White,” the company explained on its website. “This candidate is probably already planning to binge 10 hours of her classics, but now they get paid to do it!” The winner—who will receive a DVD player and a curated selection of Betty White DVDs—is required to watch 10 hours of pre-selected Betty White film and TV appearances in 24 hours all while documenting the experience on social media....

We told you this was coming back in October. Hallmark announced that Teri Hatcher and James Denton would reunite on screen for the first time since Desperate Housewives ended back in 2012. Well, the time has finally come. A Kiss Before Christmas premieres Sunday, November 21 on Hallmark Channel and James Denton told Southern Living all about reuniting with his former TV wife. When Denton, who also serves as an executive producer of the film, began planning this project he called on a few writer friends he’d worked with in the past....

In the South, cookbooks are like practical, instructive poetry, with ingredients reading out beautifully in tandem—buttermilk, bacon grease, green tomatoes, and so on. Despite many Southern home cooks simply knowing their family recipes by heart, there’s also a deep affection for local community cookbooks. These tattered, passed-down volumes are basically overflowing recipe boxes containing all the secrets of Southern cooking, and the pages are often the place where grandmothers learned and tweaked their own creations, scribbling notes amongst saucy splatters....

When in doubt, we turn to chocolate. When we’re really in doubt, we turn to chocolate + Ree Drummond’s sage wisdom. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic with anxiety sky-high, a quick, easy-to-make chocolate mug cake is exactly what our souls need. Heed The Pioneer Woman’s call to make chocolate mug cake we will: “For your most sudden and profound chocolate cravings during this…interesting time? ❤️ This chocolate mug cake is 💯 and takes five minutes, start to finish,” Drummond captioned a recent Instagram post this weekend, adding that the chocolate mug cake also has her daughter Paige’s seal of approval....

If anything can be said, it’s that Southern cooks aren’t shy with the spice cabinet. Our recipes aren’t made to be bland or forgettable, but to be memorable and packed with butter, salt, cream, and (of course) enough dashes of whichever and whatever from the spice cabinet to really make the dish sing for the family supper. We use Old Bay, Lawry’s Seasoned Salt, and Cavender’s with wild abandon—because they just make everything taste a whole lot better....

R.Riveter cofounder Cameron Cruse says it started with a quarter-life crisis. “We found ourselves, like many military spouses do, out in the middle of nowhere with not a whole lot of job opportunities,” says Cruse, who lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina. “We realized that it was within our power to change that—not only for ourselves but for other military spouses too.” For many, notes cofounder Lisa Bradley, life in the military means relocating every two to three years, and it’s difficult for military spouses to find work that moves with them....

As accepting as we try to be, there are some non-negotiables that Southerners collectively just won’t budge on. Thank you notes, homemade pimiento cheese, and seersucker to name a few. However, when we do disagree, we disagree with a stubbornness that could rival any mean donkey. The most divisive issues might seem silly to some, but to Southerners, it can be an affront to the core. For example, how you pronounce pecan (puh-KAHN or PEE-can?...

To name any lone taco as the best in Texas would be unimaginable, an affront to the many cultural threads that weave together this colossal state and to all the cherished tacos within it. There’s the original street version, a palm-size corn tortilla customarily topped with only meat, onion, and cilantro with sauce on the side—no frills. There’s the indulgent barbecue kind, made famous by Valentina’s Tex Mex BBQ, which showcases Texas’ signature brisket on a pillowy flour tortilla....

New mom Vanessa Yates woke up around 9 a.m. Saturday to find her home in Waverly, Tennessee, filled with calf-high water. “In just a short amount of time, I don’t know how long it was, but it felt like it wasn’t long. The water continued to rise, and it got very high very quickly,” Vanessa, whose husband Anthony was at work in another town, recalled to WKRN. With the water rising to her chest, she could think only of her four-month-old daughter....

Confession: I’m not much of a cook or a baker. I eat a lot of carry-out and bake cakes from a box. When I do decide to whip something up at home, I have to pop into our food editor’s office beforehand to ask her questions that I should probably already know the answers to, like “can you substitute fresh corn with frozen?” All of that to say, I’m not a natural in the kitchen, so if I’m going to make something that family, friends, or new acquaintances can safely eat, the recipe needs to be 100% foolproof....

My grandmother once told me you can’t make good biscuits if your heart is too heavy for them to rise. I’m not sure this is a Southern proverb as much as it was her kind request for me to get out of a sour mood. I was helping her make biscuits, when I’d rather have been watching TV. But it’s true that biscuit making does require more than the right ingredients or perfect technique....