Sunday Best

Juanita Garrison, The Baptist Courier's cheery cooking columnist, is sharing some of her favorite recipes in a new book," Sunday Best."

Garrison pored over more than a dozen years' worth of recipes submitted by Courier readers and added a few of her own for this collection. The book includes more than a hundred kitchen favorites and, in most cases, the personal stories Courier readers shared with Garrison about how the recipes came to be.

"Doing the column over the years has been a pleasure because I talked to so many good-cooking Baptists," said Garrison. "I am grateful for both because I know that the recipe, whichever route it took, will be a good one. No one attaches his or her name to a dish that isn't good."

William R. West Jr. has known Garrison since 1996. "As her pastor, I can tell you that she is the real thing," said West. "For our church suppers, she often prepares a dish that is going to be featured in her Sunday Dinner column in The Courier. As much as readers are sure to enjoy the recipes in this book, they will also enjoy getting to know Juanita Garrison."

Lawrence Webb, a retired Anderson University professor, writer and Baptist minister who has been friends with Garrison for decades, praises the author's "gentle sense of humor" in presenting the biographies of recipe contributors. "If you don't cook - which I don't - you'll enjoy Juanita Garrison's stories of how she tracked down the contributors, with their 'true romance' life histories and even lists of their grandchildren," said Webb.

In the book's foreword, Tom Garrison, the author's son, writes that meal time "was what we all looked forward to" while growing up on the Garrison's family farm. "My favorite dishes back then were the ones I still enjoy today: fresh fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, cubed steak, pork chops and gravy, homemade biscuits, green beans, squash, tomatoes and sweet corn. Of course, it helped to have great cooks like my mother and my grandmother to prepare those wonderful meals - the likes of which few people today can remember."

A journalism graduate of the University of Georgia, Juanita Garrison has written a gardening column for the Anderson Independent-Mail for many years and previously published "The Little Red Book of Good Manners" and "The Garden and Field Cookbook." Some of her gardening columns were collected for publication in "The Piedmont Garden" (USC Press).

She has worked as a newspaper reporter, taught public school and was a journalism instructor at Anderson College (now Anderson University). A member of Welcome Baptist Church in Anderson, South Carolina, she was married to a prominent Anderson farmer, the late T. Ed Garrison, who served for 30 years in the South Carolina House of Representatives and later in the state Senate. She still lives at Denver Downs, the family farm where she and her husband raised six "perfect" children.