Cooking With Gena Knox

Georgia cook Gena Knox gets back to her roots in redefining Southern cuisine. by Erin Z. Bass With a new cookbook out, plus an existing line of grilling products, Georgia gal Gena Knox may be the new face of Southern cuisine. Growing up on a farm in the middle part of the state, outside of Macon, Gena spent her days helping her mother and grandmother in the kitchen, selling lemonade and boiled peanuts in town and checking the fields with her dad. Some of her earliest memories are of food, whether it be her grandmother's caramel cake or fried catfish and butterbeans for dinner. "Growing up we lived on traditional Southern foods," she says. "Every Sunday, fried chicken, chicken fried steak. My mom made everything." In starting her own career, first with a fresh salsa company in Colorado, followed by a catering business and now the company Fire and Flavor, Gena wants the world to know that healthy cooking doesn't mean a compromise in taste. This is an especially hard sell to Southerners, used to cooking with that stick of butter, frying oil or pack of bacon. But Gena's goal with her latest cookbook, "Southern My Way," is to show people around