SHORELINES

27 a p c s hor e l i n e s.c om | 2016 Vol :1 "I started dating Heather my freshman year of high school, but once college started we parted ways," Little says. It wasn't until he saw her mother on his new street that he found out she would be living nearby. "And the rest is history, as they say," Little says with a laugh. The two married and moved back to Prattville. "We are small-town people, love the familiarity of being home and being in our community." Little began writing restaurant reviews on the side for the Montgomery Advertiser in 2006. When the paper discontinued its restaurant reviews section, Little started a blog and continued to review local restaurants. "There weren't many food blogs at the time. People began to rely on Southern Bite for restaurant reviews," he says. Little, who has always cooked with family recipes, often was asked for them by friends and neighbors. One night after another recipe request, Little decided to post it on the blog. He had no idea that this effort to save time would be the starting point for a much larger journey. "Over time, I came to find that more and more people were coming to the blog for recipes than reviews," Little says. "I evolved the blog to feature only recipes and it's continued to grow ever since." In 2012, Little was approached by book publisher Thomas Nelson to write a cookbook. After turning down the publisher multiple times, Little finally agreed as a way to preserve family recipes for his son and generations to come. "The book was an opportunity to write a love letter to the food I grew up with. It was a way for me to write and give my son a gift of the food that had been passed down for generations," Little says. The recipes featured in the cookbook and blog are inspired primarily by family recipes and variations of favorite recipes growing up. "Most Southern cooks cook to taste. This was a way for me to sit down with my grandmother in the kitchen and capture the recipes I was raised on and that are easy to share with others," Little says. More than the food, Little is driven by the connections made by sharing food. "Food is important but the connections we make with our family over food are more important. Food is really the conduit to how we make these connections," says Little. And through Southern Bite, Little hopes to make these connections a little more attainable for today's cooks. "We seem to have less time these days. Many families are not able to sit down and reconnect with each other. Top: Photo submitted by sTacey liT Tle – Pictured as a toddler, Little has a long legacy of Southern cooking, basing recipes off of originals from his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Right: Photo by K im Box phoToGr a ph y – Little sees the cookbook and blog as an opportunity to pass down family recipes to his son, Jack.

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