Welcome to the NeighborhoodFor most of my life, I had no idea how to cook.
What a way to start a cookbook, right? But it’s true. I didn’t grow up in the kitchen, and while I spent many years working in restaurants (front of house, as they say, rather than the back with the chef), I could mostly just talk the talk. I could sell the stuffed fish special to a table, or explain étouffée to a guest who wasn’t from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But I couldn’t make any of these things myself. The repertoire I worked from in my home kitchen was quite limited.
This started to change in 2020 when the pandemic hit. I was doing my office job from home, and with the extra time I had without a daily commute, I set myself the goal of finally learning my way around the kitchen, a skill I was long overdue to master. I studied YouTube videos, rewinding them so that I could clearly see what was going on, and I followed people on social media who seemed to know their stuff. Then I took my learnings into my kitchen.
Y’all, there was some trial and error. There were stretches when it seemed like I had more failures than successes, because I messed up a lot of meals. But little by little, I started to make progress.
I vividly remember one of my first big wins, a dish of risotto. I took a spoonful, right from the pan where I’d been standing and stirring for twenty minutes straight, and I started pumping my fists because it was absolutely perfect. It was creamy and a touch cheesy, with rice that was so tender and satisfying.
After a couple more bites, I stepped back from the stove and did a double take. Wasn’t risotto a restaurant-only type of food, reserved for the cooking professionals? I replayed the process in my mind. I’d sautéed down some chopped onion in butter. I’d toasted the rice. I’d poured in the hot chicken stock a bit at a time. That was pretty much it.
This gave me an aha moment: Risotto was not that hard. It was basically just rice, with stirring.
Pot roast was another such dish. If I had to choose my last meal, it’d for sure be pot roast. I love it so much. But I always believed it was too difficult to make. So I did my research, gathered up the ingredients, and fired up my stove. And I came to a similar realization when I took my first bite of that fall-apart, perfectly succulent beef: Nothing was actually that difficult! The beef roast just needed enough salt, a good sear in the Dutch oven, and I had to make sure not to skimp on the cooking time.
I gradually learned that these recipes were primarily about knowing a few techniques, and once I understood that, I could start playing around. In my risotto, why not trade corn kernels for peas or stir goat cheese in at the end instead of Parmesan? In my pot roast, I could add a bag of frozen pearl onions or a can of tomatoes to the vegetable gravy or incorporate a bit of red wine into the liquid.
In my kitchen, the clouds slowly started to clear, and the intimidating notion of cooking no longer had such a grip on me. I even became a bit of an evangelist, because I wanted y’all to know that if I could do this, you surely could, too.
Flash-forward to 2022. I was talking with my best friend, Ashley (you’ll hear more about her shortly), about the videos of her ridiculous French bulldog, Bugsy, that she had started posting to TikTok. I wanted to see them, so I set up my own account.
When I signed up, I had a vague idea that if I were ever to post anything, it would be DIY content, like backyard projects. So I chose the handle “Your Barefoot Neighbor.” People think this is a reference to the Barefoot Contessa, but nothing could have been further from my mind. (At the time, I was also known to run around barefoot quite a lot, but these days I don’t mess around when it comes to proper shoe support.)
At first I shared just a couple videos to TikTok for fun, and I enjoyed it. Eventually I started doing them from my kitchen while I was cooking dinner, chatting away as I cooked easy “dump-and-go” recipes in real time. I noticed that when I posted these food videos, a lot more people were paying attention. And it didn’t take long before I started to become known for those super simple (but stick-to-your-ribs satisfying) recipes.
Occasionally I shared more involved recipes, like that risotto I mentioned, and I loved hearing the reactions, because they were very similar to the ones I had when I experienced those initial successes.
“Wait, that’s all there is to it?” Yes! Risotto is just rice, y’all.
One night, I mentioned my husband, CJ, in a video. I didn’t think much of it at first. But before too long, I realized that my offhand acknowledgment of CJ was getting a flurry of attention—and not the good kind.
There was a torrent of hateful, vile homophobic responses. It was nothing I’d never heard before, but it still took me by surprise. It forced me to think hard about the person I wanted to be in this online space, and how I would interact with the community we were building.
I decided then that I wanted our #barefootneighborhood (the name for our community) to be a space that truly felt safe and welcoming to anybody. I wasn’t going to ignore negative attention like that—if you follow me, you know I don’t shy away from it—but I also wasn’t going to use my platform to preach or lecture.
Rather, I snuck in subtler signals. To make sure that everyone, and in particular members of the LGBTQIA+ community, who aren’t always given reason to feel safe everywhere in the world, knew when they stumbled on one of my videos that they were part of a safe space, I’d paint my fingernails pink and blue. Along those lines, you’ll always find my little wooden Pride rainbow propped up somewhere in the background of my videos. And I will never hesitate to bring up CJ, the love of my life.
These little decisions actually helped me dial in my recipes, too. The fact is, I’m always going to be a cook who chooses the easy path, but I also believe that dinner should be something that anyone, anywhere, can pull off, regardless of their budget or how much time and energy they have left for dinner at the end of a crazy day. I want to meet people right where they are. And so to this day, I never look down on shortcuts like boxed biscuit or cornbread mixes, canned or frozen vegetables, and seasoning packets. Getting dinner on the table, even if it’s just emptying out a can of soup, should feel like an accomplishment! Be proud of it.
These unfussy recipes (and the #barefootneighborhood enthusiastically cooking them up) led to my first two cookbooks, Come Fix You a Plate and
Keep It Simple, Y’all. And in this new one, I’ve got plenty more of them for you. You can head straight to my chapter “Every Damn Day” (page 23) if you want to take a peek. There, you’ll find dozens of the dump and go, one-pan, 30-minuteor-less dinners people know me best for, like Cheddar Biscuit Beef Pie (page 37), One-Pot French Onion Pasta (page 47), or Zesty Sheet Pan Caprese Chicken (page 26).
What’s a little bit different about this book compared to my other ones is that, first, I wanted to formally put the story of the #barefootneighborhood down on paper, so that anyone who hasn’t been here since the beginning can trace this community back to its roots. I’ve also added a little bit more of my Mississippi life in these pages, and looped in some of my favorite people, like CJ and Ashley.
And for something new, you’ll also find a broader range of recipes. With “Sunday Best,” we’re veering into food for celebrations, with some Southern classics like Fried Catfish with Jalapeño Hush Puppies (page 139) and fancy-sounding but easy stuff like Coq au Vin (page 126). And in “Date Night,” I’ve got recipes made for two, including Air Fryer Chicken Parmesan (CJ’s favorite, page 103) and Sesame-Crusted Tuna Steaks (page 107). This has been a popular request since I first got started in the kitchen, and I had a lot of fun cooking these meals for CJ and me.
Copyright © 2026 by Matthew Bounds. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
