Even the ranch dressing gets a Cajun kick in this lively main-course salad.

For seasoning
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

For salad dressing
1 3/4 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons chopped green onion
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon peel

1 1/2 pounds skinless boneless chicken breast halves

1 5-ounce package mixed baby greens
1/2 cup pecans, toasted
1/4 cup raisins

Make seasoning:
Mix all ingredients in small bowl to blend.

Make salad dressing:
Whisk 3/4cup buttermilk, mayonnaise, chopped green onion, chopped fresh parsley, apple cider vinegar, garlic, lemon peel, and 1 1/2 teaspoons seasoning mixture in medium bowl until well blended. Season dressing to taste with salt and pepper. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Store remaining seasoning at room temperature. Cover and refrigerate dressing.)

Rub remaining seasoning mixture onto chicken. Place chicken in medium bowl. Pour remaining 1 cup buttermilk over chicken, turning to coat. Refrigerate at least 30 minutes and up to 3 hours, turning occasionally.

Prepare barbecue (medium-high heat). Remove chicken breasts from buttermilk, shaking off excess. Grill chicken until just cooked through, about 5 minutes per side. Transfer chicken to cutting board and let rest 5 minutes.

Combine mixed greens, pecans, and raisins in large bowl. Toss with enough dressing to coat. Season salad with salt and pepper. Divide salad among 4 plates. Cut chicken on sharp diagonal into 1/2-inch- thick slices. Arrange atop salads and serve.

Makes 4 servings.

Do you have a favorite recipe you'd like to share? Email it to: OSSJournal@ossone.com. If your recipe is chosen you'll receive a Free "Thank You" gift so be sure to include your name and address!

It's autumn again. The leaves fall and there's a crisp bite to the air, which is drier and seems cleaner somehow. The change of seasons tends to mark a new beginning more so than even New Year's Eve, which is why the advent of spring and fall traditionally has prompted a renewed vigor for cleaning.br>
After all, as long as you have to put away the shorts and bathing suits and pull out the boots and jackets, why not get organized at the same time?

So whether you're organizing your work office, home office, garage or kitchen, you may want to keep in mind some of these tips:

Be Realistic About Space

How many times do you see people remove furniture from an overcrowded room or empty out a closet when they are readying their home for sale? Why not thin out an overcrowded room now, while you can enjoy it instead of waiting until you are ready to move?

If the room is particularly small or you want to set up a home office and hide the desk in a closet, considering shopping for new furniture in a store that has furniture for children's or teens' bedrooms. Their desks are usually slightly smaller in scale, which can work well in tight spaces.

Look Up

We tend to think horizontally when organizing our offices, garage or kitchens. We have long countertops, desks, credenzas and workbenches with little or nothing above them. In the kitchen, think about installing extra tall cabinets or installing a shelf on the soffit above the cabinets to raise display items or little-used items off the countertop. In the garage, install a pegboard system with hooks and shelves to raise clutter off the workbench.

Surprisingly, many of the same organizational tools, such as the pegboard, not only work great in the garage, but are handy in the office, too. Use them to hang shelves that can store jars of small items, books or paper. A wall-mounted grid system in the office can hold baskets and boxes, too.

Rods provided with such systems can be used to hang baskets, shoe pocket organizers, rolls of ribbon, tape or string, all of which work well if you need an area to wrap gifts or ship packages.

In case you missed it, the first day of Fall arrived a couple of weeks ago. Fall is a wonderful time to venture out and see what nature has been building up to all summer. The North Carolina mountains is always a good start to your begin your autumn leaf viewing. The peak season for viewing fall colors begins in early October and runs through the end of the month. The higher elevations will be the first to see the fall colors as they experience the first of the cooler temperatures. This year is no different, some of the higher elevations have already had their first frost. Here is an update of the foliage conditions in the mountain regions.

In the Boone area: Color is still spotty and just beginning, but you will on occasion spy a maple or a poplar that is boldly standing out in a crowd.

Cooler temperatures are expected for the next few days with a warm up next week - shorts weather isn't entirely over, but I recommend a fleece in the morning or late afternoon. And we have already had our first frost last week. If all things hold true to form, our peak leaves should be between the second and third week of October in the Valle Crucis and Boone areas with higher elevations being a little earlier and lower elevations being a little later.

Take a drive to see come color - Try coming down Highway 105 South from Boone, turn right onto Broadstone Road, then left on to Highway 194 (Mission Crossing Scenic Byway) to go to Banner Elk. In Banner Elk, turn left onto Highway 184 to come back to Highway 105. You'll see a variety of elevations and scenery. Be careful - Highway 194 is very twisty-turny.

Waynesville area: A very enjoyable scenic drive for the early part of the season we suggest the Pisgah Forest/Cold Mountain: Take the Blue Ridge Parkway south from Asheville toward Mount Pisgah, where you will find picnic areas, hiking trails and a restaurant. Travel north on US 276 through the magnificent Pisgah National Forest, which affords a spectacular view of Cold Mountain, made famous by the novel and motion picture of the same name. Continue on US 276 into Waynesville. Take US 23 north to US 19/23/74 east, which will return you to Asheville.

Hendersonville: Searching for Fall 2006 has turned up the inevitable early maple trees and the reddish- brown leafed dogwoods. You can count on them to be as reliable as the rising and setting of the sun each day. Spring was gorgeous with all the flowering trees and bushes lushly laden with more blossoms than I can remember in years past. It was a typically untypical summer - unusually hot and dry and cool and rainy... take your pick - we ran the gamut. Summer started with an 8" deficit of rain and ended at the very least caught up, having received a whopping 4" in one August night. Was I the only one who felt like there were more leaves on the trees than usual? Hope this is setting up the Autumn Show to be loaded with gorgeous shades of the season.

The Apple harvest season is also here. With lots of "and such" and over 20 varieties of apples ranging from the early August Wolfriver to the mid-October Pink Lady and Gold Rush, you can pick them to your heart's content, whether they be from the trees or a bushel basket.

Located on 64-East a short drive outside Hendersonville, they are but one of many orchards in the area that contribute to Henderson County's claim to fame of being the 7th largest apple-producing area in the country, and this year produced a bumper crop. Drive out 64-East to see how many different kinds and colors of apples you can spy on the way to Edneyville and Fruitland (left on Fruitland Road) or keep straight on the winding road to Rt. 64/74 which leads to the Bat Cave/Lake Lure area.

The mountains of North Carolina range in elevation from 6,684 feet at Mount Mitchell – the highest point east of the Mississippi, to 2,200 feet in some valleys.

Because the North Carolina mountains are home to this unique topography and countless tree and plant varieties, fall color typically begins in early October and lasts for as long as six weeks. Each tree and plant variety offers unique color in leaves, flowers and berries. These colors change at different times at different elevations, producing stunning reds, golds, yellows and oranges, complemented by wildflowers like the white and blue asters and the royal purple ironweed.

You have several on or in your desk. They are found in your car, sometimes in your pocket and almost always in a woman's pocketbook. Some are really cheap and some are very expensive. Have you figured out what the item is yet? It is the every day ballpoint pen! I bet you didn't know that the original idea for the ballpoint came from an American leather tanner back in 1888! Read on for the details about the invention of today's modern ballpoint pen.

The greatest interest in the ballpoint pen came from American flyers who had been to Argentina during World War II. Apparently it was ideal for pilots because it would work well at high altitudes and, unlike fountain pens, did not have to be refilled frequently. The U.S. Department of State sent specifications to several American pen manufacturers asking them to develop a similar pen. In an attempt to corner the market, the Eberhard Faber Company paid the Biro brothers $500,000 for the rights to manufacture their ballpoint pen in the United States. Eberhard Faber later sold its rights to the Eversharp Company, but neither was quick about putting a ballpoint pen on the market. There were still too many bugs in the Biro design.

The competition among pen manufacturers during the mid-1940s became quite hectic, with each one claiming new and better features. Reynolds even claimed that his ballpoint could write under water, and he hired Esther Williams, the swimmer and movie star, to help prove it. Another manufacturer claimed that its pen would write through ten carbon copies, while still another demonstrated that its pen would write up-side down. However, the effect of the slogans and advertising wore off as soon as the owners discovered the many problems that still existed with the ballpoint pens. As the sale of the pens began to drop, so did the price, and the once expensive luxury now would not even sell for as little as 19 cents. Once again, it looked as if the ballpoint pen would be a complete failure. For the pen to regain the public’s favor and trust, somebody would have to invent one that was smooth writing, quick drying, nonskipping, nonfading, and most important didn’t leak.

Two men, each with his own pen company, delivered these results. The first was Patrick J. Frawley Jr. Frawley met Fran Seech, an unemployed Los Angeles chemist who had lost his job when the ballpoint pen company he was working for had gone out of business. Seech had been working on improvements in ballpoint ink, and on his own he continued his experiments in a tiny cubbyhole home laboratory. Frawley was so impressed with his work that he bought Seech’s new ink formula in 1949 and started the Frawley Pen Company. Within one year, Frawley was in the ballpoint pen business with yet another improved model-the first pen with a retractable ballpoint tip and the first with no-smear ink. To overcome many of the old prejudices against the leaky and smeary ballpoint pen of the past, Frawley initiated an imaginative and risky advertising campaign, a promotion he called Project Normandy. Frawley instructed his salesmen to barge into the offices of retail store buyers and scribble all over the executives’ shirts with one of the new pens. Then the salesman would offer to replace the shirt with an even more expensive one if the ink did not wash out entirely. The shirts did come clean and the promotion worked. As more and more retailers accepted the pen, which Frawley named the "Papermate," sales began to skyrocket. Within a few years, the Papermate pen was selling in the hundreds of millions.

The other man to bring the ballpoint pen successfully back to life was Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer of penholders and pen cases. Bich was appalled at the poor quality of the ballpoint pens he had seen and he was also shocked at their high cost. But he recognized that the ballpoint was a firmly established innovation and he resolved to design a high-quality pen at a low price that would scoop the market. He went to the Biro brothers and arranged to pay them a royalty on their patent. Then for two years Marcel Bich studied the detailed construction of every ballpoint pen on the market, often working with a microscope. By 1952 Bich was ready to introduce his new wonder: a clear-barreled, smooth-writing, non- leaky, inexpensive ballpoint pen he called the "Ballpoint Bic." The ballpoint pen had finally become a practical writing instrument. The public accepted it without complaint, and today it is as standard a writing implement as the pencil. In England, they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say "Biro" on the side of the pen, as a testament to their primary inventors.