ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – The way Tricia Dunn Adams sees it, redneck cooking has a definition of its own. And she vows to follow it every day in the fare she serves up at Nibbles Redneck Café.

Her restaurant is located at intersection of Canal Road and Gulf Bay Road in Orange Beach.

“The definition for redneck cooking is someone who can take anything and use the pieces from a kitchen and make meals,” she said. “That is what I do. I don’t throw anything away. I don’t throw a stalk of celery away, I don’t throw an onion away, I don’t throw the end of a Boar’s Head meat away. It goes into a baggie and labeled and put into freezer for a stock.”

Her chicken salad has become legendary from her days at Nibbles Market and Deli formerly located at The Wharf.

Nothing goes to waste when she makes that tasty concoction, either.

“All my vegetables are seasoned with my fresh chicken broth,” she said. “Well, my chicken broth comes from when I pull my chicken to make my chicken salad. I don’t measure anything. It’s a dash of this and a dash of that.”

All veggies cook slowly overnight in her special seasonings in a legion of crock pots lining the wall of her kitchen. The collards are cooked with the leftovers from another day’s special.

“Today, or overnight, my collards are cooking in a ham bone,” Dunn said. “The ham bone came from Sunday’s special.”

And on it goes. Nibbles is one of several recently opened restaurants the Islander is featuring on Fridays. Others were Bikini Wings and Ya Ya’s Country Café in Orange Beach and Japaleno’s in Gulf Shores.

On a busy Tuesday afternoon, Adams took a break to talk about her new restaurant and her love for cooking.

“Cooking is just my soul and I love home-cooked food,” she said. “Truly, everything is home-cooked here. Everything is from scratch. I’ve taken people back there and have shown them. ‘See, there’s nothing instant back here.’ Here’s my potatoes, here’s my onions, here’s my pasta. There’s my potatoes cut up and in the refrigerator.”

The place at The Wharf relied on Adams’ signature chicken salad and fresh sandwiches. Adams also offered some sundries in her market for the condo dwellers at the end of Main Street.

“It is still my biggest seller,” she said. “I still have people come in daily and get it by the pound. I had a lady come in who was from Texas and she had a conversation with a lady who was coming down here on vacation and she says ‘oh, we have a place down there, you have to go by this place, Nibbles, and get their chicken salad.’ She came in, she got the chicken salad. The chicken salad reputation goes all the way to Texas.”

She still offers all the fresh sandwiches with Boar’s Head meat along with the daily meat and vegetables special.

“We have a wide range of grilled cheeses,” she said. “We have grilled cheese with tomatoes, we have grilled cheese with avocado, we have cheesy grilled cheese which has three different types of cheeses on it.”

There’s a sandwich named for every one of her grandchildren.

“I have a Sadie’s, a Corley’s, a Blakely and I have a grilled cheese, Victoria’s grilled cheese that has pepperjack cheese and bacon on it,” Adams said. “That’s what she likes. They are all served on a specialty sourdough bread.”

Nibbles Redneck Café first opened on Friday, July 13, but it was anything but bad luck.

“It’s been great,” Adams said. “My sales are doubling every week.”

On Tuesday, she ran out of homemade mashed potatoes again.

The restaurant serves breakfast beginning at 7 a.m. and serves up until 8 p.m. six days a week. On Sunday it closes at 3 p.m., giving Adams her only time off for the week.

“I do it because no one can fix the food like I can,” she said of the exhausting schedule. “I don’t mind. I feel like as long as I keep putting out a good product at a good price, people will keep coming.”

The only thing she brings in are sweet cornbread muffins.

“I don’t bake,” she said. “And these are wonderful. I can’t make ‘em that good and people love ‘em.”

She does home make two desserts, chocolate pie and banana pudding from “a very old family recipe that’s very easy to make.”

Nibbles also offers catering.