I think that my favorite octogenarian chef has turned down her chance to become a touring celebrity chef.

After visiting The Grill at Quarterfield Station (Maryland) as a guest chef last weekend, she said no thanks to the owner’s plea for her to come back every weekend.

“I told him I had a husband and a business to run,” Dean Harrison said.

And run she did, back to Pope, Mississippi where she’s celebrating on Saturday the grand re-opening of her Back Porch Restaurant.

She’s “Aunt Emma Dean” to her great niece, Jennifer White, a member of The Grill staff who made the connection with restaurant owner Bill Chalmers in Glen Burnie, Md., a Baltimore suburb. Chalmers invited Dean to come back, show his staff how cook her signature catfish and hushpuppies.

Prior to cooking debut at The Grill, Dean sent the restaurant a list of her required ingredients. That sent Dean and Jennifer on a last-minute shopping trip when Dean arrived and discovered no one had secured the white corn meal she had requested. Or the buttermilk.

On their visit to the third major grocery store in Baltimore, they found it. In two-pound bags. The bought ten bags. They also found the buttermilk, but in quarts.

Nevertheless, there was a great repast. The specially printed menu for The Grill’s “Southern Inspired Dinner,” stated that it was “inspired by our very own Aunt Emma Dean, owner of ‘Back Porch Restaurant’ in Mississippi.

The fried catfish and hushpuppies was among the dinner specials. Dean said that she was so busy in the kitchen “dropping hushpuppies,” as she describes her procedures for placing the delicacy into the hot oil, that she did not get a chance to try the “Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka” offered among the drink specials.

They served 175 dinners that evening, Dean said. Of the six homemade coconut cakes she had made for dinner, not a crumb was left.