Afternoon Tea Party

Hey y'all, I'm Paula Deen, and today we're going to put a twist on an afternoon tea party

that's going to turn this southern tradition into a dining delight. You know, if you thought wine was the only beverage to pair with food

you've just got to come with me to the Savannah Tea Room, where we're going to learn a thing or two about pairing for teetotalers

And then it's back to my kitchen where I'm preparing some of my favorite finger foods

And the first one is going to be my specialty pickled okra sandwiches that are truly one recipe you're just going to have to try

And then it's my pesto cheese blossom that's the perfect topping for any cracker

And finally, it's my cherry cream cheese tarts that are melt-in-your-mouth delicious

So y'all take out your best china and get the water boiling, because right now, it's tea time

music plays

a very special tea party for a group of friends. Now the kind of tea that I want to serve to them today

you can't buy from the grocery store. I want to get them a nice, special, loose tea

And I can only find that at the Savannah Tea Room because I want it to be very, very special

And I hope you'll come along with me because one day you may want to throw your own tea party

What are y'all doing here? Hey, Mom. We're just over at the new restaurant

Aren't y'all supposed to be working? Oh, we were, uh... Hey! Just went by to check on progress, and we're having some tea

What are you doing here? I wasn't expecting to see y'all. Well, we weren't expecting to see you. Ooh, what y'all drinking

Okay. Mmm. Oh, my goodness. And what y'all eating? These are some delicious poppy seed cakes that they got here inside

Delicious. I'm getting ready to have the girls over for a tea party. Beautiful

So Elizabeth's supposed to have some tea ready for me. Okay. So y'all on your way back to the restaurant

Yeah, we're headed back that way shortly. I ain't going back to the restaurant

I'm going to the golf course. I'm with you. Hey, Elizabeth. Hey, Paula. How are you

I'm fine. How are you? I was surprised to see those Dean brothers out there having tea

I know. They're having a good time. Yeah, they are. Well, do you have me ready

How many people are you going to have? I think I'm having like six. All right. The actual tea you're doing is the green tea

It's Sencha, it's Pouchon, peach, rose, and cherry. Oh, let me smell

So that should go really nicely with your cakes and things. Oh, gosh, it smells just heavenly, doesn't it

Yeah, it could almost be appropriate. And it almost looks like a potpourri with all the colors in it

I have everything you need and what you need to know to get it going right. Okay, great

And you got my tea ball and everything. Your tea ball, the scoop, the tootie

I thank you so much, and I'll see you before too long. Sounds good

Thanks, Elizabeth. Have a good one. Bye. Bye. Okay, guys, I got my stuff

You got everything you needed? Yes. Give Mommy a kiss. Love you

Love you. I love you, too. Catch you a little bit later. Go have fun. I love you, too

Oh, we're going to have a wonderful time. I got lipstick all over you. That's all right. All right, now, y'all going back to work, aren't you

Right now. You're going back to work. We are. We're headed that way. Okay. All right

See ya. Well, y'all take care of the restaurant. Bye-bye. Let's make our tea time

2.30. Let's go. How did y'all like Savannah Tea Room

Isn't it a beautiful little store? It actually brought back so many memories for me

I remember as a girl, my mother making tea out of the loose tea leaves using the little tea bags

And she made absolutely the best sweet tea I ever tasted. So I hope you all enjoyed our visit

All right, now how many of you all have had an okra sandwich? Probably not many of you

The South really loves your okra. We love it fried, we love it boiled, and we even love it pickled

Now to assemble these sandwiches, it's so simple. We have just taken a piece of ordinary white bread

We have decrusted it. And we're going to take our rolling pin and just roll them out real flat

Like that. And you want to take your bread and flip it over and turn it the other way so that you get all the edges down Now at this point all we going to do is take cream cheese and spread a light little layer over that entire piece of bread

And you might have to dig through the okra to find long enough pieces

I've found a nice piece in there, and I'm just going to roll that up

Just like that. And we'll do that one more time. Do the same thing with that

Now we're going to put one more light coating on the outside of cream cheese

because we're going to sprinkle this with fresh parsley. You know that fresh parsley wouldn't stick to the dry bread

So we've got to have something to make that parsley stick. That sounds like a good excuse to me to eat a little bit more cream cheese

So I've got some fresh parsley. It's already been chopped and we're just going to sprinkle it

Now you could use dried but I wouldn't recommend that. I really like the fresh parsley for these

Now when I plate these up, I want to show you how I plate them

They're really pretty this way but I really like to cut them at an angle and put them

on the platter so that you can see the inside of the okras

What a pretty little finger sandwich that is. They're so good

So delicious. I think your guests will love the unusualness of the flavors and the beauty of the little sandwich

Y'all don't go too far. Coming up next, the pesto cheese blossom

I'd like to share with y'all now the pesto cheese blossom. We're going to start over here with just an ordinary glass bowl

that's been wrapped in saran wrap inside of the bowl. So we're gonna start with one round cheese in the bottom

and then we're gonna come up here, and we're gonna let it overlap onto that bottom ring of cheese

And you see how it's already taken the shape of a flower blossom

And then I'm gonna save these three slices to put on the top of our filling

Now, the first layer that we're gonna put in there will be cream cheese

and we're gonna start by dropping a whole garlic into there, and then we're gonna add a few pistachio nuts

and then we're gonna add two eight ounce packages of cream cheese

You can see where all the pistachios and the garlic was just kinda slinging everywhere

We don't wanna miss a bit of that flavor. We wanna get every drop

Now we're just gonna take that out of the bucket. bucket, we're actually fixing to make our pesto next. To make our pesto, we're going

to use about a half a cup of fresh parsley and about a half a cup of fresh basil. This

looks so, so pretty, doesn't it? All right, we're going to put in about a half a cup of

pine nuts, a clove of garlic, about a fourth of a teaspoon of salt, and a couple of tablespoons

of olive oil. And we're going to just let that become almost like a paste

I'll go ahead and add a little black pepper to it. I love the cracked black pepper

And you can just do this to taste. Now, I like quite a little bit of pepper in mine

And I'm going to add just another little drop of oil while it's running

And that should do it. We've got one final layer to complete our blossom

The last layer to our pesto cheese blossom is going to be sun-dried tomatoes

Now, we're just going to put those in the Cuisinart. And I'm going to add just a little bit of the oil that was on the tomatoes back into them as they're pureeing

Oh, I love sun-dried tomatoes, too. I just adore those. All we got to do now is just put our cheese blossom together I going to leave that right in there because this is actually going to be our next to the last layer So I just going to put that right there and let it sit

The first layer we're going to put in is the cream cheese with the pistachios

And we're going to put about a third of that. And that's going to go in first, and we're just going to spread it

on the bottom of our bowl, just like that. And you can see it's already got the makings of a flower

Looks like a blossom. The next layer is our pesto. Now, I think every time I've made this dish

I've probably layered it together a little differently. So you can do it any way you want to

I've got the first layer of cream cheese, half the pesto. I'm going back with another layer of cream cheese

Just spread that out, just like if you were frosting a cake

and I'm going to go back with the rest of the pesto

All right, and then another thin, thin layer of cream cheese. Looks so good

All right, now I'm going to come in here with our sun-dried tomatoes

And that red, when we slice it, that red is going to be so pretty coming through there

All right, now we're going to finish up with the last little bit of cream cheese

Looks so pretty and so festive. So before we seal this up, I'm going to take these last few slices of cheese and put them around like so

And then I'm going to pull the paper up so it'll form it into more of a ball

and then I'm going to just tie him up with a twist tie

put him back in the bowl, and put him in the refrigerator until he's set

Like I said, this is a great dish to do the day before. Which is what I've done

I have one that I made yesterday, and you can see how nice and firm it is

And you can see the sun-dried tomatoes have kind of run out

I have a few crackers to go along with it. And this really doesn't need a lot of garnish

maybe just a little basil, and you're actually ready to go. And what do you say we taste

Now, I like to cut mine like a pie since it's in a round circle

Okay, here we go. Look how pretty that looks. And you can serve this with any type of cracker that you want

but you want to make sure you've got a good premium cracker. It's so good and so savory

The tomatoes make it taste like a wonderful, rich Italian dish

It's just out of this world. It's over the top. I think you'll love it

Plus, it's pretty. Y'all stick around. Go fix your glass of tea because we're fixing to make cherry cheesecake tart

I'd like to share with y'all now a simple little recipe that I was formulating the other night in the kitchen

So simple, so quick, and so easy, yet so delicious. And we're going to take two 8-ounce packages of cream cheese and about a cup of sugar

Now this is a half a cup measure, so we'll do that twice

And we're just going to cream that together. Then I'm going to add one egg at the time

And I'm going to put in about a teaspoon of vanilla. This is one of those quick, quick, easy desserts

that you can have ready for your family in just a matter of a few minutes

And they'll just love it, and it stores well. You can keep them and actually run them

a couple of nights for dessert. All right, now I'm gonna transfer this to a measuring cup so we won't make a mess on

our muffin tin pan, because sometimes I get a little sloppy when I'm using a spoon

Now the crust is wonderful that we're gonna make for these with just no, absolutely no work

We're gonna take an ordinary vanilla wafer. We're gonna drop that into our muffin tin

and we're gonna put the flat side down. Then we're gonna take our batter

and fill that muffin tin almost completely full We gonna leave about a quarter of an inch topping This is one of those desserts that the kids will wanna come in and help with because it so simple

Now we're fixing to run this into a preheated oven that has been heated to 350 degrees

and we're gonna let them cook about 15 to 18 minutes. In the meantime, I've got a pan over here

that's been cooking, and the time is actually up on these. Look how pretty these look

Now I wanna tell you something about the day I was formulating these and playing around with them

I took them out of the oven and I said, oh, they're so pretty, and I went to my pantry

to get a can of cherry pie filling out, and I opened it and I turned back around and I said

what happened to them? They look like this. And I said, oh, my goodness

And then I realized it was just perfect for what I wanted to do with it

because they all fell in the center, and the cherry filling fits just perfectly down in that little hole

I thought I had made a big goof, and it turned out to be just perfect

They look just wonderful, and it's just the right amount because, you know, cream cheese or cheesecakes can really, really be rather rich

So this is a perfect size. Now I'm going to serve these right in the paper, but when the girls get ready to eat them, they can very easily just slip them right out of their paper

And look at the nice little crust that the vanilla wafer made with absolutely no trouble

And you can see the pan that I took out of the oven has already fallen

Mm-hmm. They are so incredibly out of this world. Y'all stick around because I'm going to give you a few quick tips to help you along at your tea party

I want to share a few tips with you on tea time. I want to show you what an ordinary grocery store flavored tea looks like as opposed to what I'm going to be using today for our tea party

You can see how finely ground that is, and you're not really sure what you're getting as opposed to what I've picked up from the tea shop

Look at the beautiful tea leaves and all the different aromas that's in it

To brew a pot of tea, I'm going to simply put one teaspoon of tea leaves for each cup of tea that I'm going to brew

Just snap that shut, and I'm putting it into a teapot that's filled with hot water that's been poured in right before boil

I'm going to let that steep for about one to three minutes, and already the aromas are just about to knock me over

They're so wonderful. Now you can serve this tea cold as well as hot

And in order to sweeten your tea, you can have a simple syrup on hand

which is equal parts sugar, equal parts water, brought to a boil

and make a simple syrup that will hang around. Just pour your tea over your ice and sweeten each glass individually

Now our tea should be ready. And you can see the beautiful color of our tea

Now we have several different choices on how we can sweeten our tea

We can use a regular sugar, we can use a syrup, or we can use honey

Or if you want to throw in a nice little twist, you can use sweetened orange rinds or pineapple

or just a plain sprig of orange zest or lemon zest. And mint is always appropriate in your hot tea

I think I'm going for the orange today. And I hope that you'll take the time to treat yourself

to a nice cup of hot, fresh, brewed tea. I can hardly wait for the girls to get here

and sample some of the things that I've made for them today. The cherry cream cheese tarts and the pickled okra sandwiches

and the pesto cheese blossoms and, of course, that very special tea that I went and bought for them

I hope that I've given you some good ideas for a tea party that you're going to throw

And until next time, America, I wish you best dishes and love

From my tea party to yours