Cozy Country Cooking

Hey y'all, I'm Paula Deen, and you know when there's a nip in the air, there's just nothing better than curling up with some good old comfort food

And today is just one of those days. So I'm going to be cooking up some of my favorites that are not only good for your heart, but good for your soul too

I'm going to be starting with a lady's chicken noodle soup, and I'm going to be making my savory herb cornbread to go on the side of it

And then I'm going to be fixing up ox tails. If y'all have never tried them, now's the time

So y'all set a cozy place by the fire because it's a perfect night to stay in

Today is such a feel-good day

You wouldn't believe, but in here in the pantry, I've got two dogs sleeping so hard that they're snoring

There's a nip in the air, and today is all about cozy cooking

and I'm wearing one of my favorite aprons. It always makes me feel good just putting this one on

Country cooking makes you good looking. I should be Miss Universe if that were the case

The very first food is chicken soup. It was the first soup that I ever made for the Bag Lady customers

But we're going to start with a pot of water. Now I have a whole chicken here

and this chicken probably weighs three pounds. To me, the chicken is easier to pick if he's left whole

And I'm going to add bay leaves. And some lemon pepper. And Italian seasoning

That Italian seasoning's going to be so good. And I'm adding a few chicken bouillon cubes

in fact, three just to make sure it's rich enough. And fresh garlic

and some salt. And I want to make sure that that's nice and salty

All right, now we're going to add some pepper to this pot. Oh, I just love onion in here

I love that onion. For y'all that don't know my story, I started 16 years ago with a business called The Bag Lady

and I just desperately wanted to be able to take care of myself and my two sons

And, you know, I had no talent, no education, no nothing. So I was a pretty good cook, so that made me turn to my stove

And I began a business in my kitchen at the house, and it was called The Bag Lady

And I would make bag lunches and send my children out to sell them

that was just 16 short years ago. In a way, it seems like a lifetime

but in reality, 16 years is not long. Yeah. You know that they say that chicken soup

really has medicinal purposes, and I would say this soup really kind of saved the life of me and the boys

So I think it does have medicinal values, and I know it's going to be wonderful when it's ready

All right, so let's move on. You know you can't have soup without something to sop it with

Biscuits are good with it. Cornbread is good, and that's what I've chosen to serve with this today

It's just self-rising meal, self-rising flour, dried thyme, celery seed, and marjoram

And I'm just gonna give these a quick stir. And I've got two eggs

This is a real simple cornbread recipe. And what's a cornbread without a half a stick of butter

Gotta have a little butter. All right, and then we've got one and a half cups of milk

And I'm cooking mine in a eight by eight square dish. We're gonna preheat our oven to 450

and we're gonna bake it for about 25 minutes. And there's nothing like good cornbread

just nothing, nothing, nothing. All right, so we're just gonna spray our pan

And into the dish it goes And in 25 minutes, we're going to have herb cornbread

Well, I've got a surprise for y'all. We're not going to have to wait 25 minutes for our cornbread

I've got one over here that's been cooking, and I'll bet it's ready

Hey, Rennie, and you smelled the cornbread, didn't you? And the chicken, oh my goodness, you want some chicken

All right. I'll give you a bite, okay? Okay, it's kind of warm, kind of hot actually, Rennie

It just looks yummy. Are you ready? I'm not going to let you have any butter

I don't think it's good for you, maybe. Maybe it's not good for dogs, but it makes my complexion pretty, Rennie

All right, here we go. Rennie, you're getting old. I swear Rennie's old

She's losing it. Mm-mm-mm. When we come back, we're going to continue to work on our pot of chicken soup

which I need to cover up. And possibly my favorite one to eat, oxtails and buttered rice

So y'all don't go anywhere. Those oxtails are over the top. We're going to have swinging sirloin, y'all

Mmm. Isn't that good, Brittany? Alright, let's take a look at our chicken

Take him out. Alright, we're going to move him right over here

In the meantime, while I'm taking the meat off him, I'm going to put in our celery

And you know I put the onion in when I first put the chicken in

so we've got that in there. And our carrots. All right, so we're going to let our vegetables cook for a few minutes

and we're going to start picking our chicken. I got so good at this, y'all, it was scary

When I was doing the bag lady out of my house, I picked a minimum of eight chickens a day just for my chicken salad

That didn't count the other chicken dishes like chicken noodle soup, chicken pot pies

Oh, and this is hot. But you see how easy it is when you start whole, not having all those little bitty pieces

Yeah, this chicken soup just, the memories just come rushing back in

It kept food in our bellies and house payments going. You know, I just, I love my boys so much

These big old football playing, baseball playing guys out walking the streets with their baskets

And Jamie said, we were talking the other day and Jamie said

Mama, you know, probably the lowest point was the last year that the bag lady was running

and it was Halloween, and he dressed up like a bag lady

and he had the boobs and mascara, and his hair was curled

and he looked just like a bag lady. He said, Mama, you should have known then that there was nothing in the world that I wouldn't do for you

He said, because that was so humiliating. This big old six foot four guy out peddling sandwiches in a dress

You know, you just, girls got to do what a girl's got to do, though, to make a living

And it turned out the right thing to do. There's lots of things that you could use this chicken for if you didn't want to make a great big pot

You could make chicken salad out of it. You could make a chicken casserole

You could make a chicken omelet. Chicken cookies. I just wanted to see if y'all were awake

I've never made chicken cookies. I used to didn't think I was ever going to get through picking chickens

Let me give my hands a wash. Chicken fat is a wonderful hand lotion

All right, let's come over here and look. Oh, that's looking good

All right, now I'm going to go ahead and add the noodles now. Just add a little fresh parsley

Yeah, I like a lot of those herbs floating around. And to finish our soup off, I'm going to add some sherry

Now this is optional. You may not like that flavor in your soup, so don't feel like you have to add it

And I'm going to add a little bit of seasoning salt. and I'm going to add some heavy cream

Now, this is optional, too, but I like to bring it to almost a cream state

rather than a brothy state. So see what that pot's doing. It's just turning almost magic on us with that cream

And I'm going to add a little handful of Parmesan cheese. or maybe two handfuls that was. Yum! And now I'm gonna toss our chicken into our

pot. I like to really be able to see the meat and you know in your store-bought

soups the chicken is like in little teeny teeny tiny bite-sized cubes but I

like it where when you dip your soup up you really almost need to use a knife on

some of those pieces of meat. It looks delicious. Alright, one last ingredient

ingredient for this, just a few mushrooms on top. And that kind of reminds me of the mushroom soup that you get in your Asian restaurants. Wow. This will cure what ails you. I know it did me if it hadn't been for the chicken. I don't know what I'd done. Chicken made me the woman I am today, y'all

Thank goodness for chicken. That is so delicious. Now I've just got one last thing to do

I've got some rosemary and some beautiful flat Italian parsley and I'm just going to

drop those in there. Look at that beautiful pot of soup

get that bay leaf. Mmm

Oh, y'all gonna just love it. I'll see y'all in a little while

I'm just gonna spend a couple of minutes here with my soup, and then I'm pulling out those oxtails

so y'all don't go anywhere. Mmm. All right, are y'all ready to cook oxtails

You know, people ask me all the time, Paula, what is your favorite food? And I have to say that oxtails is right up there at the top

This is slain and sirloin. This is the part down here that swats the flask

and this is the end that's closest to the rump. Now, we've tried cutting these at the restaurant by using a hatchet

and it's really, really hard to cut through that bone, so this is something that you'll definitely want the butcher to do

Now, I have had this one cut into pieces that are about two inches thick

This is a real, real rich meat because of all the maura

There's going to be a fabulous maura that comes out of this bone. People down south just love oxtails

and they would love for me to run them on the buffet at the Lady and Sons, but it's not always feasible because of the price of them

But once in a while, I do like to run them. So we're going to take these now, and we're going to season them up

and this is just how seasoning I'm putting on them. All right, and I'm going to put just a little bit of soy sauce

I found that this gives them a lot of flavor that you wouldn have without it You could use a Worcestershire but I not a big fan of Worcestershire All right now I going to just lay a few bay

leaves in there, and I'm going to put an onion in here. I love that onion, but our house

seasoning has salt, pepper, and garlic already in it, but some extra garlic certainly wouldn't hurt it

And I'm just going to kind of petal this onion. I kind of came up with this way of cooking them on my own. You know, it really just depends on

whether you like a lot of gravy or you like just a little bit of the rich stock

So the last thing I'm going to do to these is put just a little bit of water in the bottom of the pan

because I don't want them to burn. So that's enough. Now we're going to cover them

and I'm going to let these cook until they're tender, which may take four hours

It may take two hours, just depending on the quality of the meat

So in three and a half hours, four hours, we're gonna have oxtails

I'm gonna throw these into the 350 preheated oven. Y'all know that I'm not gonna make you wait that long

to see a dish. And now I just wanna wash my hands

Look at that. This is one of those dishes where you can really make it your own

I think I've just probably given you the idea of how it works for me

so you can make it taste any way you want to. I took the tinfoil off of this about 30 minutes ago

and let the oxtails kind of brown. My gracious

Can't wait to taste it with the rice. Mmm

And then add my favorite little piece to it. Mmm. Y'all stick around, because coming up next is some more chicken tips

So I'll see y'all back in a minute. All right, let's talk about chicken stock and making a quick pot of chicken soup

Because we don't have all day here to make this soup. So y'all have heard me say before how I love to take my stock and just freeze it

Throw that in our pot and I'm gonna cheat today by using canned vegetables

I'm using canned potatoes and carrots, but I am using fresh celery and fresh onions

I'm gonna add carrots, and our potatoes

I'm gonna throw in my herbs, a couple of bay leaves

We're gonna add our chicken, and if you find yourself running short on chicken stock, just

marry the fresh with some canned and you won't know the difference. So we've thrown everything

in here. Now I'm going to dump the pasta. And in 10 minutes, we're going to have a fresh pot of

chicken soup. And don't forget to stop by your grocery store and take advantage of those whole

chickens that are pre-cooked. You can bring it home and have a pot of soup in just a matter of a few

minutes. Oh, I had so much fun today, cozying up to my stove with all these dishes. The chicken

noodle soup, what Gertie, brought me back to the bag lady days and herb cornbread. It's all so

so good. Y'all just have to try the oxtails. Give them one shot. You're going to love them

So until next time, y'all, Gertie and I send y'all best dishes, hugs and kisses from our kitchen

to yours