Farmer's Market

Well, hey there. I'm Paula Deen, and today I'm going to show you around our beautiful farm country

because there's nothing that makes a meal better than good local produce

First, I've got a sweet summer squash casserole that's just fit for a king

Then I'm going to show you the simplest, tastiest tomato pie with my very own fresh basil from the garden

You'll just be amazed at how fast you can make this one. And finally, the creamiest, butteriest corn dish in the whole wide world

I promise you the kids will be holding up their plates for seconds

Wouldn't your mama be proud? Today's meal is all about fresh vegetables

So I'm fixing to ride them hills out there, and I'm on the hunt for tomatoes, corn, and fresh squash for today's dishes

And I would love for y'all to ride along with me. My old friend Ray is real, real busy down at McEnroe Farm, but when he's in, he helps me pick the most unique vegetables

So let's just hope he's there. I'm here. How are you, Paula? There you are. Good to see you

Good to see you. I've been waiting on you. I need just a little help

Okay. All these are organic. Yes. Right? And that means no fertilizers, no..

We will have no synthetic pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, thungicides. So my children are safe. They won't grow two heads

Well, that's right. Wonderful. The tomatoes are beautiful. I don't think I can resist making a wonderful fresh tomato pie

Well, the first thing you want to do is get some of these old heirloom tomatoes. Wait, now I've never..

This is a Cherokee purple, and it's an old heirloom seed. And they're not the prettiest looking tomato

but they're going to taste about as good as anything you've ever had. Well, I've never seen one of these

They're a little different. How do you use this? Do you use it just like you would one of these tomatoes

Use that any way you want, and it's going to be the best-eating tomato to me and most of my customers. I'm going to hold you to it now. You better not screw up my tomato

pot. I won't screw it up at all. I'm going to make a squash casserole and I think the zucchini is so

pretty I think I'm actually going to throw a few of these in the pot. This is another particularly

good one. It's called roly poly. If you just take that and slice it and put it on the grill. Let's

go a little funky and different on this casserole today. All right and the next thing I'm going to

do is cream corn. Now, I've always used a silver queen cream corn. We'll have silver

queen next week. Next week. So you're a week early. Those days and weeks are very important

in produce, aren't they? Sure are. You can't rush Mother Nature. But these are nice ears

of organic corn. Well, that sounds wonderful. Well, thanks so much for your help today

Well, thank you. And I'm so glad you were here. You're not always here when I come by. And I'm going to let you know about those tomatoes, those heirlooms

You'll be letting me know, I'm sure. Yes, I will. Thank you so much

You know, when you've got good, fresh products to work with, you don't really have to worry about a lot of camouflaging

You can let that food stand up and speak for itself. So what I'm fixing to prepare for y'all today is our squash casserole

And we're going to start with just yellow squash. But while I was up in the hills today, I found a zucchini

And I've never used this before. It's called a roly-poly zucchini. So we're gonna try these today and see how we turn out

And we're gonna start by just slicing our squash up. Really doesn't matter how you cut it

because this is going into the stewing pot. So we're just gonna slice it like this

and throw this into our pot. And we're going to do enough so that we come up with like three cups

And I just can't hardly wait to cut into these little things. Oh, my goodness

It's very tender. That cut probably more tender than the yellow squash

And it's sticky. I think I'm just going to have to sample that raw

It's delicious. I think it's going to make a great addition to our casserole today

Now, squash has a tendency to have a lot of water in it, and when we get ready to put

our casserole together, we're really not going to want a lot of water. So I'm going to start with just a few drops, just enough to get it going

And probably six cups of raw squash will yield us the three cups of cooked squash that we're

going to need to put our casserole together. Now we just going to cover this pot and let it stew down And in the meantime I going to come over here and saute our onions that go in it And a lot of people say well Paula why don you just throw your onions in

with your squash? I really don't like to do that because if we do, our squash takes a little bit

longer to cook than our onions. And I just love when you dip into that casserole and put a big

chunk of onion in your mouth. So it just really seems to give it a lot more flavor if you do it

separately and don't overcook it. We're just going to kind of let those saute until they kind of get a little clear on us

I have to tell y'all, I can't help but think of this telephone call that I got one day from a young lady

She said, Paula, I can't get my squash to fit in my measuring cup. And I said, well, honey, what do you mean

And I found out that she, I did not say slice in the recipe, so she didn't slice it

and she's there trying to cram all of her squash into this cup

Well, we laughed and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed. We probably laughed for 10 minutes

And so every time I fix squash casserole, I think about that fun phone call I got that day

And that taught me a lesson. You have to be very explicit. Now, in order to get the water that I was talking about earlier

in order to get it out, I've got a colander here and you can use just a clean rag or cheesecloth, either one

And we've gotten all of the water out of that, and look how good and yummy it is

And if you need to, at this point, if your squash is not stewed down enough

you can just simply take a potato masher and mash it up some or take your spoon and just kind of do it like that

So we're ready to mix all of our ingredients together now. I'm just going to put these back into our pot

and we're going to throw our onions in. Just looks and smells delicious

I can't tell you what the onions do to it. They just really make it. All right, we're going to transfer our vegetables into our mixing bowl

All right, we've got our squash and our onions mixed all together nicely

and from here on out, it's just so simple. we're gonna moisten our squash casserole with sour cream

And we're gonna put a little salt, black pepper, and garlic powder

And we're gonna stir that up, and then we're gonna put just good old sharp cheddar cheese

Look how delicious that looks. I think I could actually eat this at this stage now

And speaking of eating it at this stage, I'm gonna taste it to make sure my seasonings are right

I wanna make sure I didn't miss the mark on my salt. It's good

All right, now we're just gonna turn this into our buttered casserole dish

Just kind of spread it around evenly in your dish

Now at this point, you can kind of do anything you want to with it

You can top it with straight cheese. You could top it with, there's a wonderful little product out there that are canned onion rings

You can top it with that, only you'd need to wait until the last two minutes. You'd need to go ahead and actually bake it like this and then add the onion rings the

last two minutes. But one of my favorite toppings is just a good buttery cracker, and that's what we're

going to top ours with today. And that's it. It's that simple

We're going to put it in the oven and cook it for about 30 minutes, and then it's going

to be ready to eat. The best part about having two ovens is that I can cook two things at once

So my first casserole should be ready. I can't hardly wait to taste those cute little roly-polies in the final dish

And I'm gonna make sure I get one in this bite. They're wonderful

You've got to stay tuned because next I'm gonna be cooking you up a tomato pie

Yes, a tomato pie. Right now, I'm fixing to show you my tomato pie

Normally, I would make my tomato pie with just a regular vine-ripe tomato

but Ray talked me into trying one of his heirloom tomatoes, and this is a Cherokee and it's beautiful

You see how dark it is in color. In fact, when I first saw him, I thought, gosh, Ray's got some kind of rotten tomatoes up there

but he insisted that I taste it. So I promised him I was gonna try this

in my tomato pie today. We're gonna start by cutting a little notch through the skin of our tomato

and we're gonna drop it into boiling water and we're gonna leave it for about 30 seconds, 45 seconds

It doesn't take long. you can lift it up in a few minutes and you can actually see that skin

splitting on you. Let's see if we see The skin already split on it just that quickly and that was probably less than 30 seconds And then we going to put it into the ice water The ice water stops the cooking on it

and it makes it cool enough for us to handle. See, that skin will just slip right off

That's so much easier. Beautiful, perfectly peeled tomato. We're going to come over here now

and we're going to slice these up and get them ready for our pie. This is a dish that I serve on all the major holidays, Thanksgiving, Easter, Father's Day, Mother's Day

We always serve tomato pie at our guest because it is such a special dish

Now, on your pie crust, you can either make your own or you can just use a frozen

When I'm doing cocktail parties, I buy little frozen phyllo shells, and I actually chop the tomatoes up and fill them into these little shells

and we pass them at cocktail parties, and people just love them. And right now I'm going to take the tomatoes that I've peeled and I'm throwing them into a colander and I'm going to just lightly salt them

And we're going to give these tomatoes just a minute to drain because we don't want our pie crust all soggy, even though that tomato juice is wonderful in there

And while they're draining, we're going to come over here and make our dressing. And all we're doing here is taking a cup of mayonnaise and mixing it with a cup of cheddar cheese and a cup of mozzarella

And we're just gonna stir that together. How simple. And we're just gonna throw a little salt into here

And a little pepper. And while I'm waiting for our tomatoes to drain, I'm just gonna run out here in the garden

and clip a little fresh basil. If you'd like, come on along

The basil is just wonderful

It doesn't take a lot for your pie, but it adds the greatest, greatest flavor

So let's go over here and see if our tomatoes are ready. I think we've got them drained pretty good

So all we're going to do is just lay our tomatoes around the bottom of our crust

Isn't that beautiful? And next we're going to top it with our spring onions

But we're just going to spread those over the top of our pie. Now at this point you can kind of just play with it and do whatever you'd like

You can go ahead and pinch your basil on the top or you could even mix it into your dressing, which it doesn't matter

But I think I'm just going to pinch it and make sure that no matter where you cut it or where you dip

you're going to get a bite of that wonderful basil. You know, this is one of those dishes that's so, so easy

I almost don't even know how it could give you problems. Probably the most important thing to the whole dish is just getting as much juice out of your tomatoes as you can

so that it won't make your pie crust soggy. So all we're going to do now is just frost our pie with our mayonnaise and cheese

We'll just dot it around. And I can't think of a meal that this pie is not good with

On Mother's Day, my son invited me over for breakfast. Before he sent me off to work, I might add

Seems like he had the day off, but he fed me and sent me on to work

And he had scrambled eggs and tomato pie. And it was so wonderful together for breakfast

It's fabulous with steak. It's wonderful with fried chicken. It's just great with just about everything

and every meal that I can think of. There's just not a place that this pie won't go

All we have to do now is just put this in the oven until all of our ingredients are hot

and our frosting has melted, and you're in for a real treat when it's ready

I'll tell you right now, I got so excited about my fresh vegetables

I made two pies. And I think the other one is ready

Oh, look. Look at our luscious pie

The great thing about this tomato pie is this is the only garnish you need

a fresh piece of basil. I think I'm gonna have to go ahead and cut this pie

and give it a taste. Look at the juice from the tomatoes

Oh my gosh

A hot tomato sandwich with cheese. Y'all hang around because next we're going to have great fun with some fresh corn

And when I say great, I literally mean great. So come back

I promised y a great time and here I am I'm grating it

I was up in the valley this morning looking for corn, tomatoes, and squash

and you can see that I'm grating this corn on a little corn grater

It's just a wonderful little invention. I can't imagine trying to do creamed corn with a knife

because you've got to get in there and actually get the cream and the milk out of that corn

And it has a little blade right here that actually busts the tops off, and then in the

center it's got little arms that stick up, and then down here on this blade it actually

removes the milk. You know I've spent many a summer as a young bride putting up cream corn for the winter

And it really is a job, but you just have to, have to do this with all this beautiful

fresh corn coming in. And just rotate your corn just like I'm doing, and you can turn him upside down and get every

drop of that milk out of him. Look at that wonderful corn

And like I said, there is no way you can do this with a knife

So we're just going to keep going until we have enough for supper. You might want to wait and make cream corn when hubby's home so that he can lend you some

of his manpower. And by the way, don't wear any good clothes on cream corn day

You see I'm going to be polka dotty by the time we get through. All right, we're all through having our great time now

So we're going to take our corn and put it into a baking dish

Now, if this corn had been a little on the dry side, you could always just simply add

a little bit of milk giving you more liquid. But we've got so much juice in this corn

I think it's going to be fine. The only way you can really mess a fresh cream corn dish

up is by getting old corn. If you've got to hold the old corn, it's going to be drying

it's really not going to be any good. So if I were you, I wouldn't even waste my time

and labor on trying to prepare it. Now I'm fixing to taste this corn and see how sweet it is

This is so delicious. All I'm going to add to this is straight butter

At home when I'm doing this dish, this is the only food besides a baked potato

that I will sometimes cook in a microwave. You can take this corn now and cover it in a plastic wrap

put it in the oven for about four minutes, take it out, stir it, put it back in for about four more minutes, and you've got creamed corn

But I'm going to stick this in our regular oven today, And we're going to cook it for about 10 minutes

Then we're going to go into the oven and we're going to stir it up because it will begin to cook faster around the edges than in the center

So we're going to keep stirring until that corn is evenly cooked. And it doesn't take much

Actually just heating it completely through. And we'll be ready. When we come back, I'm going to show you how to help make summer

last all year long. Before we say goodbye today

I want to share with you just a few tips that were shared with me years ago

that were so, so much help. The easiest vegetable or fruit that we have to preserve

is the tomato. It's so very simple. All you do is wash your tomatoes, drop them in a plastic freezer bag, seal them up, throw them into the freezer

And when you're ready for them in the winter, you just take them out, hold them under hot water, and the skin will peel off just like we've blanched it

It's a great, great way to preserve the tomato. You can't make a tomato sandwich with it, but you can have a great pot of pasta

And the next thing I'd like to share with you is herbs. All you have to do is take your herbs, tie them up with regular kitchen cord

and hang them in a dry place. And after they dry, you just crush them up, and you'll have them all year long too

But one of the most important things to remember is always wash your vegetables very well

even your organic vegetables, because you never know who's touched them or where they've been

We've made some wonderfully scrumptious dishes today. We've got our squash casserole with these cute little roly-poly zucchini squash

that I've never had the pleasure of cooking with. And, of course, we've got this magnificent juicy tomato pie

And I even had time to throw some collard greens into the pot this afternoon. And our sweet and mouth-watering creamed corn

And as always, America, you know I send you love and best dishes from my kitchen to yours