House Tour

Hey y'all, I'm Paula Deen. Today we're in for a special treat because my buddy Brandon Branch is coming over to help me get this house ready for today's tasting tour

He's going to show us how to create beautiful interior landscapes by just using the t from your own backyard

While Brandon gets started creating miracles outside, I'm going to go into the kitchen and get started on the food

We're going to begin with my zesty cheese straws and crab stuffed mushrooms that are the perfect finger foods for touring

Then it's one of my favorites, mini eclairs. They're a showstopper. And finally, a platter of fruit with a velvety smooth dipping sauce

It's going to keep your guests hanging around all day. So y'all put out your welcome mat and open up your front door

because my house is the next stop on the tour. Hi, today is got a totally new twist to it

Normally you find me chasing food. Well, today I'm going to be chasing greenery

I've got my friend Brandon over here cutting on what I feel like is ordinary plants

that he's going to bring inside and just make the house beautiful

because we're doing a house tour. So you can show us today how we can go out into our yard

take some clippings, and make magic with it. Yes, for little or no money

So why don't we go make magic, Brandon? Let's go. Well, I'm going to avoid the obvious today in your garden

I mean, it's very luxurious, but most people don't have this. So I'm going to use some just very common plants that you have

They're just base plants. I'm looking for texture. I'm looking for leaf size

I'm looking for color. You know, I'm looking for different things that maybe the normal person wouldn't see that I'm going to try to get them to see

How about some of these? These are great. And I love these, Paula. These are beautiful this year

Aren't those pretty? Wonderful coneflowers. Just look at the beautiful combinations that we're collecting

Yeah. Look at this, Paula. This is actually a weed that you neglected to pull, but we'll use it

And look at the texture in that. Oh, that's so airy and lovely

That's fantastic. Now, what do you think we're going to use for just your greenery

If it's for greenery, I think I'll just maybe go around and use some of your boxwood shrubs, maybe some magnolia, just lots of textures and lots of different shades of green

And the hydrangeas, even just the dry blooms from earlier this summer, they'll be wonderful to use, maybe for a garland on the staircase

Look how wonderful these are. Aren't those pretty? If you touch them, you can feel that they're already dry

Uh-huh. They are. They've already started drying, haven't they? You look like you've made some great choices

I think so. Well, listen, I don't know about you, but I got a lot of work to do. I've got to get in the kitchen

So I'm going to go on in and let you work your magic. Okay

I'll start. Let me know if I can help you now if you need anything, okay

I will. We're going to have some wonderful dishes for our open house today

And I'm going to start with a delectable light southern cheese straw

We're going to start with a stick of butter in our food processor

And this is just a one-dump bowl dish. It's great. And we're going to put in our all-purpose flour

And we're going to put in our cheese. These are actually like eaten little pieces of cheese bread

And they have been around for years and years and years and years and years

dating back to probably the 1800s. All right, now I'm going to use ordinary table salt

and a little cayenne pepper because it's nice if they have just a little bit of a kick

We're going to let that run until we have kind of a soft dough

And I think we're there. This is looking nice and doughy. So we're just gonna empty it into our bowl

And y'all know to be careful with that blade from these food processors, they can be terribly sharp

Now there's several different ways that you can actually make your cheese straws

I'm gonna use a gun today, but you can also use a pastry bag

The most important thing though about a cheese straw is that you have the right tip

And I'm gonna show you the correct disc to use for your cheese straws

is a straight across squiggly line and you just fill your gun with the dough

And I've got a tray back here started for us. and see they actually look like a straw But using your gun you just run them out making about a two straw

So you're going to want to press down real, real hard on these guns because they've got some strength needed to press that out

So I'm going to take my knife, and I'm just going to cut them in two

Voila! And we're ready to go. All right, I've got our oven preheated to 300 degrees

and we're going to let these bake slow for about 15 minutes

Since we're going to need so many of these, I went ahead and started with my bacon a little earlier

so I've got a pan in here that's been in here about 15, maybe 16 minutes

and they should be ready. And they are. They're just beautiful. You can see that you don't want your cheese straws brown

And these smell so good. See how pretty and you can see all the butter on the bottom of that cheese straw

Mmm. Just makes you automatically kind of talk like scarlet. And while those are cooling, I'm going to show you what you can do with fruit

You can put you together a beautiful fruit tray, but actually, if you don't have time

or don't want to fool with it, you can go to the grocery store and get the pre-made trays

because what I'm going to show you next is really the secret to your fruit trays

and that's the sauce that you're going to dip that fruit in

And it's very simple, easy, quick, yummy, tasty to make. I've started with an eight-ounce package of cream cheese and some powdered sugar

and we're going to use the juice of one lemon. This is going to be nice and tarty with our fruit

And we're going to use fresh lemon zest from one lemon. And then we're just going to cream this together

You want to make sure that you start with nice softened cream cheese

so you can beat it very, very smooth. Now we're gonna fold in some whipping cream

that has been sweetened with a little sugar. We're just gonna fold that in just like this

And after we get it mixed up, if it's too thick for you

we're just gonna thin it using a little pineapple juice. And I don't even think I'm gonna need to thin this

And all we're gonna do is fill our pineapple, but you can see that pineapple makes a beautiful

natural container for our fruit. And the tray is ready for our guest

Mmm, delicious. Y'all stick around because next, we're doing some sinful mini chocolate eclairs

One of my favorite sweet treats to serve at cocktail parties is chocolate eclairs

And I've got a cup of boiling water, which I'm going to add a stick of butter to

Just going to plop that over in there. I'm going to just let that butter kind of melt in there a second

All right, that's boiling. We're going to take a cup of all-purpose flour

and just sift that over into our boiling water just very quickly

And we're going to stir that together until it comes to form a ball

And you can see that's quickly happening. All right, now I'm going to break one egg at a time

And with each egg, we want to make sure that we stir it in good

When you see those eclairs in the grocery store, you think, gosh, surely that's hard to do

But it's not at all. All right, now last egg. And then we're going to be ready to put them onto our baking sheet and pop them in the oven

Okay, we got it ready. It's just that simple. Now we're going to take our baking sheet

We're going to spray it lightly. And I'm going to dip these up

Now you can make eclairs any size that you want to, but I just love the little round bite-sized ones

So I'm going to use like a rounded teaspoon. And I'm probably going to put maybe nine of them on this cookie sheet

All right, now we're going to put these in a rather hot oven because we kind of want them to dry out

We don want them like moist and cake So I gonna put them in a 400 oven and we gonna cook them for about 25 or 30 minutes And you gonna be amazed when you see the magic

that takes place in that oven. Now we have some that should be about ready

and they are, look how pretty those are. Those are. We're going to take these after they've cooled

and we're going to split them. And we're not going to cut all the way through

We're going to leave them attached back there. And it's amazing what we're going to find

when we actually open this little thing up. It's got a hollow center

They're sitting there just waiting on this rich custard that we're fixing to make and pipe into there

Now, our custard filling is also very, very simple. And we're going to start with some sugar and flour and a half a teaspoon of salt

And we just want to mix our dry ingredients together real, real good so that that flour won't lump on us

Okay, so we've got that mixed up. Okay, I'm going to turn on the fire

and I'm going to slowly add our milk. And if you do this process slow, it will not lump as badly on you

Okay, so that's nice and smooth. So now it's safe for us to add the rest of our milk

All right, we're going to let our custard cook and begin to thicken

We're going to have our eggs over here. I've got three eggs that I'm gonna

I'm gonna scramble up and when our custard is right, we're going to temper these eggs

by putting a little bit of the custard into our eggs and slowly heating them up so that when we put them

into our hot custard over here, they won't become like scrambled eggs

And that's how simple the custard is to make. Our custard's ready now

And we're just gonna temper these eggs by pouring a little custard in there

warming those eggs ever so slowly. Great, okay, here we go. Gonna put those tempered eggs into there

And we're gonna stir, stir, stir those real quick. And you can see how those eggs have turned our custard

to a nice, soft, creamy yellow color. And we're gonna let those cook

for just a couple more minutes because we wanna make sure our eggs are done

All right, so that's ready. Now, after we remove that from our heat

we'll wanna throw our vanilla in there because we don't want our vanilla added

while our custard is actually cooking because we don't want all that flavor to dissipate

Oh, it smells divine. So we're going to take these delicate little puffs of air

and fill them with our chilled custard. These are going to be so delicious

All right, now I'm going to talk to y'all now about the different toppings that you can use on your eclairs

You can use any kind of topping that you want. In fact, on these, I think I'm going to use just an ice cream topping that I've thinned with a little cream

Y'all can see why I'm going to have to make so many of these

because half of them won't be accounted for when the party starts

Now, I want to show you another option to your topping besides chocolate

You can do another little twist to it, and that's by using a caramel topping

And this is just an ice cream topping. Y'all stick around, because next thing coming up is stuffed mushrooms in crude

Yum. Hey, I see y'all are back

And I've already started on our mushrooms, and I have actually got six sheets of phyllo dough there

And these are the last two. I'm going to have a total of eight sheets of phyllo

I have brushed every other sheet with butter, so this will be our last layer to butter

You can see how thin and delicate this phyllo dough is. and this phyllo was purchased in the grocery store

in the frozen food department. Now, I'm gonna take these eight phyllo sheets

and I'm gonna cut them right down the center because we gonna make little individual bundles for each of our mushrooms So I gonna do this in thirds So that looks about a third right there

I'm gonna come in here with one more cut, giving us two, four, six bundles

All right. Now I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna mix the center

that's going into our mushrooms and it's ever so simple. We're using boars and cheese

And this is a wonderful little cheese, but you know, if you go to the grocery store and buy it

it's really rather pricey. So you can actually make boars and cheese at home so simple

You start with cream cheese and just add herbs and it's, you're there

And I'm gonna mash this up. And then we're gonna add crab meat to our boars and cheese

Now, if you wanted to, you could use a canned crab or fresh

All right, we've got our cheese and our crab mixed together, and it looks and smells divine

So we're going to take our mushrooms. We're going to pop the centers out, and I save these

I'll chop them up, and I'll use them in a gravy or a topping for steak

but I don't throw them away. I'm going to take my little spoon and kind of just scoop out the center

because I want it stuffed full of that savory crab. And I'm gonna sit that in the middle of our bundle

and I'm gonna stuff the boys and cheese and the crab right down in there

And I'm gonna sprinkle it with just a little salt and a little cracked black pepper

And then I'm gonna bring our sheets up just like this. What do they call these? Little beggar's purse? Isn't that cute

And I'm gonna spray our cookie sheet. And just put them on there

And that's as simple as that. Now you can actually make as many or as few of these

that you think you'll need. And I've actually got some more in the oven

so I wanna turn around and check them real quick like and make sure that they're all right

These look delicious. Now, I have baked these in a 400-degree oven for about 20 minutes

or until they're golden brown. They look yummy, don't they? They look so delicate

Like, whatever you have done to this has got to have been a lot of trouble

And, of course, we know that it wasn't. Got to have a little bite. It's so hot

Oh, the phyllo is so delicate and thin and crisp. I've got to take a quick break, but when we come back

Brandon and I are going to be sharing some housewarming tips with you

I've got a couple of quick tips for y'all on some of the recipes today

You can turn those sweet chocolate eclairs into a savory appetizer with a blink of an eye

by taking your shells and filling them with either chicken salad or shrimp salad

But the neatest tip I have for you today is from Brandon, and he has taken artichokes and pulled the leaves apart and stuffed them with little flowers and different weeds from the garden

And they just make a beautiful little name tag for the dining room table

How cute is this? And Bobby and Amanda have name tags. I want y'all to see some of Brandon's magnificent creations that he's done in here in my dining room

He has got an arrangement cascading out of the cabinet and down onto my sideboard

He did not spend one penny on anything here. And you can see what he did over here on the table with vases and more goldenrod and wildflowers

His work has made my chocolate eclairs and my crab stuffed mushrooms look incredible

It's just amazing what Brandon has done with my house today. He's turned this foyer into just a magical garden entrance

And you can see I have my fruit tray with a French cream sitting here that's just very inviting

As soon as my friends come in, they can start munching on the food. And over here, I've got those delectable Southern cheese straws

I hope that Brandon and I have shared with you some ideas that you can use for your own party

So until next time, America, I send you love and best dishes from my kitchen to yours