My Grandmother's Table

Hey y'all, I'm Paula Deen, and today is a very special day for me, because I'm going to be cooking up the recipes that my mama and my grandma raised me on

And you know, my mama would not cook a meal without a potato being there

So I want to share with you her mashed potato bake, and once you try it, I'm sure it'll show up on your table year after year

And then I'm going to go back to the early days when my grandmother fried chicken in a very special way

And I can't wait to share with y'all what her secret was

And then I'm going to be putting together a simple, tart and tasty cucumber and onion salad that was on our table with every meal

Well, maybe except breakfast. And then to top off this meal full of memories

I'm gonna be sharing my Grandma Paul's red velvet cake with ya

Recipes this good will bring tears to your eyes. Y'all grab your loved ones

and let's take a trip down memory lane together, cause today is definitely a family affair

Guess what today's show is all about

It's about something that's near and dear to my heart. Today we're visiting Grandma's kitchen, and I don't have to tell you how much my grandmother

meant to me. She made a living with her food. She fed us, her family

She taught us how to cook, and she gave me choices by taking the time to pass her love

of food on down to me. Do you know grandmama would not consider laying out a meal that didn't have a tater in it, now would she

I'm telling the truth there. So that's what we're going to do. But this one's kind of an updated dish that grandmama may have done in her later years

And I've got some frozen hash browns in the freezer. And I've got a pot

Gertie's head is laying right where I'm going to have to stand. I hope I don't get her nose

All right. I've got my boiling water and I'm going to just put these hash browns in the boiling water

and I'm going to let them cook for about five minutes. And then over here in this bowl I have some herb-flavored instant potatoes

I've got butter. I've got softened cream cheese. Sound delicious already, don't they

I've got some jack cheese. and I've got some sour cream. I've got some garlic salt

Potatoes are not good if they don't have the salt in them, so you want to make sure you season those up good

And while I'm waiting on those to heat up, I'm going to take our casserole dish with a little softened butter

I'm just going to wipe our dish down with it. Alright, and I think those potatoes are ready

Now I'm just going to dump those in our colander because we want to make sure that we get all the water out of them

I'm going to turn that eye back on. So I've turned this eye back on

Now what I'm going to do is throw those potatoes in there and just let that water that's in them evaporate

That'll help just absorb that water and pull that water out of it

so it won't go into our casserole. All right, I'm going to dump our potatoes in there

Okay, now I've got all those ingredients mixed together. All we have to do now is add a liquid to our potato dish

And I'm just going to use water. And I'm going to measure up two cups

Perfect. I'm just going to stir that in. All right, those looks real, real good

And I see that jack cheese kind of stringing in there. Now I'm going to just transfer these potatoes to our dish

All right Now I going to put this into the oven and I going to bake this for about 45

350 preheated oven. All right we're going in with this and when we come back I'm

gonna be frying up my grandma Paul's fried chicken so y'all don't go anywhere

All right, let's check on our mashed potato bake

Now at this point, all we have to do is put our onion rings on top

And you'll want to be real careful that these don't burn. So all it needs is about five more minutes

And while those are cooking, let's come over here to the refrigerator and get out the chicken

because the recipes are just getting better and better and better as the show goes on

Now, this time, I'm actually going to use my grandmother's recipe. Well, my grandmother didn't deep fry her chicken

Grandma put the lid on her chicken after it started browning and she would steam it

So I'm going to take our chicken and I'm going to roll it in the egg

And this has got lots of salt and pepper on it. So I'm going to throw it over here into the flour

want to make sure that your dark meat has a little bit longer to cook because your white

meat cooks very very quickly where your dark meat takes a little bit longer

All right now I'm going to start adding the chicken and you can see I'm adding, I'm starting

with the dark meat which is your legs and thighs. I've got to get the goop off my hands, y'all

And you can see I've got my pan pretty full. If I was trying to fry three pieces of chicken, the heat wouldn't get distributed through it

like it should. All right, so I'm going to let that brown, and I'm going to come over here, and I'm going

to whip together some cucumbers and onions real quickly. there's just nothing to it. It's just a regular cucumber peeled or you can leave the peeling

on if you like. So I like to get it all off. And my mother would fix these every day for

my daddy when he came home for lunch during the summer months. And then we're just going

to add onions and parsley, and I'm just going to cover this with white vinegar. It's delicious

with black-eyed peas and mashed potatoes and fried chicken. You just got that little bit

of twang to go along with the sweetness of that fried chicken meat. So that's all we

have to do. In fact, I'm not even going to bother refrigerating mine. I'm just going

I'm just gonna sit it back there because I really like mine at room temperature

So let's check on our chicken. This is looking just like my grandma's pot

All right, now I'm gonna turn that down. I'm just gonna cover that chicken

cut it down and let it steam. Oh crap, mashed potatoes. I forgot about them

Oh, but they're all right. They're all right. They're fine. Ooh, that scared me

I just knew I had burned those onions after I told y'all not to do that

Okay, you can see how nice and soft that chicken looks. It's beautiful chicken

All right, and I'm gonna drain it right here for a second. And there's nothing like fried chicken gravy

All right, so I'm gonna need only about two or three tablespoons of oil

It really depends on how much gravy you wanna make. Then we're just gonna stir that flour up

in our drippings from our chicken. We're just gonna brown that off

and I'm gonna add some salt. And you'll wanna scrape your pan

and get all those little pieces of chicken and gravy. All right, I think we're safe to add our water

It's ready to plate, I think. Let's bring our chicken over here and put on this platter

Oh, that chicken's hot. Ooh doesn that gravy look good

Y'all know I don't think I ever met a chicken that I didn't like, because I love it all

And I think I'm gonna put a little gravy on my mashed potato bake

Look at those mashed potatoes and those onion rings and that gravy

Mmm. That could almost make me cry. Just makes me think of, you know, family that I no longer have and miss today

But through their recipes. and the things that they instilled in my heart, they're still with me today

So I'm going to work on this plate, and when we come back

I'm going to be making my Grandma Paul's red velvet cake to finish off this delicious meal so y'all don't leave me

All right, y'all. I'm glad to see you came back

I'm putting on these gloves because I love my grandma's red velvet cake

but it calls for food coloring. So I'm going to put these gloves on just to make sure I don't have red hands when I'm through

All right. We're going to start with two sticks of softened butter

and two cups of sugar. And we're just going to beat these up until they're smooth

and then I'm going to be adding one egg at the time. All right

I'm going to come over here now. I've got two and a half cups of cake flour. I'm going to add two

tablespoons of cocoa to our flour and I'm just going to kind of stir those together

And right here I have a half a teaspoon of baking soda and a tablespoon of vinegar

And you can see how that foamed up the reaction of the two ingredients

All right, I'm going to make sure that these are stirred up well together

And I'm going to pour that in there. And now I'm going to start adding the flour and the cocoa alternately with the buttermilk

So this works very, very well. So here we go. And the last bit of flour and cocoa

Now you can see that the color of our batter is a light like chocolate

Just two tablespoons of cocoa changed the color of it that much

Well, speaking of color, we're really fixing to change that color now. I'm going to do this very, very slowly

Okay, now we're ready to divide it up. Now, I have found that I can do it more consistently if I use some type of measuring cup

All right, now I'm going to put these in a preheated oven at 350 degrees, and depending

on the size of your cake pan will determine how long you're going to bake them, but you

want to bake them until the center, if you touch the center, it springs back, or until

it's ever so slightly pulling away from the side of the pan

So I've got them all ready, and we're going to put them in our oven, and you'll want to

make sure that your pans don't touch each other. You'll want to give them plenty of room

so that the heat can circulate around your pans. All right, well while our cake's baking

I'm going to make the icing. I've got a 1-8 ounce package of cream cheese that's softened

and one stick of softened butter, and I'm just going to cream these two things together

And I going to add some marshmallows that I just heated and melted in the microwave

All right, now I'm going to add one 16-ounce box of powdered sugar

All right. Now I'm going to fold in a cup of sweetened shredded coconut and a cup of chopped pecans

This looks so yummy. All right, so we're ready to ice our cake now, and you'll want to make sure when you're

making this cake and using this frosting that your cake is completely cooled because if you

try to put this on a hot cake it will melt the icing and you'll have a big mess, it'll

go everywhere. So our cake is nice and cool. I've got my wax paper to keep our edges clean

I put a little dab of our frosting in the center of our cake plate because I don't want

our cake to move around on us. So that will make him stick. So I'm just going to try to

divide our frosting evenly between these three layers. All right, and then we're going to

take our next layer and if he gets to leaning don't be afraid to get your

fingers in there and straighten him back up. Okay here we go

Okay. That looks so good

All right, to really give this cake a festive look at Christmas time, the touch of holly

and berries make it so pretty and so festive. Not only is it beautiful, it tastes wonderful

And speaking of taste, I don't have time to taste this right now because I've got to clean this up

and then I'm going to be back with some tips. And I'm going to taste this cake before this 30 minutes is up

So I'll see y'all in a few minutes. Do y'all love scrapbooking as much as I do

I don't know of anybody that doesn't have a special recipe that was in their grandmother's handwriting

or their mother's handwriting that you don't want to let anything happen to

So why should we not place all of our recipes into a scrapbook

Now this particular recipe was given to me by Jamie and Bobby's Aunt Sarah

And I have a picture of her. And I'm going to put it right here on the scrapbook page, along with the recipe

But I love this one right here. This is Grandmother Paul's sour cream pound cake

And that looks so pretty. I had such a great time doing this

I hope that you'll try this and like it. I think you will, especially if you're a scrapbooker like me

Look at this table full of beautiful food. And these recipes were passed down to us

It just gave me a warm feeling inside to prepare all the food for this show today

It put me back in touch with people that I miss so badly

My grandmother's fried chicken, it was so heavenly and so delicious. When I bit into it, it was just like I was back at my grandmother's table

My Grandma Paul's red velvet cake. Look how pretty that looks. Mmm

I was so lucky to have the parents and grandparents that I had

So I want to encourage y'all to go to your grandmothers and your mothers

and ask them to teach you all that they know so that when they have to leave

the recipes don't have to go with them. Until next time, America

I send you all my love and best dishes from my kitchen to yours

Mmm