Say Cheese

Hey, y'all. Paula Deen here

I want to welcome you to my kitchen today. Now, I know all of y'all know how much I love cheese

So today, it's chicken Georgia with mozzarella, y'all. And I've got the perfect combo to go with my cheese straws

a three-cheese hot artichoke dip. And to satisfy your sweet tooth, it's a sweet cherry cream cheese pie

And you won't believe what I'm going to do to one of my all-time favorites

It's the ladies mac and cheese, fried. So y'all get out your grater and say cheese

Now the first dish that I want to make for you is cheese straws

You know, down here in the South, we absolutely cannot have a party without cheese straws

So we're going to start by sifting two cups of self-rising flour into our bowl

I'm just gonna kind of stir through our strainer, sifting those good

And to our flour, we're gonna add a half a teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper

Because we like our cheese straws to have just a wee little bit of heat to them

So using my teaspoon, I'm just going to kind of stir those last few ingredients

And on my cutting board, I have two sticks of butter. And real butter, you don't want to make cheese straws ever using margarine

You want to make sure it's real butter. So two sticks of real butter is going to go in our bowl

and we're gonna mix our butter along with two cups of sharp shredded cheddar cheese

And I'm gonna take my little portable mixer and I'm gonna just beat together our butter and our cheese

And I'm just gonna beat this until it's nice and creamy. Alright, so now I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna slowly beat in our flour

So we're gonna add a scoop at the time, and that way it'll just be a little easier to

blend our ingredients together. So there we go. And we're gonna put our cheese

straw batter into our oven at 350 degrees and we're gonna bake our cheese

straws for about 12 minutes. So there we go. Just that easy. We've got our cheese

straw batter. Okay, now I've got me a baking sheet up here and you'll notice I

have not greased it because our cheese straw batter has so much butter in it

They're just gonna come right off of our cookie sheet. I'm just gonna take my batter

put it into my bag. Now we're just gonna scoop that in there

just like that, and I cut the corner out of our bag

So we're just gonna come in here and squeeze out onto our sheet

Now, you can make these as long or as fat as you want them. If you want them wider, you can just come back and put another layer in

So there we go. Us southern girls would never dream of having the girls over for a card game

or have an afternoon tea or have a baby shower without serving cheese straws

It's just we wouldn't even think about that. So we're going to bake them for 12 minutes

So in the oven they go. And while those are baking, let's come on down and make an artichoke dip

Now, I know that y'all have had so many artichoke dips. Well, we're going to give a little twist to this

We're going to use one can of artichoke hearts that have been chopped

Now, in my bowl, I have beaten one 8-ounce package of cream cheese with two cups of mayonnaise

Now over here I have one cup of fresh grated mozzarella cheese and half a cup of grated Parmesan cheese Now our artichokes go into our mayonnaise and cream cheese

I've got two green onions that I'm just going to dice up real, real quickly right here

Throw those in. Throw in my mozzarella cheese. Toss in my Parmesan cheese

and I've just got two more little ingredients that I want to add to this

I'm going to use just a dash or so of hot sauce

and then a dash of Worcestershire sauce. There we go. All right, I'm just going to incorporate that into our dip

And I've got a casserole dish right here and I'm going to transfer our dip into that casserole dish

So let's put this in the oven. Now that's 350, just like our cheese straws

for about 30 minutes. When we come back now, we're gonna pull those out of the oven

That artichoke dip is gonna be delicious. Just kind of spread all over our cheese straws

Coming up next, it's chicken Georgia, y'all. And later, cherry cream cheese pie

and fried macaroni and cheese. So come on back, y'all. Hey, y'all, in case you've just tuned in

today's show has been all about cheese. If you're like me, you just love it any way you can get it

While we were on break, I took the cheese straws out of the oven and I transferred them to a wire rack so that they could cool

So why don't we go to the oven and check on our artichoke dip

Smelling mighty fine in here, y'all. Mmm. And it looks mighty fine

Doesn't it look good? Now, I'm gonna just transfer my cheese straws

And, y'all, these cheese straws, they feel like air. They're so delicate

So, I think I'm gonna transfer a little bit. of our artichoke dip into this pretty little bowl

Because sometimes, you know, these larger bowls don't look so pretty. Look at that

Our cheese straws are so delicate and real big on flavor, along with our cheese straws

Oops. See, I told you they were very, very delicate. Mmm

I absolutely adore that artichoke dip. Let's move on down here because I've got a wonderful chicken dish

I want to share the recipe with you. It's called Chicken Georgia

Now, I'm using two cups of sliced mushrooms, and these are just button mushrooms

and I love them so much with chicken. I've got a shallot that I'm just gonna mince up real quickly

Now, I'm gonna start by adding four tablespoons of butter to my skillet

and in goes our shallots, and in goes our mushrooms

Now, we're just going to let this cook, y'all, for about 10 minutes. Now, let's move on over here to our chicken breast

I've washed them, and I've made sure that they were very, very clean

Now, I'm going to take my chicken breast, and I'm just going to salt and pepper them

I've seasoned our chicken breast. So, let's just come in here, tuck our chicken breast around there

Now, it's going to take about 10 minutes probably for our chicken breast to cook completely through

Now, I'm using two cups of mozzarella cheese. So, while that's cooking, I'll grate our mozzarella cheese

Let's go over here and check our chicken. Oh, it's ready to be turned

You just want to make sure your chicken is done, but you want to be careful not to overcook it

because if we do, it's going to turn out real, real dry on us

Now I'm going to take that beautiful mozzarella cheese, and instead of transferring this to a serving platter

I think I'm going to take this to the table just like it is

because I don want to lose any of those wonderful juices that have come out of that chicken and those mushrooms and the butter and the shallots I want it to all stay right there Now I going to let this just sit for just a minute

long enough for the mozzarella to melt. And if you've got your oven on, you could actually

throw this in the oven and let the mozzarella melt in the oven. While I'm waiting for our

mozzarella to melt, all that rich juice down in there, I think

deserves some bread for sopping. So, come on back down here. This dish

just looks fabulous. And look at this good

crusty bread with it, y'all. And I see which spot I'm going for

Oh! That bread and all that stuff, I just almost don't care if the chicken's any good or not

Because that bread, by itself alone, is out of its world. I think y'all are going to love this recipe

Smells so good. So fresh. Mmm, I love a mushroom. Mmm

Mmm, mmm, mmm. After all this wonderful savory food, I think it's time to bust out something sweet

Up next, a delicious cherry cream cheese pie. And later, macaroni and cheese with a twist

That chicken Georgia was so out of this world y'all, but it's time to move on to something sweet

Now this dish that I'm gonna make for y'all is a cherry cream cheese pie

And it's gonna be so easy to put together. You're not gonna believe it now

I've got one eight ounce package of softened cream cheese Because remember all of our dishes today have some sort of cheese in them

So, I'm gonna beat up our cream cheese. See how nice and creamy that immediately got

with no lumps in it. It's perfect. All right, now we're gonna take one 14 ounce can

of sweetened condensed milk. And this stuff is so good, it's just perfect

Alright, now I'm gonna add to this a half a cup of fresh lemon juice

Now, it's important that you use fresh. Don't use that bottled because, really, it just takes away from it so much

Now, I'm only gonna work in about half of my juice until I get everything creamed together real nice

This is smooth as a baby's honey, y'all. Because, you know, I got that new little grandson

And I know how soft that little booty can be. All right, so just that quickly, we've got our pie put together

Now, there's only one other thing that I need to add to it

and that's a teaspoon of vanilla flavoring. And that looks like about a teaspoon

Now I'm really going to cheat today, y'all, with our crust

I'm going to use a store-bought graham cracker crust. Now we're just going to take our filling, pour it over into our crust

and then we're going to stick this in the refrigerator. for just a couple of hours to let it set up nicely

because we want this to come out firm and whole when we cut it into slices

So there we go. Now I'm going to pop this in the fridge

and I've got one that's been in there for about two and a half hours

It's already set up nicely. So let's pull it out and see what we've got

Mmm! It smells so good. So let's do the old switcheroo. You can see how that's set up nicely

And we'll just stop right here with it. And I going to bring over just a cherry pie filling that you find in the baking section at your grocery store If you have one that you prefer over the cherry use it Now I just going to pile this on top of our pie You know

it's just amazing that a dessert can be this simple and this tasty. Now it's very, very hard

to get that first piece out, isn't it, without tearing it up

So I'm gonna use my scissors, and I'm just gonna snip that pie crust

And then I'm gonna come over here, and this is the size I'm gonna make

for my first piece of pie. I'm just gonna come in there

give it a nice deep cut. And then I'm gonna come over here

All right, here we go. Perfect. You know, I just can't ask for anything to be any simpler than that

Just that easy. We have a cherry cream cheese pie. So let's dig into this

Mmm. This is so good. If I can pull myself away from this cherry cream cheese pie

I'm gonna come down here when we come back, y'all, and I'm gonna do something that I've never done before

How about fried macaroni and cheese? Okay, y'all, I promised to share with y'all something that I had never done

What I'm fixing to do is fry up the lady and son's macaroni and cheese

I'm going to wrap it in bacon, and we're going to deep fry it

So here goes, y'all. This one's ice cold. It's been in the refrigerator because it has to get hard and set

All right. I'm gonna cut this into squares. Just like that

Come on out. There it is. It popped out great. Now, I'm gonna take these four squares

and before I dip and dredge, I'm gonna take my bacon, and I'm going to wrap my bacon around this macaroni and cheese

and I'm going to secure it using a toothpick. Y'all, it's funny, a lot of recipes, you know, kind of come to you by accident

because when you're in the kitchen cooking, you get to thinking and before you know it, you've created a whole different recipe

from the one that you started with. So a lot of times, good recipes happen this identical way

I've got my macaroni over here with my bacon. Now I'm just going to scramble those eggs up

Okay. So, in the flour, our macaroni goes. All right, now, so into our egg this goes

We're going to make sure we get it coated all over. All right, into our cracker crumbs

We wanted our temperature at 350, so it'll cool down as soon as I add our mac and cheese and bacon to it

All right, so let's go ahead and roll these in the breadcrumb

I'm cooking this in peanut oil today because, you know, I do a lot of my frying in peanut oil

I happen to think it has a lot of flavor. Okay, so the last one in the pot it goes

All right, I'm gonna give my hands a quick wash because they're really, really goopy

Okay, so I'm gonna come over here, and let's see. This is not gonna take long to fry up

Just a few minutes, and it's ready that quickly, y'all. Look at this

Take a look, and we'll see what we've got. They sound beautiful

This is really, really good. Until next time, y'all, I always send you love and best dishes from my kitchen to yours

Bye, y'all