Southern Comfort

Hey everybody, y'all come on in. I'm Paula Dean and today I'm gonna give you the lowdown on low country cooking

But first, we gotta go down the road for some of my favorite farm style sherbet, but that's just dessert

Next, it's back to the house to pop this big ol' ham and a couple of juicy yams in the oven

and let them set while we work on our turnip greens and some classic cornmeal dumplings that are simply to die for

And finally, the angels will be singing for these creamy squares of clouds and sunshine

So kick it into low gear and call in the neighbors, because today the lady is cooking low and slow

Hi. Today's program is all about some favorite foods of mine that I grew up on in the south

But don't ever underestimate our sweet tooth. Before I get started, we're going to go get some

heavenly treats. So come on with me. What you doing, Joe

Hey, Paula. How are you today? You making me a banana split

You betcha. You knew I was coming, didn't you? What kind of flavors do you have in there

Well, we have orange sherbet, raspberry sorbet, and strawberry ice cream. You're going to help me eat this, though, aren't you

Surely you didn't make this, but just me. Let me come down here and get some

Now, what did you say this was? Tangerine? That's orange sherbet. Orange sherbet

That's what I've come for today. I'm going to make you some fresh. Oh, that's too bad

I have to have fresh ice cream. The first thing we're going to do is put our ingredients in up here

And the first thing we're going to need is a little bit of milk. You're using whole milk, aren't you, Joe

Oh, yeah. We're going to add some water. Uh-huh. And then we're going to add our sugar

This is what gives us all our flavor. We're going to add those right in here also. I bet that's very, very powerful, isn't it

Yes. They both are pretty powerful. It's quite a bit of flavoring because you want to really juice it up a little

All right. Ready? Is it soup yet Joe

It looks ready Paula. Put this inside for you

Pack that up. And you're going to be all set. Joe, you've got me a perfect ending to a perfect meal

Thanks so much. Thank you. I'll see you later. You come back and visit us again

I'll do it. Do y'all think I got enough ice cream

That will feed a family of four. All right, the very first thing that we're going to start with now

is one of a southerner's probably favorite meats, and that's fresh pork

And I think we're going to go ahead and put him in a tray so I can be just as sloppy as I want to be

This had to have been a mighty fat hog. Isn't he just beautiful

What we're going to do to him now is very, very simple. I'm going to sprinkle him with soy sauce

and just kind of rub that into him. Y'all know how I like to rub my meat and touch my meat

and I like to rub the seasonings into it. If I didn't rub my meat, look, it would just sit there and roll off

I want it to get into it. Now we're going to add our house seasoning

and y'all will hear me say 100 times what our house seasoning is. is it's a cup of salt, a fourth of a cup of black pepper

and a fourth of a cup of garlic powder. So we're just going to coat him good with that

Because like I said that salt is going to kind of form a crust on him We going to throw him in the oven and we going to put him in a 325 oven and we going to cook him approximately 20 minutes a pound

And because we're cooking him in a slower oven, we're not even going to have to cover him

And I've got one in the oven that's been cooking for about four hours now

And how beautiful. Now you're going to want to open the oven periodically and just spoon your juices on top of him

Isn't he just beautiful? Can you tell why us southerners love pork

It's going to be so good. The reason I like this cut of meat is because three nights in a row you can have three totally different meals

Tonight we're going to slice it and serve it warm. But tomorrow at lunch we're going to have a nice fat sliced pork roast sandwich with lettuce and tomato and onions

And then the next night I can chop it up, toss it in barbecue sauce, and we've got barbecue sandwiches

So it makes it so versatile it's wonderful. And while that's sitting there resting, we're going to start on our sweet potato yams

Now, I have put these yams in the oven and baked them for about an hour

And I've let them cool long enough for me to remove the skin. And see how it'll just peel right off for you

All right. And we're just going to line them up like that. Then I just slice them all at one time because we're going to be pouring sweet sauce over them

And I want them to go all the way through. To make our sauces ever so simple, we are going to make what they call a simple syrup

And we've started with boiling water, brown sugar, and I want y'all to take note of this now

I'm only using a half a stick of butter, which you have to admit is unusual for me

We're going to drop a couple of little pieces of cinnamon stick in there, and we're going to put a little fresh grated nutmeg

Once I discovered fresh grated nutmeg, I just can't use any of that packaged ground stuff

This makes it so much better. All we've got to do now is add an orange strip

and don't leave this out. If you have to run to the store to buy an orange

by all means do it. We've got one last thing to put in here

old number seven. And we're going to put about a third of a cup, and I'm going to use our little butter cup to measure

And that looks just about right. So we've got all of our ingredients in there

All we're going to do at this point is put a lid on it and let it simmer for about 30 to 45 minutes

We want this to start turning to a syrup, thickening up, just like the syrup that we'd eat on our pancakes

Rennie! My cooking buddy Rennie. Actually Rennie's my eating buddy. Okay, I have a pot here that already made a syrup

So all we're gonna do now is pour our syrup over our potatoes

We don't want to be stingy with our syrup. We want to give those sweet potatoes plenty of juice

to cook in. Don't those look delicious? So we're going to put these in the oven

and we're going to bake these for about 30 to 45 minutes

But while we're waiting on that, I've got some ready over here on the counter that I think are ready for us to taste

Oh, and you can see how the tops have kind of caramelized on us

Oh, they look perfectly heavenly delicious. And you know I can't eat a yam without a little piece of pig to go with it

So far, so good

Oh, gosh

You know, this reminds me of my mother's kitchen at Easter. Look at that

It's out of this world. But now, I've just got to taste some of that pork along with it

It just perfect along with the yams Y don leave me because next we going to make some out turnip greens and cornmeal dumplings to go along with this southern meal

So y'all come back. Look at all these beautiful greens I have over here

Wonderful fresh turnip greens. They do require a little care though. The first thing we're going to do is strip the greens away from the stem

Where the green starts, you just stop and pull and it's out of there

And before you know it, you'll have a big bowl full and you're going to think, oh my

gosh, I don't have a pot big enough for these. Well, let me tell you, let me tell you a little secret about turnip greens

You can have a barrel this big and that deep and when you get through cooking them, it's

going to go down to about this size right here. The other thing I want to tell you about greens is they can be very, very gritty because they

grow down into the dirt, so you're going to want to make sure you wash them very, very

good and get all that grit out of them. So we've got our greens and over here in this

pot I've had ham hock cooking for about an hour and a half. Now if you would like, you

can certainly swap out ham hock for smoked turkey wings and you can find these in most

any of your grocery stores. They make a great seasoning and you will have to cook them about

the same length of time that you will the ham hop. Now these greens that I have up here that I've de-stemmed

have been washed three times. They're nice and clean. So here we go, that water's boiling

we're just gonna put them down in that broth. And you can see how quickly they'll break down

So depending on the greens, they could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 45 minutes

to an hour, depending on whether they're young or they're older greens

So you'll just have to test your greens. And while those are cooking, I'm going to be preparing the roots

that we're going to put in there. So to prepare your root, just trim both ends off

and peel them like so. These take about 12 to 15 minutes

So we'll add those towards the very end of our cooking time

And we'll just slice them just like we would a potato, a cottage potato

Just like that. Now I'm gonna come back to our pot. Now that our greens have kind of wilted down

and I'm gonna add a chicken bouillon cube. And remember, this contains a lot of salt, too

so I'm gonna drop that in. And one other thing I'm gonna do to these turnip greens

that my grandmother Paul did not do, I'm gonna put a little ground ginger in them

Just a pinch. All right, so I'm going to cover these up, and while they're cooking, I'm going to go

on to make my grandmother's cornmeal dumplings. When I was cooking my turnip greens, I put in a little extra broth so that I could have

the extra broth to pull out. So we're going to mix up our cornmeal dumplings by starting with a white, medium ground, plain

cornmeal, a little bit of salt, a little bit of chopped onion, and I like adding a

little green onions. They just add a lot of interest in color. And one egg

All right, now we're just going to pour a little bit of that broth and you'll want to do a little bit at the time because remember you can always add two, but it's hard to pull

it back out. But see how simple that was? So all we're going to do is pick up a spoonful of our dough and mold it, and we're just going

to drop those down in the hot boiling liquor and it seems to be holding together nicely

Now we're going to let those cook for, oh gosh, maybe about ten minutes

It really doesn't take them very long because we're going to let them boil pretty good

Oh, look at that pot of turnip greens. Now I've added those sliced turnip roots

They've cooked and look how beautiful they are. Now I'm going to take our cornmeal dumplings and I'm just going to lay them around on the greens

just like Granny taught me to do. How wonderful do they look

I want to make sure I get me a little piece of everything

I'm talking about putting some south in your mouth. This is it

And then I'm going to grab me a corn stick. They so good There still a sweet ending to all this so don y leave me

When I was a little girl, I think my very favorite ice cream in the whole entire world was called a Dream Sickle

It had a white vanilla center, and it was covered with an orange sherbet, and I just loved them

I thought that they were named appropriately. So we're going to recreate that dream sickle by very simply making us a layer of orange sherbet

Now we're going to make our bottom layer, which is actually going to wind up our top layer

we're going to make it about an inch thick. I've softened this sherbet so we can easily get it into our bowl

And then we're going to come with our next layer about an inch deep and do the vanilla ice cream

Just kind of take your finger and work your ice cream to form that next layer

All right, so here we go with another sherbet layer. We're just going to kind of slide him right off the spoon

All right, we're going to finish up now with the vanilla layer

and this is actually going to be the bottom. All right, we've smoothed him out

Now we're just going to cover him with wax paper and put him into the freezer and let

him stay until he's good, good and hard. And I have one right here that's ready

So we're going to see what our dreamsicle tastes like. See if it's what we remember

I'm going to invert him onto this plate. And you can see he's still sitting in the container

So just in case that happened, I had a rag over here soaking in warm water

and I'm just going to lay it on top of this, and that should release the ice cream from the bowl

See how pretty and how easy he just slipped right out of our mold

All I'm gonna do now to garnish him is just put a little fresh mint in there and look

at this fresh orange zest. How pretty is that? This dessert looks like we've gone to a lot of trouble, but in reality we haven't

And so before he melts, I think I ought to taste him though, don't you, and see if my

My dreamsicle is a reality or a dream. I'm six years old again

It's out of this world. Y'all stick around because coming up next

I've got a few tips to share with you. Before I leave y'all today, I want to just share with you a few tips that might make your southern meal go just a little bit smoother

Moving on down to our meats, the kind of meats that you cook your greens in. My first preference is ham hock, but if you can't find it for some reason

and you can't find the smoked turkey wings, you can always get a nice smoked slab of bacon

You can slice this in thick strips and fry it up in your pan

Get the seasoning out of it, and then add your water. And to add just a little extra zest and crunch to your sweet potatoes

You can take pecans or even walnuts and just crush them up and toss them over your potatoes

Let's talk about greens for a second. There's a lot of different greens that you can cook

But to be true to my heritage, I have to say that I prefer collards, turnips, or mustard

The mustard green is even tartar than the turnip green, and it'll make you a fabulous pot of greens

I hope that I've managed to bring a little Savannah sunshine to y'all

with my Southern Comfort food. The yams are so good. And the pork roast

And don't forget the turnip greens and cornmeal dumplings with that ham hock in there

And look at all the things that you can do with that pork roast. And don't forget the delectable dreamsicle dessert

So until we eat again, America, best dishes from my kitchen to yours