Southern Side Dishes

Hey, y'all. I'm Paula Deen

You know, you can't have a true meal without a good side dish. And here in the South, we serve up the best sides in the country

So today, I'm cooking a few of the lady and son's favorites. First, though, my friend Bob Garner is going to show us the secret

to making the perfect hush puppy. And then it's back to the kitchen where we'll start with my grandma's

turnip mashed potatoes, followed by my Indian succotash. They'd liven up just about any dinner plate

And then next up are my Hoppin' Johns, a dish that's sure to bring you good luck in the kitchen

And then we'll finish off the day with a corn casserole. It's so simple you won't believe it

So grab a plate, y'all, and join me for a Southern Side Dish Buffet

I hope that y'all caught my barbecue special

I went around, I drove through a lot of the southern states in search of the perfect barbecue

But guess what else I found? I found fabulous southern sides. And I made a stop in North Carolina at Bob Garner's

And he's got some great tips for you. Because sauces and sides are a staple in our cooking

and every southern state has its own traditions for serving them up

After making me the perfect pork shoulder, Bob gave me a southern side dish lesson

He even gave this old gal a tip for making the perfect hush puppy every time

Now for some of the side dishes that you have to have in order to have real North Carolina barbecue

That sounds great. Now you know in a lot of places, hush puppies or deep fried corn bread is just something that you eat with seafood

seafood, but in North Carolina, hush puppies are traditional with barbecue. You know, when I first walked up to your table, Bob, I saw that pastry bag and I thought

this is a brilliant idea. Now, I know how I make a traditional southern hush puppy

but what do you have in your mix? I use cornmeal, a little bit of flour, and then salt

onion powder, buttermilk, and then a little bit of bacon drippings in there just for extra flavor

Well, they look just delicious. They will sure add the finishing touch to a plate of real North Carolina barbecue

And you have to have a little bit of coleslaw. All right, now do you put your coleslaw on your sandwiches

If I'm making a sandwich, I put it right on top. But if I'm making a plate like today, I just put it to the side

Good serving of that succulent barbecue. Oh, it looks. And, of course, you must have sweet tea in the south

Sweet iced tea and barbecue. It don't get no better. It really doesn't

Well, happy barbecue eating. Well, thank you. Cheers to you. Cheers. Thanks, Bob

I'll never forget your barbecue or your hush puppies. Wasn't that a great piece with Bob Garner

Anyway, today is all about southern sides. So I want to share with y'all one of my favorite dishes

that my grandmother made that I remember from my childhood, turnip mashed potatoes

So we're gonna start by using red potatoes and I'm gonna leave the skin on

All right, so we're just gonna put these in our pot just like this and you wanna make sure

when you're cutting your potatoes that you cut them into some cold water

because these will darken on you and you don't want them to turn dark. And grandmama would only add like one or two roots

to the potatoes because turnips have a very powerful flavor. So you don't want to taste like you're eating just mashed turnips

So I'm going to salt this water, and we're going to let it come to a boil

In the meantime, while I'm waiting for that to come to a boil, I'm going to come back over here and visit this turnip

When you're selecting your turnips, I kind of choose medium-sized ones, and you want to make sure they're good and hard

So we're going to cut these just like our potatoes so that they can all cook in about the same time

and I want to dunk those in water too because they can turn brown on you

All right, so let's bring this on over here. I put my turnip roots in like the last 15 minutes of cooking

and before you know it, we're going to have a delicious, scrumptious bowl of turnip mashed potatoes

I want to move on over to this pot now and show y'all a recipe for succotash

and I call this Indian succotash because I put a lot, a lot of corn in it

Now at the restaurant we cook all of our vegetables in ham hock Now I like to cook mine until they pulling apart and sometimes I cook it an hour and a half it just depends But I check my pot and when I can do this to it and pull my ham hock apart that just perfect

So I'm going to add some house seasoning and some seasoning salt

All right, now folks, just a little bite. I'm gonna do a couple of squirts of Texas peat

And y'all know how hard it is for me to not cook with butter

So I'm gonna put just maybe two tablespoons of butter. Now for the butter beans

frozen butter beans are a wonderful product, and they're just as good as fresh to me

I'm using one bag of frozen baby lima beans, or butter beans

but I would not use a dried bean. And we're just gonna let those cook in that seasoning

along with that ham hock for 20 or 25 minutes and they're gonna taste delicious

All right, let's come back over here now and check on our potatoes and our turnips

They're probably getting close to being ready. We're gonna take these over to our sink

and we're gonna pour this up into a colander and get all the water off of them

All right. I'm going to give that a couple of shakes to get the water out

Now I'm going to throw it into this bowl right here. Now you can mash these any way you like

I'm going to beat these up. Now I'm just going to turn on our mixer

All right, I've gotten them mashed up pretty good now. So I'm going to add about a half a cup of sour cream

that's the secret to the wonderful mashed potatoes that we make at the restaurant

and I do like some chunks left in my potatoes so I'm not going to over beat them

all right now depending on the thickness that you like determines how much cream you'd want to add

I'm not gonna add much, just a little bit. All right, I'm gonna taste them for seasoning

because sour cream always requires salt. All right, so I'm gonna do our seasoning up real quick

like in here. Okay. Okay. These smell so out of this world

See how pretty the skin looks in there. Now I saved the best for last, the butter

But I'm just gonna use stick butter and let that melt. This is gonna be a wonderful treat

and it's just a little different from your normal mashed potatoes. And this time doesn't have a thing to do

with these potatoes. Then just make it look pretty. There ain't nothing like a southern side

When we come back, I'm going to take those wonderful butter beans that are cooking in that ham hock

and I'm going to turn them into an Indian succotash. And we're going to be making some Hoppin' Johns, another southern favorite side dish

So y'all don't go anywhere. I just love all my southern sides that I'm making today

Can't hardly wait to get back into these two dishes. Right now I'm just taking some bacon

out of the refrigerator because we're gonna jump back on our succotash

Now I'm just gonna saute off some bacon. Succotash actually dates back to the Native Americans

when corn was plentiful. And you can see I've got another pan right here

waiting on us because when I put this together, we're gonna jump over here and we're gonna make poppin' johns

Now to our bacon, I'm gonna add our corn. I don't like canned corn for this recipe

but you can buy a wonderful niblet corn. You can find it in your frozen food section

or you can cut it fresh off the cob. So we're just gonna throw that in there

and I'm gonna throw some cut okra, and this too is from the frozen food section

and it's delicious okra. So I'm gonna just throw that in there

and stir that into all of that bacon grease. Now I'm gonna come over here

and I'm gonna get our butter beans that we cooked earlier just for our succotash

Look how good that does look. Now if you really like butter beans

then put more butter beans. All right, now I'm gonna take just a little bit of juice

from our butter beans and put her over in here, not much

but I just want that okra to have something to cook in

because I don want this real juicy So I just going to cover that lid and let that cook And in the meantime we gonna start on Hoppin Johns We wouldn think about having New Year Day

without our Hoppin' Johns because it's a great way to serve black-eyed peas

which are supposed to bring you luck. And you're supposed to eat all these foods

on the first day of the year because they're gonna bring us good luck throughout the year

So I'm gonna start by melting a couple of tablespoons of butter

So this is gonna go very, very fast. All right, now I'm gonna throw our chopped onion

and bell pepper into our butter. Now you can use a red bell pepper

if you want some color to it, or you can use green bell pepper

And if you really wanna spice it up, you could throw in some fresh sliced jalapeno peppers

for a little heat. We're just gonna let those saute just for a couple minutes

We want them to still have some crunch. All right, so that's not gonna take long

While that's cooking, I'm gonna come over here and just check out my succotash pot

Oh, and you can see that's cooking nicely. Now, I didn't saute my bacon until it was brown

I love medium brown bacon. Here we go, those are softening up on us

So all I'm gonna do is throw my rice into that and then throw my black-eyed peas in there

And I cooked them just like I cooked the butter beans. And just mix that all together

And we've got Hoppin' Johns. I'm gonna steal from this pot over here

and just put a little fresh parsley in it because I just like that green in it

All right, so now I'm gonna taste it and see what seasonings it needs

which I think, I know I'm gonna put some garlic in it. I'm going to put some salt and a little house seasoning

And I'm going to put some straight garlic, because I really like that garlic to jump

out of there and get you. All right, and I think I'm going to add some black pepper

So now to season it off just right, I'm going to just throw in another couple of tablespoons

of butter. You can omit that step if you feel like it's seasoned enough

But we've got a wonderful pot of Hoppin' Johns. All right, let's come back over here and look at our succotash

Our okra should be done. All right, now to finish off this dish

I'm just gonna sprinkle a little fresh parsley to just kind of bump up that green color

I'm gonna throw about a teaspoon of chicken base into it just add a little bit more flavor to it

I'm gonna add a little black pepper to this. Gonna put just a little house seasoning

And so now I'm gonna finish off my dish with a couple of tablespoons of butter

And I'm gonna throw my tomatoes in there. And I don't wanna cook these tomatoes

I just wanna heat them all the way through. And that's all it is to succotash

I've gotta take a quick break. I'm gonna let these heat up. And when we come back

we're gonna taste that delicious pot of succotash. And I'm gonna show y'all the easiest corn casserole

in the world. Your family's gonna love it. All right, we're back, and we've got this succotash ready

and it looks and smells divine. Look at all those yummy vegetables

And don't they look pretty in that green bowl? And if you have any succotash left over, you know, it wouldn't take you

but about five minutes to turn this into a pot of vegetable beef soup

So don't worry if you've overmade. Sometimes I wonder. How I still have a lining in my mouth

I eat so much hot food. There's so much corn in it

It almost tastes like the flavor of cornbread. It's so good. Now, speaking of corn, I want to share with y'all

the quickest, easiest little recipe for corn casserole. And the beauty about this dish is there's a very good chance

that you can walk to your pantry and find every one of these ingredients

right now without making a trip to the store. And it's so, so good

All we're gonna use is canned corn, and then we're gonna use a can of cream corn

And right here, I have a small box of cornbread mix. Now, this particular mix is one of the sweeter cornbread mixes

In a casserole like this, it works perfectly. And we're just gonna mix all these ingredients together

I promise you this casserole is delicious using these two canned ingredients from your pantry And our liquid for our cornbread is from the creamed corn and the sour cream and of course a little melted butter

We've got a cup of sour cream, and we've got a half a stick of melted butter

You just can't get any easier than this dish. And we're gonna put this in a preheated 350 degree oven

and we're gonna bake it for about 40 to 45 minutes. Okay, all we need to do is spray our pan

and just pour this into our casserole dish. And at the last five minutes of our baking time

I'm gonna add some cheese to it. All right, so we're gonna put this in the oven

and we're gonna let it bake for about 40 minutes. All right, I've got that casserole in the oven

but I've got another one in this one, and it's ready to be cheesed

So I wanna take it out, and you can see what it should look like after it's done

Doesn't that look delicious? Now I'm gonna cheese this, and I'm gonna run it back in the oven for about five minutes

Just enough to melt all that yummy stringy cheese over it. I'm using a medium cheddar cheese on this

All right, I'm just gonna have a corn buffet. All right, let's check our casserole

I've got everything ready for us to taste this casserole, And you can see just how easy that was and simple

That's all there is to it. Look at that. Oh, cheese is stringing everywhere

Oh, and our succotash is still kind of steamy. I can see it steaming

I just love corn. Everybody loves corn. And your children are going to love this

I'm just going to dip into it. Looks pure edible

You could cut this in squares almost if you wanted to. It's one of my favorites

It's so delicious. I'm fixing to pop out of here for a second, but when we come back, I'm going to have some

tea tips for you because we've got to have something good to wash down all these southern

sides with. So I'll see y'all back here in a couple of minutes. Sweet iced tea. There's just

no other beverage like it as far as I'm concerned. And us southerners think we really know our

tea. In fact, we're almost downright cocky about it. Well, today I'm going to shake my

tea up and do it just a little bit different. I'm going to sweeten this by using a simple

syrup. Now, to make your simple syrup, all you do is add equal amounts sugar and water

Cook it until it coats your spoon. And you've got simple syrup. Now, to make a flavored

simple syrup. All we would do is cook peaches in with this or raspberries or

strawberries and we would strain it into a pitcher and to keep the flavor of our

tea up real strong I've frozen some peach simple syrup and we'll drop that in

our glass and our tea won't become watered down like it would with a

regular ice cube. That looks delicious. I'm gonna serve it with a wedge of fresh

peach and a sprig of nice fresh mint. I hope that y'all will take time out of a busy day

especially on a hot summer day, to sit back with a nice tall cold glass of tea. Cheers

I had such a good time cooking up all this food for today's show. It kind of brings together two

loves in my life. The Lady and Sons restaurant and my grandma Paul. Her turnip mashed potatoes

has brought me back to when she was here with me. They're so good, and the Lady and Sons Hoppin' Johns

and succotash and corn casserole. And don't forget that big ol' pitcher of sweetened iced tea

Whether it's fruity or not, it's the perfect beverage for all these delicious side dishes

And until next time, I'd like to send love and best side dishes from my kitchen to yours