Wedding Shower

Hey y'all, I'm Paula Deen and guess what? Michael and I are engaged. So today I thought it would be

fun to share this special occasion by throwing a wedding shower. But before we get started

we're gonna have to take a trip to Bird Cookie Company for a peek into how these bite-sized

morsels get there more than just a mouthful taste. And we're gonna leave with those famous

key lime coolers that are gonna make the perfect crust for my key lime tarts. And we'll share

a laugh or two when I make Michael's pickled shrimp that's so good, I promise they won't

outlast my marriage. And we're going to tie it all up in a knot with my sesame chicken

strips and simple saltines that are perfect for any party. Y'all gather around the wishing

well. I think we're all in for a surprise. Hey, today is one of the happiest shows I've ever done

Believe it or not, it's about a bride and a groom. And you're not going to believe this

At my age, I'm 56 years old, I've got two grown sons

I'm an old lady, and I have met the man of my dreams

and he asked me to marry him. And I said yes. It almost looks real, doesn't it, girls

Michael said it only took him three tries with the little diggers in that machine

I just love it. He picked the perfect one. Well, in order to get ready for our show today, we're going to have to take a quick trip to Bird Cookie Company

So y'all don't go anywhere. I want you to stay and help me plan my bridal shower

So I'm off to my favorite specialty shop, Bird Cookie Company, to pick up some bite-sized melt-in-your-mouth key lime coolers

My friend Kay was good enough to show me how they meet the high demand for these yummy creations

How many cookies do y'all make today, Kay? Oh, I'd say in the hundreds of thousands

My goodness. And what kind are y'all making right now? These are the key lime coolers

Kay, I appreciate so much you helping me today. It's always so good to see you

Well, good to see you, and I hope the recipe turns out great. Don't forget to bring samples

I will bring you a sample because they're really, really good. Hard to improve on these little babies, but..

You can do it. This recipe is pretty good. You can do it. You have a great day. It's always good to see you

Good to see you. I got our cookies, but before I do that

I want to show y'all one of Michael's favorite dishes, and it's pickled shrimp

And he was the cutest thing. He kept telling me about these pickled shrimp

these pickled shrimp, and finally one day I said, how about showing me how you make these great pickled shrimp

So we got into the kitchen, and he was so cute, girls

Watching Michael is like watching molasses pour. He's that slow, and he was so, so cute

I really had to stop myself from slapping him and moving him out of the way

and just letting me do it, but it was so much fun watching him that day

Now, his pickled shrimp is very, very simple. He starts with a medium-sized shrimp

And I have actually split these down the middle and already deveined them

So we've got our water boiling. Just going to pour our shrimp right on in there

And these won't take but just a couple of minutes. You can see already how quick they've turned pink

I've got me a bowl of ice water ready. Go ahead and pull our shrimp out

And then we're going to plop them into our ice water. this dish takes about 10 minutes to put together and I think Michael spent about an hour and a half

doing this all right so we've got our shrimp in our ice water now I'm going to let those sit there

because I've already got some that's been peeled all right now we're gonna get us a jar you can use

any kind of jar you want. And I'm going to start by putting our shrimp in. And I think

this is exactly the way Michael does it. So we want to make sure we do it just like he

does. I can do it a little faster. Maybe that's why I'm on TV and Michael isn't. All right

So we going to layer a few shrimp in there And then we going to take our onion and throw over in there And then I got some garlic cloves and drop it over in there like that And then we gonna come back with a few more shrimp

We're gonna drop a little peppercorn in there. Michael really, really likes spicy things

Go figure. Think that's why he chose me? So we're gonna drop a few bay leaves in

We'll do a couple on this layer. And a couple more onions

And a few more shrimp. And a few more peppercorns. Another clove of garlic

I'm going to give that a shake and shake that down. And then we're just going to squeeze a lemon over that

And we're going to cover it with an apple cider vinegar. Look how pretty that is

Now, the only thing about this dish is we actually put this in the refrigerator

and let it sit for two weeks. Makes a wonderful gift. So I'm going to stick this in the refrigerator

And when our shrimp are ready, we're going to need something to eat along with it

And I don't know about y'all, but I don't always keep the fancy crackers in the house

But I always have a soda cracker or a saltine cracker. So I'm gonna show you how to kind of fancy those up

Now there's several different ways that you can do this. You can brush these in olive oil

You can brush them in butter. Or you can brush them in an egg wash using the whites of the egg

I think I'll choose the butter. So we're just gonna pat those with butter

We have to have something that will make our ingredients stick to them

I'm gonna brush this second half in egg wash, and we'll see if it makes a great deal of difference

All right, here we go. Now, to do your crackers, you can put mostly anything you want to on them

but I like to start with a little parsley. Now, I'm putting a few sesame seeds on these

and see how pretty they're looking? All right, now I'm gonna sprinkle a dark sesame

to give them just a little contrast in color. All right, now I'm gonna put a little caraway seeds on it

I love caraway. So we're gonna throw this in like a 325 degree oven

And I've got another pan already ready. Wow, don't those look great

Those don't look like that ordinary soda cracker, do they? I've actually got some shrimp that Michael did

about four or five days ago, so I'm gonna get those and we're gonna try his along with our cracker

Let's see what he did. They're so good and they're so tart

They make me pucker. Mmm. The cracker is just perfect with the shrimp

Y'all don't go anywhere, because coming up next, I'm doing chicken strips, and I want to tell y'all how Michael asked me to marry him

So romantical. All right, I want to show y'all how to make just some divine chicken strips for your man, honey

You'll just blow them away, or for your woman. In fact, I told y'all I wanted to tell you how Michael proposed to me, so guys, y'all don't go anywhere

I want y'all to listen closely, because it might give you a few ideas of your own

I'm going to start with a marinade on our chicken. We're actually going to let this marinate in the refrigerator overnight

We're gonna start with some sour cream, and a couple of teaspoons of celery salt

fresh chopped garlic, the juice of a half a lemon, half a teaspoon of salt

and about two teaspoons of Worcestershire. And that sour cream is gonna break down that chicken

and make it so unbelievably tender. and it's just gonna be perfectly delicious

Now I've got some strips already cut here. I've taken just a boneless chicken breast

and sliced them up. And y'all, I wanna remember now, working with chicken, you wanna make sure

you don't do any cross-contamination. And you wanna make sure you wash your hands

and your board real, real good. A tablespoon of Clorox mixed in a gallon of water

will work nicely to clean any of your surfaces with. Now I'm going to just toss those around

and make sure they're coated real, real well. So I'm going to put these in the refrigerator

and let them sit overnight In the meantime I got some that I did up yesterday that are ready for us to go So anyway I want to tell y how Michael proposed to me

It was Christmas morning, and all of our family had gathered around

and I'm running around looking lovely. Well, I had noticed the night before

that a new gift had appeared underneath the Christmas tree, and it was back to the back, and it said Paula

Well, I pretended that I didn't notice, and I thought, well, I'll get that when the time's right

Look at this wonderful pan, y'all. It's a heavy cast iron with the grill surface on it

because when we cook these chicken tenders, they won't sit in any grease they're going to sit up

This is a wonderful heavy pan. Before I go on with the story, I'm going to take sesame seeds

and this is just a white sesame, and you could actually even use dark, too

and breadcrumbs. And we're gonna mix that together real good, and we're just gonna take our chicken breast out

we're gonna roll them in our breadcrumbs and our sesame seed, put them on our pan

and into the oven. So anyway, Michelle, Michael's daughter, comes over to me and she said

you've got to open your gifts. So I went over and I sat down in the chair

and they pulled out that box that I had seen it said Paula on it, and it was shaped in the shape of a house

So when I sat down with this box, I noticed that the room got quiet

and everybody was watching me. So I thought, what's going on here

Because I truly had no idea. So I opened the box, and there was another box inside

Now the first box said Paula. The next box that I opened was surrounded by all this candy

all my favorite Hershey's chocolate kisses and all this stuff. So I opened the next one, and it said, love

And I still was not reading what was on the box. So I had opened a box that said, Paula, I love

So I went to the next box. It was surrounded by candy, and it had you on it

And I still did not realize what was going on. I couldn't figure out the message

and finally my niece Kari yelled out and she said, Paula, are you reading the message

And I said, well, it said, Paula, I love you. So I went to the next box and opened it up and it said, Will

When I saw Will, everything clicked. And I looked up at Michael and he was propped against the bar over there

looking at me just grinning. And I said, no! And then I said, yes, I mean, yes

And I thought it was just the sweetest thing. This big, tough, quiet river man had just chosen the perfect way to propose to me

So I've got these ready to go into the oven. And now all I'm going to do is drizzle these with butter

I don't have to tell you that in the South we're big chicken eaters

Okay, we're gonna put those in the oven, and we're gonna cook these anywhere from 18 to 25 minutes

And I've got some that should be ready over here. And look how delicious they look

Nice and golden brown. And you can see how the grease went to the bottom of our pan

Oh, these look so, so good. I'm going to just sprinkle a few black sesame seeds and a little lemon twist

Now I think all I'm going to do is serve this with a very simple honey mustard sauce

Mmm. The girls are going to love them. Y'all stay tuned because y'all remember those key lime coolers we went to get

Well, coming up next, key lime cooler tarts. You know, I didn't think that you could actually improve a key lime cooler

But I got in the kitchen one day and started playing around

and I found out, believe it or not, we could actually improve them a little bit

by putting them inside a tart and letting this serve as our crust

So it's just double goodness there, and they're so easy to make

We're going to make a cream cheese center for these using an 8-ounce package of cream cheese, some sugar

an egg two tablespoons of lime juice and a little lime zest Okay there we go

And we're just going to beat this until it's kind of nice and creamy

And while that's creaming, I'm going to come over here. I've lined our miniature muffin tins

with the little paper liners. I found that when we went to eat them the other day

they stuck a little bit, So I'm going to just give them a light spray so that they'll come out

All right, now I'm going to take our key lime coolers and just drop into the bottom

And that's going to be our crust. All right, our cream cheese is ready

Now we're just going to come over here and drop our cream cheese down on top of our cookie

Just like that. It's probably about a heaping teaspoon. You know, Michael and I are so involved in food

And I'll never forget our first date together. We came back in from the most wonderful boat ride

Finally, I said, would you like a bite to eat? And he said, yes, that would be nice

So I go to my pantry, pull out my box of pork rinds, go to the microwave and pop them in

and bring them back to the sofa and sit down. And he's very gracious

He said, you know, I think these are the best pork rinds I've ever tasted

And he said what was really going through his mind was, now I found this girl that's supposed to really be a good cook

and she's serving me box pork rinds. What's up with this? So these are ready to go into the oven

and we're going to bake these for about 10 to 12 minutes. And I've actually got a pan back here that's cooled

So these are ready for us to fill. Because our next step, you want to make sure they're totally, totally cool

Because we're going to pipe them with whipped cream, and as you know, heat and whipped cream will make a mess

So we've got these nice and cool. And we're going to take our whipping cream that's been sweetened with a little sugar

And this garnishes them nicely, makes them taste good. so you can see how they kind of fell in the center, which is just perfect

It gives us a little pocket, and we're just going to pipe our cream right into there

So how pretty are those? I'm just going to take these out and put a few on the plate

and I have some sugared lime zest. And if you don't want to go to that trouble, you can just grate some lime zest

zest and kind of sprinkle on. Doesn't that make a pretty plate? I'm going to take the paper off

and you can see why I sprayed them lightly because they could have a tendency to stick on you

I really didn't think you can improve on a bird cookie, but I think we've done it. Y'all hang

around, because I never thought this would happen, but I'm going to be giving you some

tips on wedding showers. For a few quick tips on today's recipes, try playing around with Michael's marinated

of shrimp by using different vinegars. The balsamic vinegar might be a good one that you

really like, or just plain old white vinegar, red wine vinegar, as opposed to what we use

today, which is the apple cider vinegar. And on sesame seeds, most recipes that come for

sesame seeds, you only use a few, so you've always got plenty left over. Make sure that

you store them in an airtight container, and you can actually freeze these, and they would

last up to a year. Now when it comes to topping your cheesecakes with the whipping cream, never

use a metal bowl because the whipping cream can actually pick up a metallic taste. So

always use a chilled glass bowl for your whipping cream and it will turn out to perfection

I hope that you all don't have to do this but one time, but in case you do, I hope these

recipes will come in handy. I think you'll just love Michael's Pickle Shrimp and the

The sesame chicken strips and the little key lime tarts made with the key lime cookies from Bird Cookie

And, of course, our jazzed up soda cracker. I hope that y'all will enjoy these recipes

And the best part about today's show is that all the friends I've made working here on the show surprised me with my very own wedding shower

Thank you