Better Homes And Gardens Latest Episode Recipes

Grammy-winning singer Trisha Yearwood made a name for herself with her 1991 debut single, "She's in Love with the Boy," which earned the top spot on the Billboard country singles chart. A career in music had been on Trisha's radar since she was just five years old. Only as an adult did her interest in cooking ignite, and with it came cookbooks and a television career as the host of the Emmy Award-winning Food Network series Trisha's Southern Kitchen.

On this week's episode of Homemade, host Sabrina Medora welcomes the Trisha to discuss how cherished family recipes inspired her to cook more, the perfect kitchen music playlist, comfort food, and sweet treats like banana split nachos. Plus, Trisha tells Sabrina about her new cookbook, Trisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family.

Trisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family

About Trisha Yearwood

Georgia native Trisha Yearwood rose to fame in the 1990s with one country music hit after another, including "She's in Love with the Boy," "Walkaway Joe," "The Song Remembers When," "XXX's and OOO's (An American Girl)," and "How Do I Live." She holds three Grammy Awards, three awards from the Academy of Country Music, and three awards from the Country Music Association.

After releasing more music in the 2000s, Trisha shifted gears to write her first cookbook, Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes from My Family to Yours, which she released in 2010. She went on to write three more cookbooks: Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood: Stories and Recipes to Share with Family and Friends, Trisha's Table: My Feel-Good Favorites for a Balanced Life, and Trisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family. Since 2012, she has hosted Trisha's Southern Kitchen on Food Network, which won a Daytime Emmy Award. The series films in Nashville, where Trisha lives with her husband, country music star Garth Brooks. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and visit her website.

Episode Transcript

SABRINA MEDORA: Hey, food fans! I'm food writer and culinary entrepreneur, Sabrina Medora, and you're listening to Homemade by Allrecipes. Each week, we bring you talented home cooks, authors, chefs, and celebrities to discuss the memories and traditions behind their favorite foods along with discussions on what's happening in food culture today.

You know it's going to be a good day when you're in the presence of not only a culinary superstar but also a country music superstar. That's right we have three-time Grammy winner, Daytime Emmy winner, andNew York Times bestselling author Trisha Yearwood.

When Trisha's not on tour she's either writing her next cookbook, trying something new in the kitchen, or preparing a longtime favorite for her family.

Her show on Food Network,Trisha's Southern Kitchen,is approaching 10 years on the air. Congrats, Trisha! And her latest book is out now, it's calledTrisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family.So, here to chat all things comfort food and what it means to her, please join me in welcoming the great Trisha Yearwood to Homemade.

Hello, Trisha, how are you?

TRISHA YEARWOOD:I'm good Sabrina. How are you?

SABRINA: I am so good and so excited to have you on the show today. Before we even get started, you had mentioned — I heard in the background someone said something about banana split nachos. And I have to just dive right in. Please tell me everything.What is going on?

TRISHA:OK. So, you know how I just — I mean, I love nachos and I like — why is there — we need to do a sweet spin on nachos. And so it's really simple. You take refrigerated pie dough and you sprinkle it with a little bit of cinnamon or I like to use hot chocolate powder over there. And you cut them up like little pizza squares and you bake them. So they're sweet, and chocolaty and then that's your layer of nachos, and then I just top it with what I want. So I did today. I did bananas, I did some strawberries, I did some nuts, some chocolate sauce, some maraschino cherries. And then you do another layer of the nachos and another layer of all that. And then you top it with ice cream and serve it on a platter. So it's like a nacho platter, but it's dessert.

SABRINA:Holy sweets in heaven. That sounds amazing.

TRISHA:And it's so easy to do. I like that it's easy.

SABRINA:Yeah. I need to come work for you because you made this for your team today?

TRISHA: I did. Yeah, you should come over.

SABRINA:OK, yes. That's happening. That's happening right now. So of course you need no real introduction. Singer, actress, home cook that just happens to be a number oneNew York Times bestselling cookbook author and a cooking show host. I mean, just call you Superwoman, right?

TRISHA:I don't even know how it all happened, honestly, I wanted to be a singer since I was five years old. And that worked out. And then there's just been other opportunities. And I've just tried to say yes to the things that I think I'll enjoy. And I think when you do that, you kind of are led to the places you're supposed to be.

SABRINA:It was carpe diem, seize that day.

TRISHA:That's right.

SABRINA:And now you have a new book coming out,Trisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family.

TRISHA:It's my fourth book and I thought when we wrote the first one, we would never write another one because those were all, like, my mom's fried chicken and her white gravy and her German chocolate cake and all the things that I grew up on. And then when the first book did well, the second book became sort of an extended recipe of those family reunions and asking my aunts and uncles and cousins and, you know, other family recipes, and then the third book was sort of the 80-20 rule about trying to eat better 80% of the time and indulge 20% of the time. Sometimes it flips for me. Sometimes I eat healthy 20% of the time and indulge 80.

But this book kind of took it back a little bit to me to the beginning of just those, kind of, basic comfort foods. A lot of these are recipes that I had as a child that just didn't make the first book or they were — most of them were things that we kept searching for. Like, for instance, there's a recipe in there called, 'Jack's Fried Pies.' And my dad's name was Jack. And my whole childhood, he talked about these little fried apple fritters that his mother made. And my mom tried to recreate the recipe a million times and they were never quite right because, you know, when your momma makes it, it's the way it's supposed to be. And just this past year, during this pandemic, going through our mom's and dad's stuff, my sister and I found a little recipe book with a bunch of handwritten recipes in it, and there were the fried pies. So there's been some really cool discoveries in this past year of finding recipes that we didn't know were still in existence to be able to share with everybody.

SABRINA: That's amazing. And yeah, that was one of my questions, was your books each have over, like, a hundred recipes. Is it all just from your family's repertoire or do you take some kind of inspiration, sort of make it your own? Is it a mix of both?

TRISHA:It is. And it's also like if a friend — there's a recipe in here for arancini, which is basically a risotto ball that you deep fry. I didn't grow up eating those, you know, that wasn't in my mom's repertoire, but my next-door neighbor Kat is Italian and she makes these for me and brings them over. And I'm like 'would you share the recipe with me?' So it's her story and we share that in the book. My sister and I were at a family reunion a couple of years ago and had a pound cake. And, I mean, pound cake is a very Southern thing and we have a bunch of pound cake recipes, but a cousin of ours brought this pound cake that was so incredible, really just rich and moist, and it was her great grandmother's recipe, which is a family member of mine, but I'd never had it before, so it's a combination of a few of those recipes that are passed down through the family, some new family recipes that we didn't know existed, and then over the last five years of doing Trisha's Southern Kitchen, I've had the wonderful opportunity to grow a little bit myself and make some things and develop some things that I didn't grow up on that are now things that I make enough at home that I feel like, oh I haven't been making this for 20 years. I've only been making this for a couple of years. There's a chicken pot pie burger in this book that kind of takes the best of my mom's chicken pot pie and spins it into a chicken burger. And it's my new favorite thing. And I realized, I haven't been making that forever but it is now become a family favorite.

SABRINA:What a way to honor the people that you love in your life, but then also bring your own twist on things and just keep growing as a cook, as a person. It's such a way to almost immortalize your life through food.

TRISHA: It's been a wonderful adventure to go from really following my mother's handwritten recipes word for word to becoming more confident as a cook and taking things to another level and realizing over time that even though I make my mom's Sunday roast beef and rice and gravy, I do it a little differently than she did. And I didn't even realize it had morphed into that. And the confidence that I've gained through doing the cooking show has been just wonderful. The chefs that I've met along the way have never made me feel like because I'm a home cook, I don't have something to offer, and it has been a way you know, when I started this process, my dad had just passed and it was really devastating for our family. And the first book, in part, was a way to keep my mom busy. It was to give her something to focus on. Because our dad was such a good cook, it gave us a way to really kind of grieve him and go through that process and try to keep him with us. And then when I lost my mom 10 years ago, right before the show started — so for my sister and I as lighthearted and fun and as much laughter as we have, it's such a reminder for us that we're keeping them with us through cooking. And it's wonderful, I guess you never get past being sad, but when you can get to a place where you can just tell the stories and that keeps them with you, it's a beautiful thing.

SABRINA:Absolutely. And is that part of what you call comfort food is a way to evoke those memories from your family?

TRISHA:Yeah, and I think comfort food is — sometimes it's kind of coined as a Southern thing, but comfort food is everywhere. It's whatever comforts you. Whatever your traditions are that were in your family, that's what comfort food is to you. So it's different for everybody. But, yeah, for me, it's about making those dishes that I associate with family. And it's comfort because it satisfies and it's good, but it's also comfort because it does allow you to remember those people and to relive those stories.

SABRINA:Yeah, we recently just recorded an episode with Padma Lakshmi, and she was talking about how to her comfort food as a way to write down recipes that have come from women in her family and bring those intergenerational ties to the current generation and keep those traditions alive and find comfort in that. And I just think it's so beautiful that everyone has their own way of keeping that alive in their families.

TRISHA:Yeah, and I love to see the next generation. My sister's kids in particular. She's got a daughter and a couple of boys. And the boys, they do a lot of the things that my dad used to cook. They make the Brunswick stew. They make chicken with the, you know, homemade barbecue sauce. So I love to see that it matters to them because my dad was kind of famous in our local town for making barbecue for the whole town and making Brunswick stew to feed 200 people. And they'd sell it on the square for, you know, the Kiwanis Club or something. And when I learned to make that stew, it was a rite of passage for me because now that he's gone, I know how to make it and it tastes like his. And now these boys know how to make it. So long after I'm gone, they can make it for their families. And that's one of the cool things about food, is that it is to share. I've never been a person who has held an ingredient out of a recipe. Like if somebody wants to know how to make something, I want you to know how to make it. I want you to know exactly how I make it, what my tricks are so that you can make it for your own family. And it's such an honor when somebody makes something of mine or my mom's and they tell me they're cooking it at Thanksgiving at their house. Then that means my family lives forever and it lives in their families too.

SABRINA:I know you said you've been wanting to be a singer since you were around five. Did you ever think that you would be entering the homes of so many people by way of their kitchens in this way?

TRISHA:No, it's really funny, too, because I'm the youngest. And so I was the cut-up. I was the one who got away with everything. My sister's the more responsible one because she's the oldest. I don't think anyone ever expected in my family that I would be the one carrying the food tradition on because my sister, you know, she married in her 20s. She had kids. She was cooking for a family. I was on the road making music. I was not cooking a lot. I cooked when I was at home, but I wasn't home that much. So when I started the first book, I felt like everybody knew more than I did in my family. But they didn't make me feel that way, they were really great. So, no, I didn't ever dream that I would do it, but it came out of something that I really do enjoy. And I enjoy cooking now more than I ever have, only because I've been doing it now for so long. And I just enjoy the adventure because you don't always know what's going to happen in the kitchen. And sometimes the best mistakes turn out to be the best dishes, and that's sometimes how a dish is created. My mother was — in our small town, there were a couple of little ladies that made cakes for, you know, weddings and things. And my mom, as a young mom, kind of entered into doing that. And there was a lady in our town who made cheese straws. And if you've ever had — some people call cheese sticks.

SABRINA:Oh, yum.

TRISHA:But if you ever have one at a wedding reception, my mom made a lot of those. And when she was handed the torch down to make the cheese straws for the weddings in her hometown, the lady Miss Gertrude gave her the recipe. And my mother mistakenly, like, tripled the cheese, like it has Cheddar cheese in it. But they were very cheesy, and they're so good. And that's how my sister and I make it. But it came out of an accident, I mean, I love a cheese straw. It doesn't really matter who makes it. But my mom's cheese straws? They're the best.

SABRINA:The triple cheese Cheddar cheese straws.

TRISHA:The triple cheese. Yeah.

SABRINA: You talk a lot about your mom in the kitchen and your memories of her, you know, catering for weddings and things like that. Did you ever see her make any mistakes, besides knocking a whole bunch of Cheddar into cheese straws?

TRISHA:I saw her never get flustered. You know, like, if she put too much salt in a stew, she knew how to correct it by slicing up a potato and putting it in the soup. It would absorb some of the salt. She made wedding cakes. And my sister and I were little and we'd have to get in the station wagon and carry the cake in parts to the church. And so my sister, who was older, always got the job of the top of the cake cause you can't really fix that if you drop it. And the little kid got the bigger, bigger piece on the bottom. And I've seen a cake get, you know, a little bit smudged in traffic from the kids being in the car with it and just taking a little bag of icing with her to the church and just fixing the cake on the spot right before the reception, right before they're about to walk in and cut the cake. And it's flawless. I also watched her make a cake for a wedding. And then that afternoon realized — in our town you didn't just make the cake, you were going to the wedding, some of your kids might be in the wedding, you never knew. And she got ready to go to the wedding and realized she didn't have anything to wear. And my mother, who was a home-ec major and a schoolteacher, made a dress, a shift dress that was fabulous in that moment and wore it to the wedding. Like my sister and I were like she is Superwoman. Like our mom was Superwoman. She could do anything.

SABRINA: So that's where you get that from?

TRISHA:Well, I aspire. I aspire to be more like Gwen, for sure.

SABRINA:You're listening to Homemade. Stay tuned as we discuss Trisha's perfect kitchen-music playlist, her family's catfish tradition, and for all you bacon-heads out there, a love letter to bacon. Yeah, you heard me. All that and more, after the break!

Welcome back to Homemade. I'm Sabrina Medora and my guest this week is culinary superstar and country music icon, Trisha Yearwood.

Where did you start getting the confidence to take, you know, those almost sacred recipes from your mom and start to put a little more of yourself into it, your personality?

TRISHA:I, honestly, think it was part instinct and part just naturally happened without my realizing it. And I think it was actually Garth who — I can't remember what I made for him, it might have been my mom's German chocolate cake. And it uses coconut, but I don't like coconut to be stringy. So I put it in the food processor to make it really small. So you're not biting into a string. And, he said 'you make your cake different from the way your mom did.' And I'm like, no, I don't. And he's like, 'no, this is what you do differently.' And so I realized that over time, just my natural instinct to change things to my liking has kind of filtered in there. and there are some things that are sacred. Like my grandmother's cornbread dressing that we have for Thanksgiving, it's in the first book you know, it's sacred. But just last night, my sister and I were making, 'Hot Chicken Chili,' which is in the new book with a cheesy skillet cornbread, which is also in the new book. And we combined them and we ate — this cornbread is our new favorite thing. It's got extra sharp Cheddar cheese in it. It's so good. And I said, would we be committing a sin if we tried the new cornbread in the cornbread dressing? And she's all in. But we decided to do a stunt recipe soon. So we're going to see if we can — we're going to see. We're going to try it, though. So, I mean, I guess you never say never. Even the most traditional recipes, you know, you can always find a way to maybe just add a little something to change it.

SABRINA:And so this new book that you're doing is with your sister. What is it like to collaborate with your family on these projects? What's the hardest part about it? What's the best part about it?

TRISHA:Well, I think it serves me well that I'm sort of — even though I'm the youngest, I'm the pushy one. I'm the aggressive one of the two of us. Beth is such the kinder, gentler version of me. She's just my hero in every aspect. But she's a few years older than me, so not much, like three years. But she has just a set of memories from our childhood that I don't have because she's just got that much time on me. And when it comes to making food, sometimes especially traditional things that our family made, she'll have a memory or a tip that I don't have in my head because I wasn't old enough or whatever. She's the only other person in my life that I share those same memories with and have all of those memories of our parents. And so it's just nothing but a joy, we laugh a lot in the kitchen. We have fun and she's a good cook. You know, we were raised by the same parents, you know, so we know the same thing. So it's truly the best of everything to get a chance to work with her.

SABRINA:Is there never a time where you guys disagree on what the memory was or how something was supposed to taste? Do you ever interpret things differently?

TRISHA:Yeah, we were actually talking yesterday about this dressing, this cornbread dressing. And we were talking about my mom. I thought my mom. She said our dad. There was a restaurant in our hometown that served catfish on Fridays and they would serve turkey and dressing and then catfish. And my memory is vivid that my mother would go in and get catfish and dressing and that became a thing. But Beth's memory is vivid that our dad would get the dressing with the catfish. So I don't know the answer, doesn't really matter. Like she's pretty certain and I'm pretty certain.

SABRINA:Right.

TRISHA: Maybe they both got it, I don't really know. But yeah, I mean, you're definitely going to have a different take on it, but it usually turns out being close to the same memory.

SABRINA:You mentioned a lot about, you know, cooking like the chili and stuff, but you've also talked a lot about baking. What do you get more comfort from cooking or baking?

TRISHA:It really depends on who I'm cooking for, because for me, I mean, I love to cook for myself, but it's mostly just about like eat to live, you know? Like but cooking for other people is what really makes me happy. So if it's your birthday, for instance, you usually will get whatever your favorite dessert is. And so I really enjoy baking when I know I'm going to be making you whatever your favorite thing is. And then, dinner, if it's savory, Garth always said that he and the girls would eat cardboard if you put my mashed potatoes on it, you know? So mashed potatoes are like a thing. So I know when I'm making certain dishes or certain meals who loves what and who's going to bring joy to. So it really just depends. I love the versatility of savory because you got a little more wiggle room to change things up. You know, baking is a little bit more about math. So your measurements need to be accurate, you know, to make things turn outright. But, in my family, my mother did all of it. I know people that only bake and I know people that only do savory. But we had to do it all because she did all of it.

SABRINA: Right. OK, so my birthday is January 24, and I would really like to request...

TRISHA:What's your favorite dessert?

TRISHA: Oh, those are good. Those are good.

SABRINA:Anything with bacon caramel just makes me very happy.

TRISHA:As it should. And after you cook the bacon, you save the drippings. And that actually goes into the dough, as well. Along with some butter. I'm getting hungry just talking to you right now. I haven't made those in a while.

SABRINA:I've done that with pie. I take the bacon drippings and I use that as the fat source. and I was just mentioning on an earlier episode about baking, where for Thanksgiving I used to take just a load of walnuts and cook up bacon and then mix it all together in a sauté pan and add brown sugar and maple syrup. And that would be a pie filling. And that was it. That's just the whole pie.

TRISHA: That sounds fabulous.

SABRINA:So when I saw your sticky buns, I'm like, 'oh, she upped it up a notch and I'm ready for it.'

TRISHA:Yeah. Bacon makes everything better. I, actually, even wrote a love letter to bacon in this book because I love bacon so much. I did. There's an ode to bacon in the book. Just an essay.

SABRINA:Can you sing an ode to bacon?

TRISHA:I don't have to write — I'd have to write something to sing. But I could write a song about bacon. I could. To be continued. I'll have you a song next time.

SABRINA: I love it. OK, well that's happening. It's going to hit number one on the charts.

TRISHA:It probably would. It probably would.

SABRINA:It totally would. You could just go on TikTok right now and I bet you you'd get a million views in like a day.

TRISHA:There's got to be a song about bacon already. There's got to be.

SABRINA:Yeah, but not sung by Trisha Yearwood.

TRISHA:Well, this is true.

SABRINA:Speaking of music and cooking, I was in my kitchen yesterday, and I decided to make braised short ribs because it's finally feeling like fall here in San Diego. And there's, you know, a nice cool breeze and my body was ready for some good Dutch oven cooking. And I realized that I'm very fussy about the music that I play when I'm cooking. It's like a part of my mise en place where I have to pick the right vibe, the right melody, and tone, and then I channel it into what I'm cooking. Do you do that, too? Do you have, like, special music when you cook?

TRISHA:I do. And I also — the thing you didn't mention is for me is also what volume it's at. Right? Cause it has to be loud enough to enjoy, but not so loud that you can't think over it, but not so low that you can't hear it. So there's a sweet spot for the sound too. Yeah, and I don't pick certain music for certain foods. I'm a huge Prince fan, but I don't really cook to Prince, you know? That would be a different activity. But I do like Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin or James Taylor or Linda Ronstadt, The Eagles. That kind of stuff I'll definitely put on.

SABRINA:You just named my whole playlist. I love listening to oldies. I love listening to jazz. Yesterday, I was listening to, you know, I called it Autumnal Jazz on Pandora. And then I usually, you know, always cap off with a little Frank Sinatra. It's just soothing.

TRISHA:Yeah. It is soothing. And I never had really thought about the kind of music I listen to until you asked me that question. And I think you're right. Because I find cooking, and if you cook you probably do too, I find cooking to be relaxing and soothing. So the music — that would make sense that the music would need to do the same thing.

SABRINA:Did the pandemic affect your style of cooking, how you approach things in the kitchen?

TRISHA:You know, of all the things that have been difficult about being in a pandemic, the silver lining for me was the kitchen. Because a lot of people that I knew were like 'I don't cook. What am I going to do?' We're panicking. We're going to be shutting our house for 30 days or whatever. I was like, I feel like I'm born for the quarantine because I got, like, ingredients in my pantry for — I can do this. And to really have the freedom of every day, that was my go-to. You know, to be able to cook a lot. And that's, honestly, I'm not sure that I would have gotten a cookbook written in the past year if I hadn't been kind of forced to be home, because it gave me a great opportunity to really just focus on that. And it was actually really good.

SABRINA:What are you most excited about in terms of this book?

TRISHA:I think it's beautiful, first of all. I think it's beautifully shot. Ben Fink has been the photographer for all four books, but this book has a real warm feeling to it. The other books have been a little more glossier and shinier and this is more earthy feeling to me. I think it's a really beautiful book. I want as many photographs as possible in a book. So I think there's 80 photos for the 125 recipes because you want to see what you're making. What I really want people to get out of it is, I love a recipe, but I love the story. I want to know the why. I want to know why this recipe is important and why does this matter to them and why are they making this food? So it was really fun to sit down with each recipe and tell the story of where it came from and why I love it and why I make it for my family.

SABRINA: Well I can't wait to read all that because that's my favorite part about it, too.

TRISHA:Well I hope you enjoy it. I really do.

SABRINA:I definitely will. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was really wonderful and I loved learning a little bit more about your style.

TRISHA:Well thank you. I enjoyed hearing what your favorite dessert is. So I don't know how well pecan sticky buns mail in the mail? But we'll see.

SABRINA:We'll do an overnight situation. We'll figure it out. Or I'll just come over.

TRISHA:OK. Perfect.

SABRINA:Just expect a knock on your door, maybe January 23ish.

TRISHA:OK, well, Happy Birthday in advance. Way in advance.

SABRINA:Thanks, Trisha. Good luck with everything and congratulations on the new book.

TRISHA:Thank you, Sabrina.

SABRINA:Trisha's newest cookbook —Trisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family — is out now wherever you buy books. Be sure to tune in toTrisha's Southern Kitchen on Food Network, and you can follow her on Instagram @trishayearwood, for everything she's working on!

Next week on Homemade, all the way from the UK, I'll be joined by Michelin-trained chef, self-proclaimed 'Potato Queen,' and TikTok and Instagram sensation Poppy O'Toole!

POPPY O'TOOLE:All I've ever done is cook. That's the only thing that I can do and I can do it all right, I think. I like to think that I'm quite all right at it. And I just thought if this can help somebody maybe have an easier evening after work or produce some nice food that they want to or have any questions. That's the only way that I'm going to help. I like to think that I've kind of done the training so that people don't have to, and then they get some delicious food at the end of it, hopefully.

SABRINA:And next week we'll also have Chitra Agrawal, who is a culinary entrepreneur and founder of Brooklyn Delhi, which is so delicious. It's going to be a fun one, sobe sure to follow Homemade on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen.

This podcast was produced by AllRecipes with Digital Content Director Jason Burnett. Thanks to our production team of Rachael King, Matt Sav, Danielle Roth, Jim Hanke, Maya Kroth, and Andy Bosnak at Pod People.

This is Homemade, I'm Sabrina Medora, and remember: Cook with love, eat with joy.