Country superstar Trisha Yearwood pens a down-home cookbook
People are always surprised to see Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks at Wal-Mart.
“They can’t believe it. It’s like, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” she said.
At the Brooks-Yearwood home in Owasso, there is no personal chef, no butler to fetch the laundry or the groceries.
“Garth and I both are very down-to-earth people who have been very lucky,” Yearwood said.
And besides, she said, it wouldn’t be much fun to have a personal chef when you enjoy cooking as much as she does.
Yearwood is a woman who loves to cook and cooks for love — for family and friends. Now she’s doing it for her fans, in a cookbook she’s written called “Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen.”
She didn’t want it to be a “celebrity cookbook” that used her name solely as a marketing tool. This is a real cookbook — something any cook will know once they flip through it — with recipes pulled from her mother’s, sister’s and her own recipe files.
It’s a book as down-to-earth as Yearwood herself, unpretentious and inviting to seasoned and new cooks.
A shoebox of recipes
It wasn’t long after Yearwood moved to Oklahoma to be with her man—a guy you may have heard of named Garth Brooks—that she offered to make Thanksgiving dinner for the family.
She’s a confident cook, but this time she was a little nervous. They weren’t married yet, and she was making dinner for 14 of Garth’s closest relatives.
She knew her No-Baste, No- Bother Turkey, which you’ll find in the book, would be perfect, even though Brooks wondered about the cooking method—cooking at 500 degrees for 1 hour and then “cooking” for four hours once the oven is off. (Yearwood puts a sign on the oven door threatening bodily harm to anyone who even thinks about opening the oven door.)
“He made me do a stunt turkey just to try it out,” she said. She did, and he loved, as did the entire family.
One thing she learned that Thanksgiving was how many family recipes she needed to write down, like her mom’s cornbread dressing and giblet gravy.
“When I moved out here, I had my shoebox full of recipes, but there were some I was missing,” she said. “A lot of the recipes from my family history were things that weren’t even written down. It was ‘Cook it ’til it sounds right.’ ”
The best present
A few years ago, Trisha’s mom, Gwen Yearwood, and sister, Beth Yearwood Bernard, put together a notebook of favorite family recipes for Trisha’s birthday. They called it “Georgia Recipes for an Oklahoma Kitchen.”
Whenever she’s feeling lonely for family, she has the book—her mom’s chicken noodle soup, her niece Ashley’s Ashley’s banana bread, they’re all there.
Most of the recipes in that binder book, with cover art from her niece, made the final cut in the published book.
Some of those family recipes were so simple they had Yearwood’s editor asking questions, such as, “Don’t you need something more than salt and pepper?”
She had to tell her New York City editor that salt and pepper is all you need to season cream gravy, fried chicken and butter beans.
At home
Brooks and Yearwood eat at home most nights — it’s basic food like meatloaf and mashed potatoes and chicken pie, all of which are in the book.
If they do eat out, it’s simple food, usually in Owasso.
“We like Red Robin and the Delta Cafe,” she said. “We really like In the Raw. Our girls like sushi. And the Green Onion was the first fancy restaurant Garth took me to in Tulsa.”
But most nights it’s macaroni and cheese, pork chops, roast beef—the food they both grew up with. Food still fit for two country music stars.
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LOVE THEM! LOVE THIS! ROCK ON!
That is all...
- lish
But Totally awesome!!!