Southern Cooking in Your Home

Paula’s southern cooking is all about warmth, comfort, simplicity, and taste. You can bring the same delicious meals to your dinner table. The best part of her style of southern cooking is the fact that it’s so easy to prepare. Using ingredients found in most cupboards or pantries, her recipes are easy to follow. In budget-conscious times, her food can bring a lot of comfort straight to your table. She learned her cooking skills and learned to love food thrugh the influence of watching her grandmother cook, besides other cooks in her family.

Southern cooking, particularly Paula’s southern cooking, is probably most famous for one ingredient: butter. When preparing a home-cooked recipe, go ahead and use real butter instead of margarine.

Paula’s southern cooking isn’t really waist-conscious, but is taste-conscious. Try her zucchini and corn casserole, or her mashed potatoes (the recipe calls for one stick of butter), or the sweet potato bake (contains half a stick of butter).

Casseroles are also a part of her cooking style. The best part of casseroles is they can be made ahead of time and use fewer dishes, which means easier clean up. Paula’s country casserole recipes often feature a combination of a meat, vegetable, some sort of canned soup, a form of dairy product such as milk, cheese, or sour cream, all topped by a type of crust. These crusts are usualys crushed crackers or corn bread or bread crumbs. Among her tastier recipes are chicken casserole, potato casserole, and pattypan summer squash casserole. The best part is, if you don’t care for an ingredient, or you have picky eaters, you can leave something out (onion, for example).

If you’re looking for a meat main dish, try a stick-to-your-ribs meat loaf, oven-roasted ribs, chicken and dumplings, or pecan chicken, recipes straight from her restaurant. And there’s always the great Southern classic main entree: Southern fried chicken. Her recipe recommends seasoning your chicken for three hours before preparing.

And don’t forget the desserts! You might recall one episode of Paula’s show where she auctioned off a variety f her delectable desserts for charity. Try the infamous Gooey Butter Cake, a favorite in her restaurant. Three simple ingredients will make your tastebuds sing. Of course, nothing beats a good red velvet cake. And there’s nothing like one of her own family recipes: Grandma Hiers’s Carrot Cake.

You can find plenty of information about southern cooking in your home, and especially Paula’s recipes, on-line or in most bookstores everywhere.