CMT Blog: Archive

For Thanksgiving dinner this year, my responsibility was easy -- bring a few homemade side items. So I pulled down my Loretta Lynn cookbook, You're Cookin' It Country. Inside she wrote that Jack White told her that her yeast bread is the best bread he's ever eaten, so I decided to try it. (I also chose sweet potato casserole and patchwork quilt rice -- both were easy and delicious.) I didn't start the bread until Thanksgiving morning since that was the only time I had three consecutive hours to prepare it. About halfway through the process, you have to punch down the dough, which I did while singing "Fist City."

When we sliced the loaf before the meal, I immediately popped a morsel in my mouth -- let me assure you that it is worth all three hours of effort. However, the chocolate pie didn't turn out well, and not because I mistakenly used salt instead of sugar like a young Loretta did in Coal Miner's Daughter. Instead I didn't know that the mixture has to solidify in the saucepan before pouring it into the crust and baking it. So I dumped the batter back into the saucepan and later called it pudding. Oh well, Loretta herself writes, "I'm not a pretty cook. But my cooking tastes better than it looks." Same here, and I can be thankful for that all year long.