CMT Blog: Food

I learned two things about Trisha Yearwood over the weekend. First, she went to a lot of church dinners. Second, she likes mayonnaise. I didn’t grow up in Monticello, Ga., but judging from her cookbook, I would have fit in just fine there. Over the weekend, I made her chicken salad and broccoli salad recipes - on a Sunday afternoon, no less. Both were delicious, but maybe a little bit too creamy. Next time, I’ll trim down the mayo portions. However, my friends and I completely cleaned our plates. So I dug in a little further into Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen to see what else I could make.

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Michael Symon is the chef and owner of critically acclaimed Lola and Lolita restaurants in Cleveland, but he’s best known as one of Food Network’s Iron Chefs and host of the network’s show Dinner: Impossible. It’s the latter job that paired him with country star James Otto. Yesterday, James told his side of the adventure. This is Chef Symon’s take on cooking with James.

I never know what I’m getting into for each episode of Dinner: Impossible, and this trip to Nashville was no different.

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Let me start by saying I’m no chef, but I got the chance to learn from one of the best when I was asked to be part of Food Network’s hit TV show Dinner: Impossible.

I started the day by meeting up with the host, Michael Symon, at the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville where he was getting a lesson in country music history. I waited in the alley in a limo to pick him up and take him to the Opryland Hotel where the actual cooking would take place.

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Last night I tried three recipes from Trisha Yearwood’s cookbook, Georgia Cooking From an Oklahoma Kitchen. I had invited one of my friends over for dinner, but since I’ve been traveling so much, I hardly had any ingredients on hand. In situations like that, I usually grab either Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (the book that taught me how to cook) or Giada De Laurentiis’ Everyday Italian (since I eat pasta almost every day). But I’ve heard Trisha talk about how she wrote this cookbook to be accessible, so I flipped through the pages and found a few recipes that seemed to go together.

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This is none of my business, but I’m glad Tim McGraw is taking a bit of his own advice and starting to take better care of himself. In his big cover story for People magazine’s most recent country issue, he said he quit drinking. So even though he’s well past 30, he’s taking the lyrics of “My Next Thirty Years” pretty seriously now. At least, that’s how I’m reading into this. As if all country stars stop and think about what they’re singing as much as I do.

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Most country artists have a pretty good sense of humor. But rarely do they have it in them to make people laugh out loud. Phil Vassar does, though, as you can see from his video bestowing his random grilling tips upon America. And he’s not talking about marinades, rubs and cooking times. His advice ranges from dealing with vegans and “accidentally” disposing of the gross food people bring. It’s seriously funny.

She spent a good portion of 2006 singing about skinny little girls with no meat on their bones (in “California Girls”). But now Gretchen Wilson is out there trying to get people to talk about the life-threatening problems of obesity. Getting country stars to speak up for issues isn’t new, but Wilson’s efforts for Country Bands Together gets points for originality. She’s doing it because she knows how important it is to get healthy and happy, and that makes her good people in my book.

When is a sellout not a sellout? I think it’s when you’re an all-American girl hawking an all-American icon. So I’m OK with the fact that Julianne Hough is going to be singing “The Taste Is Gonna Move Ya” on 30-second TV spots for Juicy Fruit gum. In fact, I’m looking forward to it. If she was teaming up with another brand, it may not have made a whole lot of sense. But who doesn’t like a little twang with their Juicy Fruit?

Think Brad Paisley ate his veggies growing up in West Virginia? Think his son Huck does? Paisley’s wife, actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley, is making sure of it. In fact, she’s even trying to get schools to get more fruits and veggies into kids’ diets. Her new children’s new book, Henry and the Hidden Veggie Garden, is your typical boy-finds-veggies story and is now part of a grant to fund better choices at schools. And while it doesn’t come with a guarantee of a healthy eater, it’s story worth telling and a choice worth making.

Williams-Paisley has autographed a few copies of the book for CMT.com to give away. Enter for your chance to win.

Some sound research out of France has determined that turning up music makes people finish their beers about three minutes more quickly. The average time it took to drink a beer fell to about 11 minutes when the music was cranked. Their theory is that when the music is too loud to talk, people just drink instead. I can’t help but wondering what the results would be if they broke down the data by genre. Would loud country music make you drink even faster than loud rock music?And what would the holler ‘n’ swaller phenomenon do to their margin of error?