Paula Deen: It Ain't All About the Cookin' » (Abridged, 6 CDs, 7 hours)

Paula Deen was born and raised in Albany, Georgia. She later moved to Savannah, where she and her two sons, Bobby and Jamie, started the Bag Lady catering company. The business took off and evolved into The Lady & Sons Restaurant, which is located in Savannah's historic district and specializes in Southern cooking, as well as Uncle Bubba's Seafood, which co-owns with her brother.

You may think you know the butter-loving, finger-licking, joke-cracking, queen of melt-in-your-mouth Southern cuisine. You may have even heard some version of her Cinderella story (a single mom with two teenage sons started a brown-bag lunch business with $200 and wound up with a thriving restaurant business, a fairy-tale second marriage, and wildly popular television shows), but you have never heard the intimate details of her often bumpy road to fame and fortune.

Courageously honest, downright inspiring, and just a little bit saucy, Paula shares the highs and the lows of her life in her inimitable charming and irreverent style. She talks about her childhood, the difficulty of her first marriage, and how the death of her beloved parents precipitated a debilitating agoraphobia that crippled her for years. But even when the going got tough, Paula never lost the good grace and sense of humor that would eventually help carry her to success and stardom.

Whether she's telling...

Publishers Weekly

Anyone who's ever watched, mesmerized, as the author of this memoir panfries a pork chop on the Food Network will find lots to savor in her down-home life story. Deen, the sunny host of Paula's Home Cookingand the author of three cookbooks, relates the collapse of her first marriage, her surprising fight with agoraphobia and the rise of her Savannah restaurant, The Lady & Sons, with candor, good humor and mouthwatering descriptions of Southern food. Of her husband's favorite dish, Sexy Oxtails, Deen writes, "It is a loving dish; a hearty, lip-smacking dish; and those tails are better than a passionate kiss." Yes, she includes the simple, savory recipe alongside favorites like belly-filling Shaggy Man Split Pea Soup, salty-sweet Pan-Fried Corn and addictive Biscuits and Sawmill Gravy. Deen writes the way she talks-lots of ain'ts, darlings and honeys-but the effect is charming and disarmingly upfront. On her early Food Network success, she says, "I was not a size 2, but instead a sassy, roundish, white-headed cook. Women could identify with me... I could be them, and they could be me." She's absolutely right; when Deen has turned the last of life's lemons into Southern-sweet lemonade, readers may want to stand up and cheer, or maybe just tuck into a big, celebratory plate of pork chops. (Apr.)

Contents

Foreword

1 Terror with No Name

2 Something Smells Good

3 On Not Listening to Yo' Momma

4 How Do You Get to Be a Woman of Substance When Your World's Fallin' Apart?

5 The Terror Did Have a Name

6 The Bag Lady

7 The Bottoming Out and the New Beginning

8 What I Did for Love

9 The Lady & Sons

10 Sharing Recipes

11 Love on a Tug: Michael

12 How I Got My Own Television Show, and It Wasn't No Desperate Housewives

13 Backstage Secrets and a Weddin' to Beat All

14 Blend. Don't Mix, Stir, or Beat

15 Food, Glorious Food, Southern Style

16 So You Want to Own a Restaurant?

17 Scenes from a Life: Growth, Cameron, Mr. Jimmy, Bubba, and Me

18 Southern Comfort: Things I've Learned

Index