Our evening with a Food Network star

On Christmas Eve I was running around on some last minute errands for the holidays when Nathan called me on my cell.

“Um, you received a letter…” he said.

Oh crap. When he starts sentences like that it’s never good. You received a letter about the bill you forgot to pay and they’re going to shut off our water. You received a letter from Comcast about illegally downloading episodes of Spongebob Squarepants. You know, BAD news.

But then he continued.  “You won the Paula Deen contest,” to which I replied, “Huh?”  I did not remember entering a contest involving Paula Deen, but I fill out a lot of forms on the internet in order to print off coupons.  This particular contest was sponsored by Smithfield meats and Meijer and I vaguely remembered seeing Paula’s face on the Meijer website once upon a time, though I couldn’t be sure.  Anyway, the letter stated I won an opportunity to see Paula in person during a local appearance at the Frederick Meijer Gardens.  I’d get a free cookbook out of the deal, get it signed by Paula and get to see her cook.

And since I was stressed out about the holidays and my upcoming trip to Oklahoma, this was happy, happy news.  It seemed my streak of good luck had not ended with winning the Johnson & Johnson sponsorship for BlogHer.  And here I was thinking I’d be a loser for at least another decade.

And guess what?  My mom won too, though neither of us can remember entering ourselves or the other in the Paula Deen contest.  Where I like to fill out forms online, Mom likes to fill out forms at every kiosk in the grocery store.  And both our names were drawn. Go figure.

The Paula Deen appearance was this past Thursday.  I brought my friend Marla, a huge Paula Deen fan, and my mom brought her best friend Marge, who prefers Bobby Flay, and the four of us had a blast.  We arrived at the venue just before it’s start time of 6:00. The line was very long, almost out the door, and the night was freezing cold and windy.  Thankfully things moved pretty quickly and it wasn’t long before we were inside and had pretty things to look at:

And it wasn’t long before we spotted the table where Paula and her husband Michael were signing books.

See, there’s Michael looking very much like Santa Claus.

And just above where Paula and Michael were sitting was this chandelier sculpted by Dale Chihuly.

I was quite taken with this thing. Absolutely gorgeous.

Hey, we’re getting closer.  I can see Paula now.

The dude in the striped sweater seemed to be her handler or something. He hovered around Paula most of the night and had an impatient air about him. That’s a nice way of saying he seemed like a douchebag. But that’s just my observation.

Seriously, this thing is THE SHIT.

Oh hey, we’re at the table. I handed Striped Sweater my cookbooks and he very efficiently stacked them and slid them over to Paula.

Paula looked up at me and smiled. “Wow, that’s a serious camera!” she said, to which I replied, “Yes, it is.” And that was the extent of my interaction with her, though she very graciously agreed to pose for me when I asked if I could take her picture.

Beautiful, no? Let’s hope we can all look this good when we’re 63.

After I got my book signed, I had a moment of camera geekery with the event photographer who eyed my SB800 while I drooled over her D5000. Then we went into the auditorium where a Smithfield coupon and the night’s recipes were waiting for us in our seats.

And of course I was all, “Ooh! Coupon!”

About a half hour later Paula took the stage…

…larger than life, asking us if we preferred to be called “yankees” or “midwesterners.”

Michael joined her and the two of them whooped it up. They were the perfect comedy team.

And there was some business about cooking. They prepared some fancy grits and a Gooey Butter Cake.

“Yall put WHAT in your grits?”

Um, maple syrup, ma’am?

Once the grits were cooked, Paula plated them up and, of course, added more butter to them saying, “If they ain’t good enough for me, they ain’t good enough for ‘yall.”  And look there’s Striped Sweater again.  Here he’s waiving his fingers at Paula to get her to pass him the plate to give to the audience.

But we all did not get to try the grits because they were short on spoons, and by the time the plate with the one spoon made it to our row, we politely declined our taste of Paula’s cooking. Which is a shame because I wound up getting sick this weekend anyway.

I did, however make the Gooey Butter Cake that evening when I got home and brought it to work the next morning. Two sticks of butter in that dish, y’all, but it was so worth it.

So that was it.  She cooked, she talked, we laughed, we left.  But the greatest thing about Palua’s appearance in West Michigan was not what she did that evening but rather what she did that morning. She and Smithfield brought in 150,000 meals for a local food bank.  Thankfully for her and for us, she did not get hit in the face with a ham this time.

Tagged as: cooking, food banks, Paula Deen