Paula Deen

by Paula Deen

  I was game; it sounded like fun, and I knew they’d do a great job and be as unobtrusive as possible, but it was up to Michael. He wasn’t used to being so out and upfront with his personal life, and if it made him uncomfortable, case closed.

  “Michael, something wonderful has happened,” I said to him one day, “but if you have any reservations, just say so. They want us to get married on my show.”

  He looked at me and grinned. “Sure, why not, I’ve never done that before.” What a sport! Wedding wheels were set into motion. We’d be married on March 6, 2004, and a one-hour wedding special would be broadcast in June 2004.

  For several months before the wedding, I was feeling overwhelmed. It’s true, I felt like Cinderella, but the preparations turned out to be intense. I had to swallow my pride—me, who always could tackle and handle anything that was thrown my way—because it looked like I needed a wedding planner who could smoothly put a million details together for me. Michael and I had decided on an intimate ceremony of 75 family members and close friends (because we couldn’t see them, we wouldn’t even think about the zillions of people who would be at the wedding via television), and afterward we’d have about 650 guests at a reception at—where else—The Lady & Sons. We’d always loved the tiny Whitfield Chapel at Bethesda, which is the oldest working orphanage in America. The chapel holds only a hundred people and so it was perfect for the ceremony. Set on acres of rolling green grounds, the charming chapel has time-worn wooden benches and pews where thousands of orphaned boys have prayed their hopes and dreams. I’d felt peace and wonder in that chapel and I could just visualize our loved ones flanking a canopy-covered aisle with white hydrangeas, French tulips, my garden roses, English ivy, and elaeagnus (small, fragrant silvery white flowers no one knows about but me and my brilliant assistant, Brandon Branch). Even Otis and Sam, our Shih Tzus, would be watching us get married. Corrie was charged with making sure those two didn’t escape, like the last time, when they’d found me a neighbor.

  I would rather have had a gasoline enema than do the guest list. I mean, I hated the thought of doing that thing. Getting names out of Michael was like pulling eyeteeth. I knew this was not going to be easy, and him being a typical man did not help. So, we would work on those invitations every day, and we finally got them all out.

  Then we had to do another thing that was just as horrible: I had to find a dress. I put it off as long as I could because it ain’t fun if you’re a fat girl trying to find clothes. I can’t stand to clothes shop, period. Finally, I had to go to the bridal shops. I was trying on all these dresses in all these places and I finally said to the last salesperson, “You know, it’s just very upsetting. I have eaten too many pieces of chicken and too many hoe cakes and biscuits; now here it is, time for me to get a weddin’ dress, and I forgot to start a diet.” The wedding planner, Tricia Windon, had handled most of the other details, but no one could help that sick feeling when I walked into those wedding-dress shops. They stocked mostly size 4 gowns, except for the few outsized ones that made me look like Granddaddy Paul in drag.

  Still, Michael assured me that I was beautiful. I really felt so when I ended up having a dress custom-made of crisply elegant white organza with a soft but tailored long-sleeved jacket. It was made by my friend Kate, who’d had her own line of clothes in Chicago and moved to Savannah just in time for me. She almost designed the dress as we went along. I wanted something that would remind me of my momma and what she would have loved, and it ended up so pretty, I had just that beautiful dress, all alone, painted on the wall in the guest room of my home.

  Now that I had me a wedding planner, I also needed a special cake maker, and of all the people Tricia came up with, Molly Stone was my choice. When Michael was a little boy, his mother used to bake his favorite cake in the whole world for him, a banana nut cake with cream cheese icing. Molly and I decided to surprise him with that very same cake as his groom’s cake. Following tradition, the single women would each take home a little piece of that cake in a tiny box to put under their pillows and dream about the man she would marry. Our wedding cake would be a pound cake made with sour cream, almond, and orange extract. It would be frosted with a pale-yellow buttercream icing and finished off with fresh flowers like the groom’s cake.

  I knew I had to plan the food for the reception stayin’ true to my traditions. We’d have a station for shrimp and grits, which would be served hot in martini glasses. We’d have very traditional tomato sandwiches, okra sandwiches, steamship rounds of beef, crab-stuffed shrimp, and white-bread handle sandwiches, which are drumettes of fried chicken wings tied with leeks. There would be fruit trays with fresh cream, a raw oyster bar, and the only thing that wasn’t really Southern would be the wontons I loved—but we’d stuff them with collard greens and cream cheese to make them Southern, different, and delicious.

  Before the wedding my friends threw a bridal shower for me, which was also taped by Food Network. It was a riot. Jamie and Bobby showed up as bridesmaids in long, gorgeous dresses.

  “I feel beautiful,” crooned Bobby. A couple of years later, in June 2006, when Bobby was voted by People magazine as one of the most gorgeous and eligible bachelors in the country, I was real pleased they didn’t find a photo of him in his bridesmaid dress.

  Jamie did not feel so beautiful. “I think this whole bridesmaid-dress thing—which my brother talked me into—is going to unhinge my personal presidential campaign one day,” he noted.

  The day of the wedding finally dawned magnificent. Bubba informed me it was the last time he was givin’ me away. We rented a horse-drawn carriage to take us to the church: I felt like Cinderella just praying twelve o’clock would never come.

  I looked at my white-bearded, seagoin’ Michael and giggled with happiness through much of the ceremony. I was still a little worried about his comfort level bein’ married on television, and I was hoping he wouldn’t pass out on me. I will never forget when Bubba walked me down the aisle that Michael’s face, when we got to him, was as red as a Coca-Cola cup. I said to myself, Lord have mercy, if I had a blood pressure pill, I’d pop it in his mouth.

  I’d met my soul mate at last, of that there was no doubt. Two middle-aged lovers were madly in love, walkin’ back up that aisle feeling such a wave of joy that had never been felt by no twenty-year-old. I just knew that.

  We were going to be great together, I knew that too. Michael says that he thought for many years his mother had been telling him to marry a “kook.” He couldn’t figure out why she was saying that, and years later he figured out she was saying “cook.” After he’d come to know me, he figured he couldn’t go wrong: “I married a kook who turned out to be a cook,” he loves to say.

  Funny thing—we never saw a camera during that whole wedding; the Food Network cameramen were so discreet. Our good friend Tom Edenfield, an attorney and a judge here in town, married us. Michael’s brother Hank, a Catholic priest, led us in prayer in his white robe. We were so in the moment. I remember feeling like my feet were not quite touching the floor and someone would have to slap me hard to get the silly grin off my face. I’m so thrilled we decided to get married on my show, because now I have wedding pictures the likes of which no one has ever had before.

  Mrs. Groover’s Banana Nut Delight Cake

  From Michael’s momma’s memory and my cooking smarts, we reconstructed Banana Nut Delight Cake, his supreme favorite dessert, for his groom’s cake at the wedding. It turned out to be delicious, but not exactly the cake he remembered so fondly. Imagine my own delight when, a year later, we found Mrs. Groover’s original recipe box and the true Banana Nut Delight Cake recipe written in pencil on a little card in her own hand. Here it is. Now we have to have the weddin’ all over again with this exactly right groom’s cake.

  CAKE

  2½ cups sifted cake flour

  1⅔ cups sugar

  1¼ teaspoons baking powder

  1¼ teaspoons baking soda

  1 teaspoon salt

 
; 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

  ⅔ cup vegetable shortening

  ⅔ cup buttermilk

  1¼ cups mashed ripe banana

  2 eggs

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour three 8-inch or two 9-inch cake pans.

  Sift the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl; add the shortening, buttermilk, and banana. Mix until all the dry ingredients are dampened, then beat at low speed for 2 minutes. Add the eggs and beat for 1 minute. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes in the pans, then turn out on a rack to cool completely before frosting.

  BANANA NUT FROSTING

  One 8-ounce package cream cheese, at room temperature

  1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature

  One 1-pound box confectioners’ sugar

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  1 cup chopped pecans

  Combine all the ingredients except for the pecans and beat until fluffy. Fold in the pecans, and frost the cake. If you love lots of icing, you can make 1½ times this recipe. Remember, this is not banana bread but a stacked cake, so be sure to frost between the layers as well as the outside.

  Chapter 14

  BLEND. DON’T MIX, STIR, OR BEAT

  Kiss the nuclear family good-bye, y’all.

  If y’all are marrying for the second time, and either or both of you have children from your first marriage, kiss the nuclear family good-bye. No more is life going to be a dreamy picture of one momma, one daddy, and their kids. It’s not even going to be just yours, mine, and maybe ours, if you’re young enough. Take it from Auntie Paula. We’re now talkin’ yours, mine, ours, theirs, their in-laws, and maybe one hundred thousand other cousins, uncles, aunts, and pets.

  I read a statistic saying that of all the reasons for breakups in a second marriage (and about 60 percent of remarriages end in divorce), the failure of the new family to blend without shaming or blaming one another is number one. I wanted our blessed marriage to succeed more than I wanted to breathe. But the truth? It damn near came close to failing.

  It doesn’t matter that the blended family is becoming increasingly common and that about one in three Americans is now a stepparent, stepchild, stepsibling, or stepsomething; it’s still hard to get right. Since nuclear families fail about 50 percent of the time, is it any wonder that the new, blended families are so hard to get the hang of?

  When you think about a stepmother, which I had become, what comes to mind may be Cinderella’s warty witch of a stepmother, or Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother, who threw those blessed babies to the wolves. Well, most stepmothers are not warty witches, but stepmothering also isn’t anything like they promised in The Brady Bunch, and it sure ain’t Yours, Mine and Ours or any of all the other feel-good blended-family movies you see out there.

  Fact is, you cannot force a family to blend. You cannot take two separate families and force them to like each other, and then force them to create something they don’t feel. Making a real family takes time, not force. When his and her families first meet, they don’t have history together so they have to be willing to go slow enough to form memories together. You have to be able to get to a point where you can sit around a table and say, “Do you remember when we all got lost in Disneyland? Remember when you cooked me the soggy grits?”

  We all got to have patience. We live in a world of instant. We want that thirty-second meal from McDonald’s. We want that million-dollar payment from that lottery ticket. But, deep down, don’t we know that the most important, treasured things are those that you have to wait for to get? And, for sure, family is the best treasure you can have, and it takes waiting.

  I learned that some people can do it better than others. Taking the Groover and Deen families and trying to make them one happy loving group was among the greatest challenges I ever had. When kids in a second marriage are older, as ours were, with the courage of their own convictions, they’re as set in their ways as your ninety-seven-year-old grandpa.

  Thank God, in the end I figured it out: successful family blending is kind of like making a delicious but delicate blueberry muffin. You don’t want to stir it hard and you certainly don’t want to beat it. You want to take that spatula to gently fold the butter, milk, eggs, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and those fragile blueberries together until each ingredient is just wet enough to absorb the goodness of the other ingredients. A blending of two families is kinda like that. You can’t overwork it, trying to make a perfect single family who fall in love with one another and blend effortlessly. If you vigorously mix, stir, or beat the ingredients together, those berries—those people—will mush and crush and never blend.

  This is the way it was with Michael and me. On my side, I had my two sons who were very, very protective of their mother. They were so wary that a man would walk in and bamboozle their mother not only out of her heart but also out of her money. So, on one hand my children wanted me to find companionship, but on the other hand they saw the dangers a new marriage could bring to the table. They are savvy enough to know that there are people out there who will do anything for financial gain, people with no morals or ethics.

  On Michael’s side there were two almost-grown children, Michelle and Anthony. My sons weren’t pushovers, but let me tell you somethin’, girls are tough. I was a girl—I know. I was nineteen years old when my daddy died. My mother was thirty-nine years old, a beautiful woman with a lot of life still ahead of her. She met this older man, on the country side in his personality. Curtis was not nearly as dynamic or energetic as my daddy, but he was a good, soft-spoken salt-of-the-earth guy. He loved my mother and gave her company and comfort.

  Well, I acted like the biggest bitch. I never will forget the day I went over to my momma’s, to the house I was raised in, and Momma and Curtis were sitting at the table. I think I’d tapped on the door to just let them know that I was coming in, and Curtis said, “Come in.”

  It was me who knocked, but I still said to myself in fury, Why the hell is he telling me to come into my own daddy’s house! I was twenty years old, so full of anger, and I came in that door and slammed the hell out of it, about slammed that door off those hinges. How dare this man be sitting in my daddy’s house and be giving me permission to come in! I marched around to the back of the house to Momma’s bedroom, so self-centered that the only world I cared about was mine. I never wanted that new marriage to happen.

  And it never did.

  Michael’s daughter, Michelle, had been living with Michael and her brother in Michael’s home ever since her momma and daddy got divorced. When I met her I kind of understood her pain and the threat I represented. I’d been in her shoes. But although I kind of understood, I didn’t understand completely, not by a long shot. It was not that she thought I was going to try to replace her mother, with whom both kids had a very good relationship, it was the fact that I was going to take her daddy away from her. Michelle was very young to have worn so many different hats as her daddy’s girl, but wear them she did. Michael and she had an extraordinary relationship. While I worshipped my daddy, he didn’t count on me to keep the wheels of our lives turning. It was just a straight-out “I love you—you love me.”

  But Michael counted on Michelle for so much more, and she knew her daddy needed her. Part of her loved that and depended on it for her sense of safety. It was a great responsibility. Michael probably relied on her too much, because she had so much more sense than most girls her age. She would help him pay the bills, do the cleaning, and make important decisions. You know, even when her folks were married she took on some of these responsibilities. She helped raise her brother, Anthony, and teach him life’s lessons.

  But when it came to dealing with me, she was nineteen, about the same age as I was when I turned on my momma’s gentleman friend, and she was not acting much different from the way I had acted.

  I felt her pain, partially. But bein’ the adult, I knew that she needed to learn to love her daddy not any less,
but develop a relationship where she didn’t feel so responsible for his welfare. She needed to feel like she was a nineteen-year-old girl. If we could all hang in there we’d be okay.

  But I’ll tell you what: from the beginning I suspected I was headed for trouble coming up against this headstrong, angry, jealous young woman. In the end, though, I was to learn that every family should be so lucky to have a Michelle, with her sense of loyalty. I learned that if trouble came your way, you’d want this girl on your side because she would absolutely take a bullet for you. I was to learn it—but honey, I sure didn’t know it yet.

  Michael’s son, Anthony, was all boy. When I came into their lives, his daddy was pretty fed up with Michael Anthony Groover Jr. because he was not performing well at school. At the time, Anthony’s heart was sad because his father had made a decision that was very hard for both of them—to send his son off to military school. It was so important that Anthony know Michael was not doing it to get rid of him but to build character and pride into this young man. Apparently, it was clear to Anthony that he wasn’t being sent away as a punishment, because it turned out he came home every weekend. He did well, just as Michael hoped, and he graduated with plans to follow in his daddy’s footsteps as a harbor docking pilot. Because Anthony was not living at home, we met at the end of the summer, before he was to leave for Camden Military School. I instantly saw he was this precious, precious boy, and I could see a lot of his daddy in him—like once you got to know him, he was full of smart-ass comments and sarcasm. From the start, Anthony was very open to me. He’d been used to seeing his sister in a very close relationship with his father, and so it was much easier for him to accept me, another of those pushy females, into his family. He embraced me immediately and would put his arms around me and kiss me and say, “I love you.”

  Once Anthony told me that he never felt he was forced to love me, but he did quickly fall in love with the idea of his daddy’s happiness. That’s what mattered most to him. He said he didn’t feel negative or positive about the weddin’, but was just along for the ride, and when the ride turned out smooth, he was glad.