In another bowl, stir up 1 cup barbecue sauce, ½ cup salsa, 1½ tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, and ¼ teaspoon ground red pepper (and a leetle bit of salt). Take half of that mixture and stir it into your meat stuff.
Put about ½ cup meat mixture per hole in a big muffin pan (mini meat loaves!) and paint the tops with the rest of the sauce. Bake ’em at 450°F for, like, 18 to 20 minutes. How great is THAT?! Meat loaf usually takes forfuckingEVER. These little buggers will freeze great, too, given the opportunity.
BOYS ’R’ US BEANS
We call ’em that ’cause a friend of ours who’s got a husband and about a hundred little boy-type chirren gave us the recipe. Everybody—even little boys—will gobble up these beans, and you can use canned ones, which is so easy and who cares if they’re not as good FOR you—we’re only interested in taking care of our DISPOSITIONS here.
Melt together 1 stick butter (always a good start), ¾ cup dark brown sugar (you can use the brown Splenda—can you tell I just LOOOOVE Splenda?), 1 tablespoon soy sauce, and about a teaspoon or so of chopped garlic. Mix all that up and stir in 2 drained cans green beans. Put a whole bunch of nice crispy crumbled-up bacon on top and cover the dish with foil and bake it at 300°F for about 45 minutes. You won’t even care that this actually IS a green vegetable.
JEWISH BARBECUE
Queen Susan got this recipe from a wonderful woman named Phyllis, who, during Susan’s particularly rancorous divorce proceedings, declared herself to be Susan’s much-needed Jewish Mother and brought her this “barbecue” to soothe her ravaged soul. Blessings on the House of Phyllis.
You just need one slab of brisket—NOT corned beef! And you put it in the Crock-Pot with a jar of Heinz chili sauce and a can of whole-berry cranberry sauce and let it sweat on low for 6 to 8 hours. We would follow Phyllis in the desert for close to forty years for this.
CHICKEN SHIT
Queen Jeanne of Pascagoula, Mississippi, shared this with me with her profuse apologies for the name. It seems that Jeanne had a girlfriend who would occasionally, after an evening of plentiful libations, crash on Jeanne’s couch and, before taking her leave the following morning, scarf down whatever happened to be in Jeanne’s refrigerator. Upon sampling it, she was quite taken with one of the fridge’s occupants and left a note demanding the recipe for “that chicken shit.” And the name just stuck—as is wont to happen. I told her I wouldn’t DREAM of changing the name.
Mix together 3 or so cups cooked chicken, 1 can condensed cream of chicken soup (what is funeral food without Cream of Something?), ¾ cup sour cream, ½ teaspoon black pepper, and ¼ cup milk. Dump it all into a greased casserole dish and top with a couple of cups Ritz cracker crumbs and dab on some little hunks of butter. Bake for 30 minutes at 350°F. We find that Chicken Shit goes real nice with rice.
CAN’T DIE WITHOUT DEVILED EGGS
Can’t live without ’em, either, in my opinion. Queen Nancy told me that once when they had a death in her family, her mom’s best friend, Lucy, came over to field the phone calls from far-flung family and friends regarding the services and all. When Nancy’s mom came in that afternoon, Lucy reported on who all had called and that, when asked, she had advised them all to bring deviled eggs to the visitation—all of them—she told ALL of them to bring deviled eggs—because Lucy, like myownself, JUST LOOOOVES deviled eggs and she wanted to make sure they got some. They got about fifty dozen, which, in my opinion, is just about enough. I want Lucy on the job for the next funeral I’m involved with—unless it’s my own, in which case I don’t reckon I’ll care too much what y’all have to eat.
These are your basic deviled eggs and I don’t care what you do to ’em, I’ll EAT ’em—but I don’t think they’ll be any BETTER.
Hard-boil a dozen eggs. When they cool off enough, get the yolks out and mash up the yolks with 2 tablespoons sweet pickle relish, 2 to 3 tablespoons of Hellmann’s mayo, and 2 teaspoons yellow mustard. Fill the whites with this goo and git outta my way.
MAKETH ME TO LIE DOWN IN MAC ’N’ CHEESE
Queen Cherie H. just knows that nothing is more comforting than cheese…and pasta…and potatoes. It’s just all too rare that we find all these elements in combination, and while we are perfectly capable of procuring and consuming them all separately, it’s just so danged convenient to have ’em all corralled in one easy, yummy pile.
Cook a 12-ounce package of some kind of pasta—shells or rotini—something that will hold sauce well. And about that sauce—melt 1 stick butter and add ¼ cup flour, stirring briskly. Add 2 cups hot milk and 1 teaspoon seasoned salt and ½ teaspoon black pepper, stirring all the while, until it starts to thicken. Then add 1 cup (a great, big, overflowing one) shredded Cheddar and heat until the cheese is melted.
Fry at least 12 strips of bacon until crispy, then crumble. In at least some of the bacon grease, fry a chopped onion and 1 cup sliced mushrooms.
In a greased 13 by 9 by 2-inch pan, mix the pasta, the onion and mushrooms, the cheese sauce, and the bacon, and to that, add about a pound of shredded Cheddar or Monterey Jack and stir that up. And on top of ALL THAT, put as many frozen Tater Tots as will fit on there in a single layer! And sprinkle THAT with a fair amount of grated Parmesan cheese and then bake it at 375°F for around an hour or until it’s bubbly and the Tots are crispy. Or, in a panic situation, you can bake it for about 40 minutes and then run it under the broiler for a bit to brown the Tots faster. This will serve about as many people as you can bring yourself to share it with—mine’s a pretty short list.
Damon Lee’s Divine Intervention
If we could hope to attain heaven on this earth, one of our key personnel would be chef Damon Lee Fowler. Damon Lee has an assortment of gorgeous cookbooks available all over the place and I hope you will avail yourself of them all—Damon Lee has his own plastic surgery fund to contend with, after all. But because of his great love for me and all Queens, Damon Lee has bestowed upon me some of his MOST Queenly recipes and is allowing me to share them here with you now. He has further agreed that, at such time in the future, we should actually OPEN the Rest in Peace Funeral Food Restaurant, he will come and be THE Chief Cook—we’ll all be his Bottle Washers. Heaven truly sent him from above.
PASSION FOR PIMIENTO
Damon Lee believes, as do I, that pimiento cheese is PERFECT just the way it is, and we don’t neither one of us take kindly to folks messing with it, in the name of “gourmet” or anything else. Damon Lee exhorts us to use the sharpest Cheddar we can find—and if we live outside of Wisconsin, we’re pretty much screwed, but do the best you can. (You can add a little bit of REAL Parmesan—which will NOT come in a green container.) He says we should use orange Cheddar because it looks better. It’s a natural vegetable dye and it’s been in cheese for about two hundred years, so just get over it. Use real mayo. And don’t put anything else in there—no matter what—except for maybe a little cayenne.
You’ll need about 2 cups grated extra-sharp Cheddar, ½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, 5 to 6 heaping tablespoons mayonnaise, cayenne pepper to taste, and one 4-ounce jar diced pimientos, drained—but save the juice. Now, Damon wants us to mix this by hand—and by that he means WITH YOUR ACTUAL HANDS—a food processor will make paste, and a spoon won’t moosh it together good enough—so wash up and dive in (think of the glorious licking to follow). Moosh away and add pimiento juice if needed for consistency—this is a personal judgment call.
BLESSED BACON BISCUITS
Damon Lee knows of our deep and abiding love for all things bacon and he concocted these morsels in tribute to Sweet Potato Queens everywhere. We love him almost as much as we love bacon.
Preheat your oven to 450°F and sift together 2 cups of soft-wheat flour (like White Lily, if you’re in the South; perhaps cake flour will work if you’re not—good luck is all we can say), 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt. Cut in 6 tablespoons chilled bacon drippings (yum) until you’ve got pea-size lumps of dough. Make a well in the middle and pour in ½ cup milk.
Mix it as LITTLE as possible—just until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl and is no longer crumbly. Use a tad more milk if needed.
Turn the dough out onto a floured board and pat out ’til it’s ½ inch thick. Grind black pepper over the dough and fold it in half. Pat it flat again and pepper it again. Then pat and fold it two more times—but don’t pepper it any more unless you’re really into pepper.
Re-flour your board and roll or pat out the dough until it’s about ¼ inch thick. Cut into a dozen or so biscuits and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet ’til brown—about 8 to 10 minutes. I am thinking that a hot one would be pretty tasty with some of that ’minner cheese on it!
POTATO SALAD—REINCARNATED
Damon Lee is THE smartest man in the world, I swear. You know how when somebody dies, about a thousand people will bring some version of potato salad and although you love it more than air, there IS a limit, after all, and you end up with assorted wads of rotting potato salad in the refrigerator but you can’t bring yourself to throw it out until it truly is totally rotten because (a) it was a gift and (b) it’s potato salad? WELL! Damon Lee has GOT the answer—to this and so many of the world’s problems—seriously, go buy his cookbooks! This is, like, a whole new WORLD of potato salad—and no matter how much potato salad you’ve eaten over the course of the visitation, you’ll be ready for more when it’s reincarnated.
Just take any and all leftover potato salad (BEFORE it rots) and dump it into a 13 by 9 by 2-inch pan. Melt ½ stick butter and then stir in 1 cup bread crumbs or Ritz cracker crumbs—or even potato chip crumbs (just omit the butter for these). Put the crumbs on top of the potato salad and BAKE it at 400°F for about 25 to 30 minutes and serve it hot. It’s so good, you will just DIE!
Here’s another little Damon Lee decadent delight: Make real popcorn—as in not microwaved. Put the hot popcorn in a paper sack and drizzle in a few spoonfuls of HOT BACON GREASE and shake it ’til your arms fall off. Then salt it a whole lot and eat it up. We do so love Damon Lee.
BEULAH LAND BOO-BOO PIE
Queen Jeanne got this recipe from a Queen in western Kentucky and it was called Boo-Boo Pie because the Queen who made it first apparently screwed up the original recipe (now lost to the ages and who cares?) and this is what she ended up with and it is mighty fine. I added the Beulah Land to it in honor of my daddy and his buddy Brooks Jones from Nashville. They loved ol’-timey gospel music and used to do a helluva rendition of “Beulah Land,” with Brooks bellowing out the chorus, which went something like “I’ve FOUND the land of CORN and WINE and ALL I see is SHIRLEY mine,” to the everlasting delight of me and my seester, Judy. We don’t know any other words to that song—but we learned those real good.
Mix together one 7-ounce bag sweetened flaked coconut and one 14.5-ounce can sweetened condensed milk and set it aside—don’t eat it, no matter how BAD you want to. Melt together 1 stick butter and 3 ounces (3 squares) unsweetened chocolate—you can nuke it for a few minutes, no big deal, just don’t burn it. Then stir in ¾ cup sugar, ½ cup flour, 3 eggs, and 1 running-over teaspoon vanilla. Put all that into a greased 9-inch pie pan. Spread the coconut stuff over the top—but leave about a ½-inch border uncovered all around the edge, because when you bake it, the chocolate stuff on the bottom will come up and form a kind of crispy crusty thing for you—yum! Bake it for about 25 minutes at 325°F. And die happy.
COSMIC CLIMAX COOKIE CAKE
Courtesy of Queen Melissa—a crowd-pleaser for sure, if you give ’em any, that is.
Crush an entire 12-ounce box of Nilla Wafers and set ’em aside for a minute. Cream together 2 sticks butter, 2 cups sugar, and 6 eggs. Then slowly add, alternately, the mashed Nillas and ½ cup milk. Then add one 7-ounce bag sweetened flaked coconut and 1 cup chopped pecans. Bake it in a greased, floured tube pan at 275°F for 1½ hours. You’ll be too fat but certainly happy enough to ascend directly unto heaven.
HEAVEN IS A PLACE CALLED HICKORY PIT
In Jackson, Mississippi, you can go to this little barbecue place and get some very fine sweet tea and all manner of excellent barbecue, BUT when you say the name of it, Hickory Pit, what EVERYBODY immediately thinks of—and craves—is their Hershey Bar Pie. It is truly To Die For and definitely From, if you overindulge.
Make an Oreo crust in a 9-inch pie pan with enough butter to hold the mashed Oreos together. Heat ½ cup milk and 15 large marshmallows in a double boiler until melted. Add 6 Hershey bars with almonds and stir until that’s all melted together. Let cool and stir in ½ cup Cool Whip. Pour into the Oreo crust and chill overnight. Before serving, top with the rest of the Cool Whip and sprinkle with Oreo crumbs and either hide with it or expect to share a whole lot more than you’d like.
DELICIOUS DEATH DUMP CAKE
Lord, we do love a dump cake down here. There are umpteen variations on this theme and all of ’em are fabulous—poison, but fabulous. By poison, I mean that if you eat these cakes—and any other recipe you got from me—all the time, you will die. And you will die with a HUGE ass. However, that being said, it’s all very good for your disposition and I like to think of that as my contribution to World Peace. So here, courtesy of Queen Trish, is one more dump cake.
Dump (hence the name) one box butter pecan cake mix into an 11 by 8-inch Pyrex dish. Dump a couple of 15-ounce cans crushed pineapple, juice and all, on top of that. Cut a stick of butter into little chunks and put ’em all over the top of that pile. Bake it at 350°F for about 30 minutes or however long it takes it to get kinda bubbly and crispy on top. And if you die from it, don’t come whining to me about it: I warned you—it’s poison.
As Queens, we make no bones about it, we KNOW HOW TO EAT. We love to eat, and whenever we can get away with it, we eat the most fattening crap we can get our paws on. We are not too proud to eat stuff made with Cool Whip and cream of mushroom soup—if somebody’s mama made it and it’s really yummy. If it tastes good, we’ll eat it. We offer no excuses for our plebian selves. Queen Cherie G. from Pueblo, Colorado, wrote to tell me that her sister Diane is always nagging her about eating healthy—and Cherie staunchly resists. She claims she has eaten so many preservatives over the course of her life, she will most likely never die and, in fact, will remain ageless. However, should she be proven wrong and, in fact, die, Cherie G. good-naturedly suggests that her loved ones have her chemical-laden remains cremated out in the open—where she is likely to burn brightly with many varicolored flames, like that fancy stuff you can throw in a fire to create that effect. Truly heartwarming.
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