How Trisha Yearwood Keeps Her Parents' Memory Alive During the Holidays
For Trisha Yearwood, the smell of food from her childhood instantly transports her.
The platinum-selling country star and host of Trisha's Southern Kitchen grew up in the small town of Monticello, Georgia-the backdrop of 1992's My Cousin Vinny, she'll tell you-and later moved to Nashville for college. It was there that she experienced her first real bout of homesickness. After realizing the only vegetables she knew how to cook were "out of a can," Yearwood phoned home to ask for her mom's recipes for meatloaf and potato salad. "They were really simple but when I made them and they tasted like hers, I cried," Yearwood tells CountryLiving.com.
She describes her childhood home as "organic heaven, before organic was cool." The family raised their own cattle, hogs, and chicken. Her mother was an incredible cook. Her father worked as a banker during the week, but was really "a farmer at heart," says Yearwood. He loved making big breakfasts for the family on weekends.
"My parents are gone now so this whole cooking thing that I do, my second career, is tied to those memories and keeps them alive because what I make is my twist on what they used to make," says Yearwood. "It helps my sister and I feel connected to them."
"My parents are gone now...cooking is tied to those memories and keeps them alive."
Her father, Jack, took up baking as a hobby when she was a girl. He had quit smoking and needed a way to occupy his hands so he wouldn't be tempted to pick up a cigarette, she recalls. "He would make incredible loaves of bread and cinnamon rolls. When I make cinnamon rolls now it's such a throwback," she says.
On Christmas Eve, Jack would assemble the ingredients for a sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast casserole, which he would pop it in the oven the next morning, so that it would be ready by the time everyone was finished opening their Christmas presents. It's a tradition Yearwood has continued with her own family.
The season is such an important time for her, in fact, that when she and husband Garth Brooks decided to release their first-ever joint album, they went with a compilation of Christmas duets. "It's the most fun I've ever had making a record," she says of Christmas Together, out now.
"It was June or July, but we had a tree in studio, and the A/C turned way up," she adds.
Yearwood likes the collection so much that she even played it while cooking for her annual "misfit Thanksgiving" recently, even though she doesn't normally listen to her own music. She's happy that the countdown to Christmas is finally on: Now she and Brooks can perform at events like last night's Rockefeller Center tree lighting in New York, and tonight's national tree lighting at the White House. "We are enjoying ourselves and I hope that when people come to a show, they know that we're not just putting on show-it's what we truly love to do," she says.
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