Country music star Trisha Yearwood adds homely touch to fourth cookbook

Trisha Yearwood is a collard greens kind of gal, but her husband, Garth Brooks, is definitely not a collard greens kind of guy. So she had to be a little sly when it came time to perfect her Collard-Stuffed Wontons.

When the country star and her collaborator and sister, Beth, made them the first time at her Nashville home, they didn’t tell Brooks and his buddy what was in them when the two men came into the kitchen after working on their farm.

“I said, ‘You try this.’ Didn’t tell them what it was. And they ate them all. They were like, ‘These are amazing!’” Yearwood recalls. “And then I told him he ate his collard greens for the day.”

The quirky South-meets-Asia wontons are a feature of Yearwood’s fourth cookbook, Trisha’s Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family, which has 125 recipes that blend her knowledge of soulful Southern cooking with influences from China, Italy and Mexico.

Yearwood says the last five years hosting her Emmy-winning Food Network series Trisha’s Southern Kitchen has helped boost her kitchen skills and expand her recipe development.

“I’ve entered into a really cool phase and I really attribute the show for just giving me confidence to try new things. And now they’ve become kind of family favourites and they feel like things that have been in the family forever,” she says.

Yearwood is open to ideas, even asking at restaurants how the chefs make favoured dishes. She walked away from a sushi restaurant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the origins of Garth’s Teriyaki Bowl, which uses marinated chicken and steak.

That same restaurant inspired her Steak & Avocado Rolls, which use soy wrappers to mimic sushi rolls. Neither Yearwood nor Brooks are fans of raw fish — “we’re sort of roll-it-in-flour-and-fry-it people,” she confesses — but their girls are, so the recipe is a compromise.

Yearwood also leaned on several family recipes for dishes in the new book, including some from her dad’s mom. Her grandmother was a dessert specialist but none of her recipes seemed to have survived until the family recently found a little book with handwritten recipes, including one for Hundred Dollar Cupcakes. Trisha and Beth also recreated a dish that was never written down, Jack’s Fried Pies, named after her father.