The Key to Making Your Recipes Memorable, According to Trisha Yearwood

When Trisha Yearwood teamed up with Williams Sonoma for a line of Summer barbecue foods, it made sense. While Trisha certainly has a lot going on in her professional life — cooking, music, even a fragrance — she said she will keep saying yes to projects that feel like a natural fit for her, and this Williams Sonoma collaboration was one of those. "I'm their target customer," she said when I caught up with her while she was filming an episode of The Chew in New York. "I cook with all their stuff. I use it all the time, so it made sense to work together." But beyond just creating a line of products that made sense for Trisha and Williams Sonoma, this collab allowed Trisha to share her deep love of food and how it relates to her loved ones.

"All these recipes we use on [Trisha's Southern Kitchen] are my mom's, my grandma's, my dad's," she told me. She said it all has a story, including the unfried chicken mix, which drew inspiration from how her mom fried chicken in Corn Flakes crumbs. "It was an attempt to come up with something that wasn't actually fried chicken, but like how my mom made," she said.

Trisha proudly carries on the recipes she's collected from her family members and encourages everyone else to do the same. "Whether you're going to publish a cookbook or not, write your recipes down. Then you'll have them forever and you can pass them down," she advised. Take her mom's cornbread dressing recipe, for instance. Trisha had her mom measure everything out so she could get the recipe on paper. Before that, Trisha said, "The recipe was never written down and it was the dressing that we had to have every year [during the holidays]. When I did my first book, I'm so thankful I did this, because my mom's gone now. I said I want to put this recipe in the book."

The country music powerhouse, who now calls Nashville her home, also lets her Southern roots shine in her food. "When people come over, I like to impress them with comfort food, like roast beef with gravy," she said. "My mom always did roast beef on Sundays, so it feels kinda fancy in my head even though it's really not." Trisha loves simplicity. "Simple is best. You don't have to have 15 different ingredients to make something good." For those who don't cook much and find a kitchen to be daunting, Trisha recommends having a go-to meal. She turns to her mom's meatloaf recipe, which is just four ingredients.

But even with keeping things simple, Trisha is an unbelievably busy lady. She just wrapped filming season 10 of her show, Trisha's Southern Kitchen; she and her husband, fellow country music superstar Garth Brooks, are on and off the road playing concerts; and she's now out sharing her Williams Sonoma collection with the world. It doesn't leave her a lot of free time, and that's where Garth swoops in to help with the cooking sometimes. "He does cook — he puts tortellini in absolutely everything. It sounds weird, but it's good!" she said. His go-to recipe for at home is a breakfast casserole that has a little bit of everything. "He layers potatoes on the bottom, usually hash browns or tater tots, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits, tortellini. And then I started adding sausage gravy to the top to add insult to injury." She wasn't kidding when she said adding gravy to anything is a great idea.

Trisha's caring nature and deep love for her family and friends are evident in everything she does and translate directly into the food she shares. That's the magic behind Trisha's dishes — they are more than just recipes. They are memorable, because they are built from her life's stories and created for everyone to enjoy.