Prepping for the UNA show

I headed to the University of North Alabama today to do a walk through of tomorrow night’s cooking show. Let me just say again, these culinary students at UNA have things DOWN! We had a great time walking through the show and I’m REALLY excited about getting to meet some of my Southern Plate Family tomorrow. Do you realize this will be the FIRST time I’ve ever gotten to meet a group of SP family members??

TWO YEARS and tomorrow night is like my very first family reunion! To make things even more exciting, I GET TO FEED EVERYONE!

This is me getting the feel for my set. They had planned to build a kitchen to match mine but ended up having to go with another set at the last minute. Home Depot built the entire set for the cooking show and furnished all of the appliances.

I walked through each dish and will be making seven different recipes on stage. As I finish making each recipe the culinary students will come out and serve the audience whatever it is I just made.

So folks will be sipping tea (thanks to Milo’s!) and eating on my recipes. How cool is that?

Oh, there are also a TON of door prizes and we’ll be drawing for those in between and during recipes.

I talk with my hands a lot…

It’s a BIG Auditorium

(You haven’t even seen a fraction of it)

These are some of the students who will be assisting me on stage. Lela, Lydia, and Becky will be bringing out the ingredients as I need them for each recipe and guess what else?

Then they clean up the mess when I’m done! Can’t beat that with a stick.

This picture is horribly out of focus but I felt like I kinda almost look skinny in it so I had to keep it in here 🙂

We darted over to the culinary department to check on food prep and you would not BELIEVE how much food they are making for everyone! They have over seven hundred Jordan Rolls made so far!

And  I have no idea how much caramel corn is here but it took two guys to pick this up and they’re still cooking.

These are some of the pork roasts they are slow cooking for the pork sliders I’ll be making. I’m making one recipe of it on stage but these are set aside to feed the audience once I’m finished with my part of things.

Eating, visiting, drinking tea. We’re gonna have a fun time at UNA tomorrow night!

Special thanks to Chef Ogun (right) who lent us his students and his talent for this event!

Hope to see you tomorrow night if you live near me. For more information about this event visit www.una.edu/southernplate

1000 Advance copies of my book will be available to purchase there as well and I’ll be spending the first hour and a half meeting folks and signing them for anyone interested. Southern Living, Milo’s, Purity Dairies, Hamilton Beach, Nestle Toll House, Juicy Juice, House-Autry, Big Green Egg, Ideal Sweetener, and many  more will be there to pass out samples and meet all of our great Southern Plate Family!

I CAN’T WAIT TO FINALLY MEET YOU!