Few personalities have dominated the culinary landscape quite like Paula Deen, whose unique brand of Paula Deen cooking has graced countless magazine covers and kitchens across America. From her humble beginnings in Albany, Georgia, to her sprawling empire in Atlanta, Deen became synonymous with Southern comfort food.
Paula Deen is an American chef, restaurateur and Emmy Award-winning Food Network television personality. Deen’s primary culinary focus is Southern food. In 2005, Paula Deen also started her own magazine, Cooking with Paula Deen and most recently began contributing to the new magazine, Food Network magazine.Paula Deen is best-known for her Southern accent, warm personality and her ability to create unique mouth-watering dishes from Southern American foods like pot roast, pecan pike and macaroni and cheese. Unlike most current American chefs, Paula Deen is not concerned with fat and calorie counts; her tasty dishes are often not healthy. Two of her most over-the-top recipes include Gooey Butter Cake and turducken, a dish consisting of a turkey stuffed with a duck, which itself is stuffed with a chicken.
Paula Deen was born Paula Ann Hiers on January 19, 1947 in Albany, Georgia. According to her website both her parents died before she was 25 years-old and her first husband, with whom she has two sons Jamie and Bobby, abandoned her. At some point in her early adulthood Paula Deen developed the debilitating phobia, agoraphobia, which is an anxiety disorder. By the mid-1980s Deen overcame her phobia and moved her sons to Savannah, Georgia where she started a catering business.
Fans eagerly awaited each new issue, hungry for another taste of Paula Deen cooking and her signature Southern hospitality.
Her distinctive style of Paula Deen cooking not only filled kitchens but also cemented her legacy as a media powerhouse.
In 1996 after a successful run with her catering business, Deen opened her own restaurant, The Lady & Sons, which her sons also help run. Deen has published many cookbooks including The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cooking, The Lady & Sons
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