Miranda Lambert's new cookbook highlights inspirational family celebrations

For the first time in 20 years, Miranda Lambert's unbossed, unbothered and entirely in control of a burgeoning business empire.

Her 290-page cookbook and memoir "Y'all Eat Yet? Welcome to the Pretty B*tchin' Kitchen," arrives on April 25 from Dey Street Books. It adds a super-sized delivery of 39 years of the 38-time Academy of Country Music award winner's favorite recipes and entertaining family stories to a portfolio including clothing, cookware, liquor and restaurant brands.

The cookbook's hardcover edition retails for $32.50.

Feeling sad or uncertain about Lambert's recent announcement that she's leaving Sony Nashville after being signed to the label for 20 years? Take a bite of the infamous, 13-ingredient -- largely ground beef and pork sausage plus saltine cracker-based -- meatloaf that, as noted in the text, played an intrinsic role in leading to both of the times Lambert has successfully been proposed marriage, plus weddings for three other friends -- including Pistol Annies trio member Ashley Monroe.

Your sadness and uncertainty will melt away in the loaf's moistness.

"It's satisfying to a man's taste buds and appetite," writes Lambert (aided in the text's development by author and journalist Holly Gleason) about the blend of caramelized sweetness and uniquely savory, multi-layer saltiness.

While speaking with the Tennessean at the Casa Rosa bar and restaurant that bears her name in Music City's Lower Broadway neighborhood, Lambert glibly discusses how much she, her mother Bev, Nonny (grandmother), her mother's friends Neicy, Heidi and Princess V, plus others have created Southern baked, boiled and fried sisterhood through a culture driven by 50 recipes and a love of celebrations.

"[My family] finds a reason to celebrate anything," Lambert says with a wry smile.

"We're hard-working people who appreciate creating happy moments of shared community in the middle of the good, bad and ugly times surrounding [celebrations]."

COVID-19's twin motivations of boredom and whimsy ultimately inspired the book -- which was initially supposed to be a quaintly-shared, hand-written family and friend memento of weekly, Thursday night "Chopped Cook-offs" ("an excuse for not a 'happy hour,' but 'happy hours' on Zoom," Lambert jokes about the alcohol-fueled revelry of the events) where she and her friend's husbands would select an ingredient, at random and the wives would prepare meals using the chosen ingredient.

The recipes Lambert and friends used recalled the many food-driven celebrations they had attended with each other over the years that involved all manner of banana pudding, baked enchiladas, whiskey-soaked cupcakes and more.

"We had so much history and life in those stories," Lambert says.

Notable as well in the new book is the inclusion of a non-Lambert family member -- Grand Ole Opry member Trisha Yearwood's mother's "No Baste No Bother" roasted turkey recipe -- in the book.

Via the recipe, a four-decade-long lineage of country women being inspired by each other's cookbooks -- from Lambert and Yearwood back to Loretta Lynn -- is continued.

"Memories of certain dishes, like the memories we attach to songs sung by female country stars, transport you back to warm, feel-good places and times in your life," stated food blogger Erin Browne in a Feb. 2023 Tennessean feature. Her "Unofficial Dollywood Cookbook" was released via Simon and Schuster on April 4, 2023.

"Trisha's a queen on the stage and in the kitchen," jokes Lambert.

The recipe's been a longtime Lambert family staple, says the singer-songwriter.

"Country music's women are drawn to cookbooks because food -- like songs -- are involved in the happiest and saddest days of your life."

"From marriage and divorce to illness and death, these recipes have always prepared me, in a very personal way, for navigating whatever life has thrown at me, Lambert adds.

"I'm still inspired by three chords, the truth, plus great songs and stories. Two decades later, that's branched into food -- yet another way to tell a story. In this book, you're meeting the ladies I've stood around the kitchen and cooked with whose recipes created the conversations that taught me the life lessons that inspired many of my [most beloved] songs."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Miranda Lambert's new cookbook highlights inspirational family celebrations