-Our next guest is a Grammy Award-winning country music
star. Her cookbook, here it is right there.
"Y'all Eat Yet? Welcome to the Pretty Bitchin' Kitchen"
is available now. Please welcome to the show
our friend Miranda Lambert, everybody.
♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Welcome to the show.
You've been here three times performing for us.
It's the first time we get to chat.
I'm so happy to be doing this with you.
It's a wonderful book, not just recipes.
Also a great many stories, it feels like.
Is that what made it fun
to not just write a conventional cookbook,
but one that you got to tell about yourself
and the people in your life?
-Yeah, I've never written a book.
I mean, I'm a songwriter,
so it didn't seem that hard till I started.
I was like, "Oh, man, this is a totally different ballgame."
-Really? Because you don't have to --
You never have to rhyme in a cookbook.
So that seems like it should be easier.
-It's not three minutes long. It's like, yeah, it was --
It was a journey. We've been working on it since since 2020.
So my co-writer Holly Gleason, like, made sense of my stories
and my redneck way of telling them.
So that's -- she made it all make sense.
-But some wonderful characters
who find their way into this cookbook.
Your mother, Bev -- great mom name, Bev, let me say.
-Yeah. -Grandmother Wanda.
Maybe even better. -Yep.
-You also talk about sort of a group of friends,
women friends of your life that you referred to as
as the Ya-Yas? Am I saying that right?
-Yeah. So my grandmother had
this big group of girlfriends that we called the Ya-Yas.
They were generation one, we would call them.
And my mom and her best friends were like my aunts, basically.
They raised me. So it's basically just stories,
memories, like, growing up
with a group of strong women around me like that.
It really prepared me for the world.
And, like, I've been in the music industry for 20 years,
so I feel like without their wisdom,
I don't know if I could have made it.
But this is like -- it's more stories
I've never shared with anybody.
I mean, I'm really honest in my songs and my records,
but I've never put some of these
really personal stories and memories out there.
And there's just recipes to go with it.
And the recipes are like very approachable recipes.
They use like butter and Velveeta and stuff.
[ Laughter ] -Anyone can do it.
-There was a very novel recipe for how you used to --
I guess you would do this growing up --
how you would make omelets for camping trips.
-Yeah. -This was tricky.
Obviously, when you think about making an omelet
on a camping trip, you're like, "That'll never work.
You got to bring too much stuff."
-Right. And when you explain it,
it doesn't sound super glamorous.
But we all go on glamping trips.
All these girls in this book, we all had Airstreams,
so we would go like once or twice a year
on an all-girls camping trip.
And we like to make it easy so we can drink more and hang out.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
The Ya-Yas, let me say, I would love membership.
-Yes, you're in. -It sounds like a lot of fun
to hang out with the Ya-Yas. -You're in.
You're absolutely in.
And so we made up this way of doing omelets in a bag.
I think it was my dad's idea actually
because we grew up tent camping, you know,
but now we're like, "No, we don't sleep on the ground.
We sleep in Airstreams." [ Laughter ]
But you put all the fixings
for whatever omelet you want in there, like ham and cheese,
onion, whatever. -In a bag, in a Ziploc bag?
-You go ahead and you whip it all up, put it in a bag,
and then you drop it in hot water and it cooks.
Or you can bring your, you know, your glamorous --
-So, wait. You have a Ziploc bag full of just the stuff --
-It sounds disgusting. We shouldn't say it out loud.
-So you put it in a boiling...
-Can do that or you can just like -- These girls
are, like, they go hard.
They, like, show up anywhere with their own electric skillet
just in case anybody gets -- they need to whip something up.
-Right. -And so we love a party,
if you can't tell. [ Laughter ]
-That's a whole nother level of party if you're like,
"I want to make sure I got a skillet just in case."
[ Laughter ]
Your favorite cocktail is a bluebird?
What is a bluebird?
-A bluebird -- You can make it with tequila.
You can make it with bourbon. You can make it with Tito's.
I usually do tequila or Tito's,
and it is a muddled blueberries and mint and some soda
and a little bit of simple syrup.
And it's supposed to be like two ounces of whatever.
But I'm like, "Mm..." [ Laughter ]
-You're a friendly pour?
-Yeah, I just do like a six count.
[ Laughter ]
-Now, sometimes muddling like, I will say,
if I'm behind in line behind someone at a bar
and I hear them ordering a drink
where muddling needs to take place,
I'm pretty upset, you know.
But I would imagine you probably after a couple of these,
you're probably not putting too much time into the muddling.
-Yeah, I think the first two, you should really care.
[ Laughter ] And then after that,
you're like, how about just the soda and the tequila?
That'd be great.
-Have any of the Ya-Yas read the book?
Are they excited about? -They're so excited.
We're going to do a little trip we've been talking about.
We're all from Texas. So we were like,
"Where have we not been together?"
We want to go maybe to like Sedona
and have a celebration, just somewhere different, you know?
But they're so excited. It's really cool.
I mean, we were just talking. During 2020, we would get on --
We started this thing we called the Chopped Cook-Off
where it was just an excuse to drink together on FaceTime
for like three hours. [ Laughter ]
But our husbands would all pick an ingredient
and we would have to make a random dish
out of the five ingredients. But you couldn't Google.
That was the rule. It was really hard.
[ Laughter ]
Like one of them was like chili powder.
And you're like, I don't know how much to use of whatever,
so that's what even started this whole thing.
It's like we started talking about our memories
and how our sisterhood really has formed
all of our adult lives, you know?
I mean, these ladies raised me
and my grandma's friends raised them.
So it felt like -- I feel like
there's a lot of people out there
that have that circle that lifts them up and celebrates them,
that's with you through the hard times.
And that's basically what this book is about.
-You mentioned you're from Texas.
Your husband, former NYPD? -Yeah.
-You met him here in New York? -Yeah.
-You guys lived here for a little bit.
Are you Nashville now? -Yeah, we're Nashville.
We're up here a lot. We spend a lot of time up here.
We have tons of family.
-How is he adjusting, though, to the Nashville life?
-He loves it. I mean, he's, you know,
it took him a minute to get used to the slower pace.
But Nashville is city enough for, like, a city person
and country enough for a country person.
So it's a good medium. But I love New York.
I had never kind of got lost in the city
or spent time here besides working until I met him.
And we had an apartment in SoHo for six months.
And I just like immersed myself in NYC and I loved it so much.
-Who's the better chef, you or your husband?
-100% him. -But you wrote a cookbook.
-I know. [ Laughter ]
He says that every day. He's like, "Cool, cool, bro."
[ Laughter ]
He's the cook of our family.
So I told him. I was like, five years from now,
I'm calling it, like, we'll be up here
and I'll just be sitting in the dressing room
drinking like he is
and he'll be doing the work, promoting his cookbook.
-Well, I'll tell you this.
Let him know that if he writes a cookbook,
I promise he can come on here to talk.
-He's here. -Okay, good. That's a promise.
That is 100% a promise. [ Applause ]
You've got the ACMs coming up.
You've got a lot of nominations.
When you go to one of these country music award shows,
are you someone who gets nervous now?
-Yeah. I mean, national television
is always a little nerve-racking no matter what.
But I love it.
You know, this will be my 18th year at the ACMs.
-That's so exciting. -That's crazy.
And Nashville, the country music community
is so supportive and friendly. And like, people always ask me
like, "Is everybody really that nice?"
I'm like, "Yeah, we kind of are."
You know, it's like we're friends.
Friendly competition, but everybody deserves to be there.
-It seems like it's very hard to have a long career
in Nashville where you don't work
with almost everybody in the business
or someone in their band,
and it seems very lovely that way.
-It's definitely a community and a family.
And I mean, I've been, you know, doing this for 20 years
and I'm still getting nominated and get to go see my friends.
And it's like, it's such a good feeling.
It makes me want to work even harder.
-It's also cool when you do things you've never done
before after a career this impressive.
You've got a residency in Las Vegas.
How are you enjoying your Las Vegas life so far?
-I love it. It was very different.
I mean, it kind of freaked me out the first time.
I, like, went and did a show
and there was no bus there, you know?
I mean, I've lived on a bus forever.
And I was really excited, though,
because we get to do this crazy production
we've never gotten to take on the road.
When you don't have to load it into trucks
every night, it's a lot easier.
I'm like, "More fire! More confetti!"
So, like, I just got to take everything up a notch.
And being a Texan, like,
there's no such thing as too much in Vegas of anything.
-Yeah. -Especially rhinestones.
So I'm like -- I took it --
I took it all the way to the next level.
-No one will leave your show in Vegas and go,
"I thought there'd be more rhinestones."
Is that what you're saying? -Nope. They will not.
-You also have a wonderful -- I want to get this right,
your charity MuttNation Foundation.
-Yeah. -Can you tell us a little bit
about what you're doing with MuttNation?
Which is a fantastic name for a charity, by the way.
-Yes. Thank you.
I started it with my mom and we do a lot together.
-Bev. -Bev. Bev Lambert.
Beverly June Lambert.
-Beverly June. It keeps getting better.
-It gets better. -You can't beat Bev Lambert.
There's a June in the middle. Well, that's better.
[ Laughter ]
-We started it in 2009 just to basically --
I had started to get a platform in my career
where it's time to pick a charity
that you really pour into. And I love animals.
And I felt like I didn't want to just give
to certain animal charities.
I wanted to kind of -- We wanted to hand-pick.
And so we started our own, MuttNation Foundation,
and we just basically raise awareness for shelter dogs
and we lift up shelters, shelters that need help.
All the money we raise goes to improving shelters
and for natural disasters
to help the animals that are affected.
And we raised over $8 million since then.
So it's been a really cool thing.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Congratulations on that. Congratulations on the book.
Thank you so much for being back.
It's always such a pleasure. -Thank you. Good to see you.
-Miranda Lambert, everybody.
"Y'all Eat Yet?" It's available now.
We'll be right back with more "Late Night."