Kix Brooks cooks up his ‘brand’

New album? That’s so ’90s.

Kix Brooks has a cookbook.

Sure, country hit-makers Brooks &Dunn were on the front end of the early-’90s New Country explosion. But fast-forward 25 years, and it looks like Brooks also had a head start on today’s oft-repeated mantra for showbiz survival: creating your brand.

For 10 years, Brooks has hosted the syndicated radio show “American Country Countdown.”

For nine years, he’s been a partner in Arrington Vineyards, recently named Tennessee winery of the year at the New York International Wine Festival.

Last year, the Cooking Channel followed him around and filmed him eating meat in “Steak Out with Kix Brooks.”

And Aug. 30 brings the release of “Cookin’ It With Kix — The Art of Celebrating and the Fun of Outdoor Cooking.”

So what does Brooks think of the B-word?

“I have all these things going and I think when people see me, even on TV with the steak show, they probably have a good feel for who I am. Maybe that is a brand,” concedes the laid-back 61-year-old Louisianan.

“It’s not something that I necessarily consciously created, it’s just who I am bouncing around doing all these fun things that I love,” he adds.

“I guess most of us in the entertainment business are just kind of born show-offs and like to hear ourselves talk anyway,” he adds.

Last summer, Brooks &Dunn reunited both with one another and with ’90s touring mate Reba McEntire to become recurring Caesars Palace headliners. Most of their “Together in Vegas” shows have sold out the 4,300-seat Colosseum at Caesars Palace, and their latest run wraps up with shows Friday and Saturday.

“I think people like reliving that feeling they get when they heard those songs way back when,” Brooks says of playing the catalog hits with Ronnie Dunn after a six-year separation. And the two have at least a couple of “big shows” lined up beyond Las Vegas next year.

That said, “Recording and performing are certainly two different things,” he cautions. Dunn has been working on a solo album since the reunion was announced, and Brooks adds vocals to one of the songs, “Damn Drunk.”

But it’s otherwise better to “let him have his room and go make his run,” Brooks says.

Brooks is certainly on a trendier path pursuing a publishing niche that combines memoir and traditional cookbook, in the manner of “Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood” or Sammy Hagar’s “Are We Having Fun Yet? The Cooking and Partying Handbook.”

Brooks says that when he started telling stories about his life to co-author Donna Britt, he wasn’t sure if they were headed toward a conventional autobiography or a “how-to-live-your-life kind of book.”

But he decided of the latter, “This doesn’t feel good to me. This is really pretentious. I don’t want to tell anybody how to do anything.”

But the cookbook idea made sense once he realized, “most of those stories were kind of centered around food. Where I come from, if you didn’t know how to boil shrimp or throw stuff in a bunch of hot grease or get a barbecue grill going? It’s just a way of life. It’s just part of what you do. I realized, I really do know how to cook.”

Most of the recipes will not come with long lists of ingredients and instructions. “For me, it’s just the joy of cooking. Have some fun, don’t be intimated by it,” he says. But if he had to pick one recipe that would stand as his show-off signature?

“When I was living in New Orleans, every restaurant would have red beans and rice on Monday. It was one of my favorite things to go to a different restaurant every Monday and see what their take on it was, because I grew up eating red beans and rice.”

He already had “a good basic recipe.” But his wife, Barbara, is from Boston and once she “started putting her swing on it, we both started throwing stuff in there. I think maybe we have seven kinds of meat now,” he says with a laugh.

“You soak red beans for two days on the stove and then the way it cooks down, it’s almost a reduction. This is something that will make your house smell like red beans and rice for a week.

“It kind of takes over our house for a long period time and my friends have just come to love it. For Super Bowl parties and stuff like that, if we say we’re having red beans and rice? Well, we don’t know how good our friends are, but we know what they like to eat.”

And for those who know they’d like to hear Brooks sing again? Brooks recalls the sage advice of Dale Earnhardt: “Don’t forget the No. 3 car.”

“That was his way of saying, ‘You’ll get to do a lot of stuff because of your success. (But) don’t forget where your core is.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.