Garage Sale Treasures

How does a box of 6 binders full of clipped and hand-written recipes from the 40s thru to the 80s sound? My idea of treasure. Thank you Lois Tollefson, whoever you are, for your painstaking collecting and preservation over the years. Many of these recipes are from friends, so I'll start with one of those:

Kathryn's Layered Salad
Layer 1 --> etc.
1) 1/2 head lettuce broken up
2) 2 pkg frozen peas cooked and cooled
3) 8 medium carrots grated
4) 1 large onion diced
5) 2 c. diced celery
Do not stir above. Mix 1 c miracle whip and 1 T vanilla and 1 T vingar and 1 T sugar and put on top of layers. Cover with saran wrap and ref 24 hrs. She makes double recipe dressing.

It was the vanilla in the dressing that caught my eye with this. I would never have thought of that. Without trying it, I won't pass judgement.

Here's the next recipe on the page, just called "Esther's".

Esther's
1 head lettuce
1 lg red onion
1 lb bacon cooked, crumbled
1 head cauliflower flowerets
Break lettuce - layer in pan - onion sliced thin layer - bacon layer - cauliflower layer - cover with dressing.
1/4 c sugar
2 cup mayonnaise
1/3 c parmesan
Cover and refrigerate overnite.

Actually Donna or Susan gave her one more recipe written below those. It's just titled "Donna or Susan." Since Donna's name is underlined, Lois must have decided it was Donna's recipe after all. Or maybe they both make it but Donna makes it better.

Donna or Susan
1 2 lb can french green beans
1 2 lb can baby peas
1 large onion chopped
1 bunch celery chopped
1 green pepper chopped
1 sm jar pimento
Mix above and salt.

1 1/2 c sugar
1 c vinegar
1/2 c salad oil
1 T water
Pou over veg and marinate 24 hr.

Recipe-less

I've still been looking at too many cooking magazines lately. So another inspired but no specific recipe meal:

Grilled zucchini, sweet onion, red pepper, kale, and steak seasoning baked with fresh parmesan and crumbled ritz crackers.

Herb low fat cream cheese on a warm brown-at-home baguette, topped with hard boiled egg, watercress, tomato, and a little low fat mayo.

Very nice for a hot summer day.

Tradition

I'm unimpressed. I pulled out the Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Cook Book from 1959 to see what ideas they might have for Thanksgiving. They have instructions for cooking a turkey, of course, nothing particularly riveting there, and roasting a chicken or cornish game hens. There's a recipe for giblet gravy, mushroom  wild rice, browned rice, apple-pineapple slaw, a jellied cranberry ring, and shrimp cocktail. Still not inspired. A recipe for tomato soup that involves combining canned tomato soup and beef broth. Whee. Orange-glazed sweet potatoes, butternut squash, pickled beets, and corn bread.

The page of "pretty trimmings" ideas doesn't wow me either. There's the idea of sticking chrysanthemums on the naked bone of the turkey legs, or poking spiced crab apples over them. There's the avant garde notion of blopping whipped cream on your pumpkin pie, or if you'd prefer, cut a slice of American cheese in half on the diagonal, and roll the resulting triangle into a cornucopia anchored with whole cloves. Arrange six of these in a pinwheel shape on top of your pumpkin pie. Cheese on apple pie: okay. Cheese on pumpkin pie: I don't think so.

I am neither comforted by old favorites or intrigued by new twists...and then I come to this:

"For tradition's sake, serve time-honored Creamed Onions. To lots of folks, it's not Thanksgiving unless this specialty is on the table. Our version has two Southern accents--cheese to enrich the sauce, peanuts for crunch and their own good flavor."

Creamed Onions
18-20 medium onions
1/3 cup salad oil
3 T flour
1 1/2 cups milk
1 cup shredded process American cheese
peanuts, chopped

Peel onions and cook in a large amount of boiling, salted water until tender; drain. Blend oil and flour, stir in milk and cook slowly until thick, stirring constantly. Add the cheese and stir until melted. Add the onions and heat through. Place in vegetable bowl and sprinkle with peanuts.

Did I miss something? When did Creamed Onions become such a hallowed part of Thanksgiving traditions? I have never heard of this. My friends have never waxed nostalgically about their gramma's creamed onions. I don't remember Mr. Food telling us, "oooh, it's so good." Peppermint Patty didn't yell at Charlie Brown for not providing Creamed Onions as they sat around the ping pong table. There has to be some kind of editorial bias here: maybe it was traditional at HER family Thanksgivings but putting it in a book doesn't normalize it for the rest of us.

I'm going to write my own Thanksgiving chapter, it will include that great American favorite: hummus,  and that little pastel marshmallow overnight fruit salad my mom makes. What? That's what's on our table.

Halloween eats

I’m still flipping through The Casserole Cookbook from the Culinary Arts Institute, 1954, looking for comfort, and I think it should be renamed The Innards Cookbook. (Has there ever been such a book?) First there’s beef and kidney pie, but there’s also Sweetbreads and Dried Beef casserole for those of you who think you aren’t getting enough pancreas in your diet, there’s Tongue and Greens, Smothered Liver and Onions, Liver and Rice Piquant, and Heart with Apple Raisin Stuffing. If we were being really honest about the composition of food, we could add the Frankfurter and Beans or Frankfurter and Potato Salad concoctions to the mix.  ("Hot dogs. You know what they're made of, Chet? Lips and assholes.") I really am not comforted. Queasy perhaps. On the other hand, Halloween is coming up and if I needed some kind of appropriate fare for that, I know just what book to turn to. Let's rename this The Culinary Arts Institute Zombie Cookbook.

This isn’t from any cookbook but I based it off of several ideas I found online browsing. I took the things I liked best and threw them together. Here is my Halloween offering at the staff potluck this morning.

Start with a bed of spring greens. Followed by:

Cooked lentils with a dressing of olive oil, garlic, no salt Greek seasoning, and red wine vinegar. (Chilled overnight.)

Butternut squash, baked with a drizzle of olive oil, salt, and red pepper flakes. (Chilled overnight.)

Feta cheese and lime juice sprinkled over the top.

You know what this needed? Some very thinly sliced red onion on top. But still not bad at all.

Lesbian Zucchini

I don’t actually have a thing for zucchini. I really don’t. It’s just hard to find an ingredient with as much fiber, vitamins, and few calories as zucchini to bulk up dishes and add moisture to baked goods. Sure blueberries have more vitamin C but try putting them in your lasagna. Zucchini’s flavor is unassuming. Plus it’s cheap and plentiful. Oh boy, it can be plentiful. You carefully survey the garden and retire to bed assured that you have gotten ahead of the game and wake the next day to find several zucchini that have ballooned to human thigh proportions overnight. Zucchini I can’t use immediately gets grated or chopped and frozen for use throughout the year. I’ve been known to sneak handfuls into brownies and pancakes.

Consequently, I need a book like Garden Way’s Zucchini Cookbook by Nancy Ralston and Marynor Jordon, 1977. Now I’m an enlightened socially-conscious person that knows the dangers of making assumptions, however when I read that the authors each left teaching careers at the same University and moved to a farm to live a life of self-sufficiency together, what am I to think? That I’m kind of jealous, actually.

This book includes a recipe for French-Fried Zucchini that the previous owner had marked to make for Aunt Esther on her 92^nd birthday on the 18^th.

1 cups ½ slices of zucchini or other summer squash

1 cup flour

¾ t salt

1/8 t pepper

2 egg yolks, beaten

6 oz. beer

2 T margarine, melted

2 egg whites, stiffly beaten

Dry squash slices on paper towels. Combine flour, salt, pepper, egg yolks, and beer. Stir thoroughly. Add margarine and let mixture rest one hour at room temperature. Fold in egg whites. Dip squash slices into batter and deep fry at 360°F. until browned. Serves 4.

Here’s to you, Aunt Esther, I hope you enjoyed it! No matter how old a woman gets, she still loves a big vegetable.

Tacodile

Who can predict what recipe is destined to become a classic? Back in the 80s, on a visit to relatives in Oklahoma, my Aunt Linda made this layered taco dip for us and my mom promptly acquired the recipe. What was new and attention-getting then has become such a staple you can find a version ready-made in any grocery store deli section.

Taco Dip or Salad

First Layer

2 cans bean dip

Second Layer

4 mashed avocados mixed with 2 t lemon juice

Third Layer

8 oz. sour cream

½ c mayonnaise

1 pkg taco seasoning

Fourth Layer

Shredded cheddar cheese

Diced tomato

Chopped lettuce

Fast-forwarding to my daughter’s 2 birthday party, a time she was completely fascinated by Teletubbies and crocodiles--only she pronounced it “taco-dile”. So we had a polka-dotted cake made like Dipsy’s hat, tubby custard, and this layered dip shaped into a crocodile with tortilla chip scales down its back and olive claws. Hmmm, looking at it now it bears more of a resemblance to a road kill possum.

Sheik Al-Mishee (Eggplant Fit for a Sheik)

Cinnamon on meat? You bet. This is wonderful comfort food. Soaking the eggplant before it is used removes any bitterness.

1 large eggplant, sliced, soaked in salt water for 20 minutes, and rinsed. (If I'm slicing, I peel the eggplant, if chopping, I leave the skin on.)

1 lb. ground beef

1 large can chopped tomatoes or sliced fresh tomatoes, I've substituted a can of tomato soup too.

salt

2 crushed garlic cloves

2 med. onions, chopped

Olive oil

1-2 med. potatoes, chopped

cinnamon

Cook the onions in a drizzle of olive oil until tender. Add beef, salt to taste, garlic, and cook until browned. Grease a baking pan and put a layer of the meat mix. Add a layer of potatoes, sprinkle with salt, and a layer of tomatoes, sprinkle with cinnamon. Add a layer of eggplant, sprinkle with cinnamon. Repeat until all is used up. Actually, I just chop it all up and stir it together anymore. Bake 350 degrees until the eggplant and potatoes are tender when poked with a fork.

Originally from Finest Recipes From the Middle East by Yasmine Betar, 1957, a spiral bound cookbook my mother picked up back in the 1970s when she was first learning to cook Arabian food. This unassuming little book has seen a lot of use.

Tomato and Leek Tart and Desert Manna

Tomato and Leek Tart

2 cups seasoned bread crumbs

¾ cup almond butter

scant 1/4 cup butter

2 cups sliced leeks

Olive oil

1 T flour

1 cup crème fraiche or sour cream

8 oz. peeled, sliced tomatoes

½ cup grated gruyere cheese, or swiss

Mix crumbs, almond butter, butter and pat into 8 inch tart pan to form crust. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 min. Meanwhile, cook leeks 5-7 min in a drizzle of olive oil, until tender. Stir in flour and cook 1 minute. Stir in crème fraiche, boil to thicken for several minutes. Spoon into crust. Lay tomatoes over the top, sprinkle with cheese. Bake until the cheese is melted and bubbly.

If you’ve never cooked with leeks before, make sure you slice them open and rinse them well; they often have sand and dirt trapped between the layers (umm, crunchy). Speaking of sand crunchy veggies, my Dad was always bringing ‘unique’ things home and throwing them on the kitchen table for my mom to figure out how to cook. One day it was faqa’, a truffle that suddenly appears in the Dahna desert after a rain. They resemble ugly potatoes and, like leeks, have to be cleaned carefully or else they’ll provide a hefty crunch, and a trip to the dentist, to your evening meal. After scrubbing and rinsing and scrubbing and rinsing and peeling and scrubbing and rinsing and chopping and rinsing, my sisters and I decided that only people who had been wandering in the desert for 40 years would consider this to be manna from heaven. Its name appropriately sounds like something you yell at another driver on the interstate.

Baked Lima Beans with Marshmallows

Baked Lima Beans with Marshmallows

I was thumbing through an old card box of recipes at a garage sale and when I hit this one, I knew I had to buy them. I've never dared try it though.

Soak beans over night. Boil one pound of lima beans and add while cooking 1 1/2 oz. butter, pinch of garlic, and salt and pepper to suit taste. After beans are boiled, place in oven pan to brown. Add 1 1/2 oz butter and 1 1/2 oz. brown sugar. Place several strips of bacon on top of beans and bake. Keep juicy while baking by adding hot water if necessary. Dot top with whole marshmallows, place under broiler flame until toasted a golden brown.