Potluck treasures

With Thanksgiving coming up, I’m looking back on various recipes collected from people at large gatherings and written into the margins of my main cookbook. Sometimes when you ask for a recipe at a potluck, you really mean it.

Penney brought this first one over for a holiday gathering for my spiritual group, it was so long ago I don’t remember which holiday, but let’s say sometime in fall or winter because its gooey and filling and would go well with a harvest theme.

Corn Casserole

1 17 oz can creamed corn

1 17 oz can whole corn with liquid

1 cup uncooked macaroni

½ cup melted butter

2 T chopped onion

2 T chopped green pepper

1 cup cubed processed cheese

Mix all the above and put in 2 quart casserole dish. Bake covered for 30 min and uncovered for 30 min at 350.

I don’t remember but I think the next one is Afghani. At least I have other Afghani soup recipes that use yogurt so it’s a safe bet. It’s also very healthy and tasty.

Yogurt Soup

1 med onion, chopped

½ stick butter

2 cup chicken broth

¼ cup pearl barley soaked overnight

¼ cup parsley

¼ cup dried mint

1 egg

2 cups yogurt

Lemon juice

Saute onion in butter. Add broth, simmer til just below boiling. Add drained barley and cook til tender, about 20 minutes. Add salt, pepper, parsley. Beat the egg and add it to the yogurt. Pour yogurt slowly into the broth, don’t boil or it will curdle. Simmer 10-15 minutes. Garnish with mint and a little lemon juice.

This next one took major arm twisting to get ahold of. I’ve never understood the idea of keeping a recipe a secret unless you’re like Colonel Sanders or something. So here I go, blowing all opportunities of becoming a franchise billionaire by posting the recipe for simply the best homemade ice cream EVER.

Liz’s Ice Cream

3 cups sugar

3 T cocoa

8 beaten eggs

As much milk as there is eggs

Mix the above and make into a custard on the stove over med heat, stirring constantly. Make sure you beat the eggs into it well or you will end up with scrambled eggs in your ice cream. It may curdle, and that’s okay.

Pour into ice cream freezer while still warm and add:

4 cups half and half

4 cups heavy cream

1 T vanilla

Freeze as directed.

I’ve also left out the cocoa and doubled the vanilla to make a vanilla version that was deadly good. Mexican vanilla. There’s nothing like Mexican vanilla in the world. And yet it’s illegal to sell it here, so get someone to sneak some across the border for you. It’s heavenly.

Soup

I'll be making some beef stew today, to serve later on in the week. Today I have time and besides, it's one of those dishes that taste better the next day. I don't need a recipe, but for curiosity's sake, since it was sitting next to the computer from yesterday. I thought I'd see what the Household Searchlight Recipe Book, 1936, had to offer in the way of soups.

Cream of Corn
1 cup corn
2 cups milk, scalded
3 T melted butter
salt and pepper
1 cup boiling water
3 T flour
1/2 T minced onion
1 T chopped celery leaves
Brown onion and celery leaves in butter. Add flour. Mix until smooth. Add milk slowly, stirring constantly. Add water. Cook over hot water until thick and smooth. Add corn. Season to taste. Heat thoroughly. If desired, celery salt may be used for chopped celery leaves.

While I do enjoy corn soup, it was this variation that caught my eye:

Pea and Peanut Soup
Substitute one cup pea puree or sieved peas for corn, prepare as cream of corn soup. Add 1/2 t finely ground peanuts to each serving.

That seems worth a try, especially when I can find fresh peas. Growing my own is difficult, given that rabbits have eaten the plants that last few years I tried. I will leave the next one up to other people. My kids love salmon but I can't stand it. I cook it anyway, even though it stinks up the house. I have a special pan reserved just for salmon after the incident in which I cooked pastry on a pan that had previously had salmon on it, not knowing that the oils would so stubbornly penetrate the pan, and served up fishy puff pastry to my guests. Salmon is so oily I can't imagine it needs the extra butter in this soup--or that it would not benefit from some kind of thickening.

Salmon Soup
4 cups milk
2 cups shredded salmon
2 T butter
salt and pepper
Combine salmon, butter, and milk. Season to taste. Heat thoroughly. Stir until well-blended. Serve at once.


Here's two more that are unusual for inclusion in the 'soup' category:

Jellied Fruit Soup
1 cup orange juie
1 cup pineapple juice
1 package sweetened lemon flavored gelatin
Heat juices to boiling. Add gelatin. Stir until dissolved. Pour into a shallow oblong mold. Chill until firm. Cut into cubes. Serve in bouillon cups with crisp crackers.

Chow Mein
1 lb diced lean pork, veal, or chicken
2 cups diced celery
1 t salt
2 T corn starch
2 cups chow mein noodles
2 cups water or meat stock
1/2 cup diced onions
2 cups canned bean sprouts
2 T soy sauce
Fry meat 5 minutes in fat. Add water or stock. Cover. Simmer until tender. Add celery and onion. Simmer ten minutes. Moisten corn starch in a little water. Add to first mixture. Add bean sprouts and soy sauce. Season to taste. Heat thoroughly. Serve over noodles.

Log cabin cooking

I’ve been out of town for work and took along a history book to read on the plane. It had some interesting stuff about Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and use of military tribunals to prosecute civilians during the civil war. Stuff they don’t tell you about in school. It doesn’t make me feel one bit better about the Patriot Act but it does make me drag The Lincoln Heritage Trail Cook Book, by Marian French, 1971, out of the basement to see if there’s anything worth trying. I have no idea if any of the information in this book about Lincoln’s culinary proclivities is accurate, but it’s at least not as disturbing as rummaging thru de-Bowdlerized history.

“Abe Lincoln’s stepmother was one of the best sausage makers. On a solid block of hard wood she would pound the best cuts of meats available with a wooden mallet. Then she would add seasoning and herbs and mix it thoroughly. The sausage was packed into crocks and covered with freshly rendered lard and set away to ripen. Abe Lincoln said he could smell that good sausage cooking while he was still a mile away. Abe loved fried apples and salt pork for breakfast—or biscuits with ham and cream gravy.”

After talking about the simple plain food of the struggling settlers of Kentucky, there’s this soup recipe. Guess the Indians taught them how to grow cans of Campbell’s.

Cream of Green Pepper Soup

1 medium green pepper, chopped

½ small onion chopped

2 T butter

1 can (10.5 oz. ) condensed cream of celery soup

1 soup can of milk

Heat pepper and onion in butter. Cook 5 minutes. Place in electric blender and blend well. Add cream of celery soup and milk, blend a few minutes until smooth. Heat gently.

Can't have soup without bread, so here's 3 options:

Bean Bread (Indian)

Pot of boiling water

½ cup cooked beans

1 cup cornmeal

Mix beans and meals together, add enough water to moisten until it holds together. Drop in boiling water and cook (as dumplings). (No salt to prevent crumbling.) This mixture was also wrapped in corn husks or large tree leaves, tied with a stout reed, then dropped into boiling water.

I know everyone has been keeping all their pork fat since I posted about that, so you could probably use a recipe to use up all the browned bits of meat leftover (cracklings) once you strain the rendered fat.

Crackling Bread

2 cups cornmeal

½ t salt

½ t soda

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup cracklings

Mix cornmeal with salt and soda, add buttermilk and cracklings. Form into cakes and place in greased baking pans. Bake at 450 for 30 minutes.

I can remember my mother singing:

“Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’ shortnin’,

Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread (2X)

Put on the skillet, put on the lid

Mammy’s gonna make a little shortin’ bread,

That ain’t all she gonna do

Mammy’s gonna make a little coffee too.”

I’ve seen various versions of just what exactly shortnin bread is, but no actual recipe and I’ve never tried to make any. I thought it was like a batter bread, like indian fry bread, but here’s the one printed in this book. This is like a basic biscuit but without leavening. We’re having mussels and shrimp tonight, with a crusty baguette to soak up the broth, so no trying it out with dinner.

Shortnin’ Bread

1 stick butter

¼ cup brown sugar

1 ½ cup flour

Mix butter with sugar. Add flour and mix well. Roll about ½ inch thick on a floured board and shape with a biscuit cutter. Bake on lightly greased and floured pan at 350 for about 20 minutes.

More recipes coming!

Sick/Well Day

My kids can smell a mental health day from a mile off. I’ve been really busy lately and thought, “I don’t have anything that HAS to be done tomorrow; think I’ll give myself a break and take it off, maybe take the dog for a long walk around the lake, practice my dancing, do something creative…” These are the kind of thoughts that arc through the air like lightening and bring on instant illness in my children. So yesterday afternoon was spent at the Dr.’s office instead, followed by the required trip to the pharmacy for antibiotics. At least this time didn’t involve vomiting. I guess it's not much fun for the sick-ee either to be schlepped around when all you want is to be home on the couch snuggled up with your cat and endless episodes of Mythbusters.

At least I had the time to be all nurturing and junk, too bad this was the child that will not eat anything. Otherwise, I might have made her this Italian Wedding Soup, which I had at a restaurant many many years ago, loved, and scribbled down notes on what was in there so I could copy it at home. It's good for a cold in body or spirit, and a nice variation from the usual chicken soup.

My original scribble in the restaurant.

Brown a pound of sweet Italian sausage (or spicy if you want it hot!).

Brown a chopped onion in the above fat.

Add chicken stock, and when boiling, chopped carrot and barley. Cook until tender.

Add chopped spinach.

If I want something hearty, I’ll add biscuit dumplings or cheese raviolis to this.

Sounds perfect for the night of our first hard fall freeze. I may have decided what’s for dinner tonight.

Soupe or zuppa?

I’m trying to remember how old I was when my Dad made his now infamous potato soup. I think my next two siblings were toddlers but the others hadn’t been born. That means it was just me alone with his cooking skills—which might have extended as far as Arabian cooking but certainly had not made the cultural leap yet—actually, based on the matazeez incident in which he tried to poison my grandparents while he was dating my mother, I don’t think they extended that far—when my mom left him in charge of making dinner. Surely she meant to simplify things by suggesting he make potato soup. Maybe she even gave him instructions. I don’t know.

What I do know is that he winged it. Potato soup has to have potatoes so he cut some up in small pieces and boiled them. And boiled them. And boiled them until they jelled. The starch in a potato is a funny thing. It can suck up a lot of water like a sponge and form long sticky ropey molecule chains. This is why it’s good to let your potatoes drain awhile, or even reheat them in the pan a little to dry them off when you are making mashed potatoes. The starch cells can also collapse if handled with any force, like mashing or whipping them really hard in hopes of creating some kind of “creamy” base for the soup. I don’t believe it crossed his mind to use milk, or if it did, it was too late. The casein in milk (and butter) interacts with the potato starch to keep the starch from swelling and forming those long chains. Just try making mashed potatoes without either and see what you get.

As my mother tells the story, when she walked in the door she found us all sitting in silence around the kitchen table. I looked up at her and said, “I hope you’re hungry!” with all the contempt for her neglectful parenting that my preadolescent body could conjure. “What’s for dinner?” she chirruped. I held out my bowl, picked up my spoon, plunged it into the center of the white shimmering mass, and let go. It stood straight upright.

But let’s go back to Italy and France for our cuisine comparison. I love soup, including potato, regardless of any past trauma. Thank goodness my mom didn't tell my dad he should make some little hat soup for dinner. 

.

Cappelletti in Brodo (Little Hat Soup)

Prepare and set aside 2 quarts chicken broth

Combine and set aside:

 ½ cup (about ¼ lb) ricotta or cottage cheese

½ cup finely chopped cooked chicken

2 T grated Parmesan cheese

1 egg, slightly beaten

1/8 t salt

Few grains nutmeg

Few grains pepper

Prepare half recipe of basic noodle dough. Roll about 1/16 inch thick. Cut into rounds with 2 ½ round cookie cutter. Place ½ t cheese-chicken mixture in center of each round of dough. Fold each round in half, covering the mounds of filling. Dampen edges of pasta with water and press together to seal. Bring two extreme ends together. Dampen and press together to seal.

Bring broth to a boil and add pasta. Cook about 20-25 minutes or until pasta is tender. Test by pressing a piece against side of pan with fork or spoon. Serve with broth.

Pasta (Basic Noodle Dough)

Sift into a large bowl:

4 cups flour

¼ t salt

Make a well in the center of flour.

Add 4 eggs, one at a time, mixing slightly after each addition. Gradually add 6 T cold water.

Mix well to make a stiff dough. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead (page 6). Proceed as directed in recipes.

Potage Saint-Germain (Green Pea Soup)

Put into a heavy saucepan:

1 small head lettuce, shredded

2 cups shelled fresh green peas

1 cup water

½ cup chopped green leeks (green part only)

2 T fat

2 t chopped chervil

1 t sugar

1 t salt

¼ t pepper

Bring quickly to boiling and cook until peas are tender. Reserve 3T peas for garnish. Put remaining mixture thru sieve. Return sieved mixture to the pan. Reheat with 2 cups bouillon. Just before serving, blend in 2 cups cream and heat thoroughly. Garnish with reserved peas.

Can't have soup without some great bread, I'll have to do that comparison next time.

Foxgloves and Oxtail

There was a mystery series, Sgt. Cribb, on public television that I loved when I was a teen. We taped it and that was one of the things I could watch in Arabia. There’s an episode where an older gentleman is in danger of being poisoned by his much younger wife. Oxtail soup figures prominently in the story. Oxtail soup does not figure prominently in American cuisine, so both my mom and I were tickled to find canned oxtail soup in the grocery store in Saudi Arabia. Curious we tried it and it was quite good. Of course half the fun was just the connection to a favorite show.

I copied an oxtail soup recipe into the margins of my cookbook as soon as I could, sans digitalis. I haven’t made it very often, but I still enjoy it. It’s not common, I’ve never seen it for sale in a can in the states, and yet you do see oxtails in the stores here and I really don’t know what else you would do with them. I have decided however, that oxtail soup is one of those foods best eaten without thinking too much. There’s something about those tails boiling that is a little creepy. I like my meat prepacked in Styrofoam with no visible reference to ever having been part of a living creature.

Oxtail soup

2 small oxtails

2 T butter

2 onions, chopped

3 carrots, chopped

3 leeks, chopped

4 celery stalks, chopped

1 bay leaf

2 t salt

10 peppercorns

2 garlic cloves

Bouquet garni

10 c water

1 T lemon juice

1 T Worcestershire sauce

Have tails cut in 1 inch sections. Wash and dry well and brown in butter. Add next ten ingredients. Boil 5 minutes, skim froth off, lower heat, cover and simmer 3 hours. Remove meat and chill. Remove bouquet garni and puree or strain liquid and vegetables. Remove fat from meat, dice, and add to reheated broth when ready to serve. Top with grated parmesan or swiss. 


Or foxgloves to speed your inheritance.

Grease! or butter...whatever

Yeast! 

You want your bread to be so soft and light

You got a growin' thing, you gotta feed it right
There ain't no danger it can rise too far
So add some sugar now, just a pinch from the jar

Yeast is the word

Learning to bake can be a royal pain
When your bread don't rise, It's just a crying shame
The top is burning, a disaster so real
So take it out right now, you just ruined your meal

Yeast is the word

(is the word that you heard)
It's alive, can't mistreat it
Yeast needs the time, a warm place, and devotion
Yeast is the microbe we're eating

Time to make some bread! And I’ve got a carton of buttermilk in the fridge that’s about to go bad, so…

Buttermilk Bread

6 cups buttermilk

1 cake dry yeast

½ c lukewarm water

Flour

1 ½ T salt

2 T sugar

2 T butter

Heat buttermilk, stirring constantly until scalded.(Scalding breaks up the proteins in the milk, that’s why you see it so frequently as a step in bread recipes; it’s all about the texture.) Remove from fire and let cool. Add yeast which has been softened in the water. Add sufficient flour to make a medium batter. Beat until smooth. Cover and set in a warm place and allow to stand overnight. (This creates a fermented batter, with a greater depth of yeasty flavor, called a ‘sponge’. I love that term and that’s what it looks like.)

Add sugar, salt, butter, and enough flour to make a dough just stiff enough to knead. Turn onto lightly floured board and knead until smooth and elastic. Allow to rise until double in bulk and work down. Let rise again until double in bulk. Form into loaves. Place in well-oiled pans. Cover and let rise until double in bulk. Bake in hot oven, 450°, about 45 minutes.

From Mrs. W.H. Juedeman, Bristow, OK, printed in The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, 1936.

My kitchen is not very warm so this process took most of the day. That’s fine; it gives more time for the flavor to develop. Here’s the end product, a soft dense texture with a hint of sourness from the buttermilk. I would absolutely make it again. It’s very similar to my mom’s famous dinner rolls.

A bowl of homemade tomato soup is perfect with the bread, slathered with Laughing Cow blue cheese spread. The soup is my last hurrah to the tomatoes of summer. Never any recipe there, just whatever is at hand to add to the tomatoes, in this case: zucchini, carrots, roasted Anaheim chilis, a little chicken stock, and tons of garlic. My daughter didn’t want the soup, or the Laughing Cow, but she did eat the bread…smothered in ketchup. Which proves the old adage: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him eat the stinky cheese.

The Wages of Sin

I've got one more post about the recipes in The Perfection Stove Company's cook book and that has to do with this section on recipes for sick people and invalids. I know there was a time when people believed that sickness was the consequence of sin. Well, this would be the purgatory: eating gruel and beef tea.

Reading the recipe, I can see that beef tea is really just a beef broth but something about the idea of meat "tea" gives me the willies. I'm not sure what soaking the meat in cold water is in aid of. At first, I was afraid that it was going to be meat sun tea: put the raw meat in there awhile, take it out, and then boil the water. Mmmmm, meat tea.

Beef Tea
Secure 1 lb. steak from top of round; wipe, cut in pieces, removing fat, and soak 15 minutes in 1 pint of cold water. Put meat and water in a glass fruit jar and cover jar. Place in a kettle of cold water, allow water to heat slowly, then cook for 3 hours. Strain, season, and heat again before serving.


I assume the tea is a nice beverage with the arrowroot gruel listed above it.

Arrowroot Gruel

Use 1 t arrowroot to each half cup of boiling water. Mix with cold water to make a thin paste, adding a bit of salt; then add boiling water and cook 10 minutes. Cream or milk may be added if desired.

Arrowroot? The one thing on the planet with less taste than cornstarch, for when you can't even keep your own spit down. Oh wait, let's make it even more like spit by mixing it with cream or milk so it's slimey. There, now you don't have to go to the trouble of puking; it's already in the bowl.

Aunt Hasna's Jireesh Soup

My Dad went to visit our family recently and my aunt prepared this soup for breaking fast in the evening during Ramadan. (Soup is a popular dish for breaking fast since it's usually easy on the stomach.) My Dad got her to write the recipe down and brought it home for my mom, along with a 25 lb bag of jireesh to go in it. It's been a big hit here too.

1 cup jireesh (dry uncooked cracked wheat)
4 medium tomatoes, diced
1 onion, diced
chopped cilantro, cumin, black pepper, and cinnamon and--if you can find it at a middle eastern import
store--a dried lemon or lime
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 liter water
cooked chicken breast
1 pkg. Knorr chicken noodle soup with angel hair pasta

Soak jireesh for 1 1/2 hours in water, put on low fire and simmer for 1 hour, add lemon/lime. Mix tomatoes, onion, cilantro, and spices in a blender. Add to jireesh and let simmer for 1/2 hour. Add soup packet and chopped cooked chicken and simmer another half hour. A little lemon juice can be added just before serving.

You'll be surprised how bright and fresh yet comforting this tastes. My Tennessee-born boyfriend tried it today and immediately told me I needed to get the recipe. Got it covered, I replied.

Creole Bean Soup

2 c. dried pea beans

1 ham bone

1 ½ qts cold water

1 sliced medium onion

1 scraped whole carrot

2 scraped carrots, shredded

1 medium green pepper, minced

½ c chopped celery

1 No. 2 ½ can tomatoes (3 ½ c.)

Salt and pepper

Soak beans overnight in cold water to cover. Drain. Combine beans, ham bone, water, onion, and whole carrot; cover, and simmer over low heat for about 2-2 ½ hours, or until beans are very tender. Remove ham bone; mash beans with potato masher until broken up. Add shredded carrots, green pepper, celery, and tomatoes. Simmer covered for 15 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serves 6-8, as a hearty soup.

The Good Housekeeping Cook Book, 1942.

I'll try it, but think I'll use ham hocks and add the pulled meat back in with the carrots, etc. Bet it would work in a crockpot too.

Chicken and Noodles

Chicken and Egg Noodles

No South Beach diet here. This needs to be served over mashed potatoes with a side of hot rolls. This family starch-fest is served when relatives visit. It’s an affordable way to serve up vats of comfort food to the 20 or more people that turn up at my folks’ house. I made sure to corner my mom and write this one down on the inside back cover of my cookbook.

Noodles:

Eggs

Salt

Flour

For each three servings, beat one egg with a pinch of salt. Add enough flour to your eggs to form a wet dough. Knead with lots of flour on a board. Roll it out thin, fold in half, repeat, flouring between the layers if necessary to be sure they don’t stick, until rolled very thin. Cut into strips. Dust with more flour and lay out on waxed paper to dry.

Chicken:

Chicken

Chicken bullion

Meanwhile, boil a chicken in chicken bullion until tender. Cool, debone, and chop. Save the broth. You’ll need a cup or two of broth for each three servings so you may need to add prepared chicken bullion to get that amount.

When ready to make dinner, reheat broth to a simmer. Dump the floured noodles into the broth and cook for 20-30 minutes until tender, stirring frequently. Add the chicken to warm through. The noodles will cook best and make their own thickened gravy if cooked slowly and gently rather than on high.

Fancy it up with sliced mushrooms, peas, or corn thrown in the pot. We always argue about whether or not the innards should be boiled up and added too. I am not a pro-innards girl, fortunately my sisters love them and fight over who gets the liver. Consequently, someone always sneaks over to the stove and eats it before it gets added to the pot. Yech!

Spanish Meatballs

This one is so favored that I wrote it twice in the margins of one of my cookbooks. My mom got the recipe from her friend, Maria, who used to watch my younger siblings. I only learned much later from a Spanish coworker that it's called 'albondigas'. Come to think of it, looking at the 'al-' at the beginning of it, I'll bet it has Moorish roots.

Spanish meatballs

4 lbs hamburger
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup uncooked rice
1/2 large onion, finely chopped
3 medium potatoes, finely chopped
1/2 tomatoes from a large can

Mix the above and form into meatballs. Drop them in gently boiling water along with:

1/2 cup uncooked rice
3 medium potatoes, diced
1/2 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves
oregano to taste
tomatoes and juice left in the can

Simmer long and slow until the rice and potatoes are tender. I sometimes add a little beef or chicken bullion to the water too. This thickens up a little as the starch releases. It's even better warmed up the next day.