mama guest blogs: from the red recipe binder files

(also known as: blogger bail-out. because my mother hates to see me be lazy on the interweb.)

The Red Recipe Binder

My mother (Clare’s Mimi) says that I “couldn’t find the kitchen” before I got married, which is true. I lived at home. My grandmother did all the cooking. My only kitchen chore was drying dishes once in a while.

So when I got married and moved out of state I had to learn to cook or face a lifetime of what my new husband had eaten in his starving-student days. Fortunately, his cousin Beth gave me The Joy of Cooking, as shower gift. I read it like a novel, all 900+ pages. And I decided that maybe the Tuna, Noodle and Mushroom Casserole on p. 215 (subtitled “An excellent emergency dish”) was something I could tackle.

That’s where it all started. We didn’t have no stinkin interweb back then. We had home delivery of the daily and Sunday paper, and Mimi has always favored magazine subscriptions as gifts. So every month I would read Redbook and McCall’s and Good Housekeeping and cut out the recipes I wanted to try. And every Thursday I’d read the Food Section of the paper so I could cut out those recipes, too.

I scotch-taped each recipe onto a page of looseleaf paper and filed the pages in a 3-ring binder with sections for each of the chapters in Joy, starting with Beverages and moving on to Hors d’Oeuvre, Salads/Soups, Vegetables, Fish, Meat, Poultry, Breads and Coffee Cakes, Pies and Pastries, Cookies, and so on. I left out Canapes and Tea Sandwiches, Game, and Canning, Salting, Smoking and Drying.

The scotch tape is all dried out now, and a lot of the pages are ripped on the edge where the 3-hole-punch used to be. Paging through the tattered remnants of my homemade cookbook, it’s easy to see what foods fascinated and frustrated me in the 70s. There are a dozen different pie crust recipes, lots of fancy dinner party dishes like Coquilles Saint Jacques (which I am absolutely certain I have never cooked). There are five carrot cake recipes, including the definitive version from the first “new” Philadelphia restaurant, Steve Poses’ Commissary. The Frog-Commissary Cookbook http://www.amazon.com/Frog-Commissary-Cookbook-Steven-Poses/dp/0940159732 didn’t come out until a few years later, but somebody at work had the Commissary calendar (1979?). It was a pinup page-per-month calendar, with a hand-lettered recipe for each month. Porn for office girls.

If a recipe turned out especially well, I drew stars on the clipping. Like this one, which I’ve been making ever since.

Chicken and Sausage

Ingredients

1 broiler-fryer chicken, cut up (now I use skinless, boneless thighs)

½ tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

1 tablespoon salad oil

¾ lb sweet or hot Italian sausages, cut in 2-inch pieces

1 can (28 oz) whole tomatoes, drained, reserving ½ cup liquid

½ cup dry red wine

1 cup sliced onions

2 medium green peppers, sliced

1 tsp basil, crushed (now I use fresh or fresh-frozen)

Pinch sugar

1 ½ cups sliced fresh button mushrooms (this was before we knew about portabellas)

1/3 c. flour

3 tablespoons water

Prep

Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper. Slice everything up and have it ready.

Cooking

In large skillet, heat oil. Add chicken and cook until well browned on all sides, about 5 minutes. Remove chicken and set aside. Prick sausages with a fork and brown in the same skillet. Remove and pour off excess drippings. Add chicken and sausages back to the skillet. Add tomatoes, wine, onions, green peppers, basil and sugar and cook for a few minutes, stirring up browned bits from the bottom. Return chicken and sausages to the pan. Add mushrooms and stir until well combined. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 35 to 40 minutes, until chicken is tender. Push chicken and sausages to one side of the skillet. Combine flour and water until smooth; stir in ¼ cup of pan juices. Add to the skillet and cook until sauce bubbles and thickens slightly, about 5 minutes. Stir to mix everything together. Better the second day.

placeholder/excuses

dear interwebs:

my memory card filled up shortly before christmas.

and i lost my cookie notes on my desk somewhere when we rearranged furniture.

and i'm really lazy.

i have to transcribe a recipe from photos of the cookbook-- including julia's editorializing and mom & enid's notes from 1980.

i'll be back soon!


love,
clare

meringue kisses

(recipe from cookies, halved)

total haul: ~60
husbanded: none
net haul: ~60
bake time: overnight
notes: more dye!

pinwheels

(recipe from joy of cooking doubled)

total haul: ~8 dozen
husbanded: ~1 dozen (ends...)
net haul: 7 dozen
bake time: 12 minutes
notes: square the inside edge to reduce unusable end pieces.

spritzies

(recipe from cookies doubled)

total haul: ~14 dozen
husbanded: ~2 dozen
net haul: ~12 dozen
bake time: 8 minutes
notes: less a tablespoon or two of flour. don't use insulated baking sheets.

regularly scheduled baking: christmas cookies

i'm not going to type out all my christmas cookie recipes. i'm just not. because, gentle readers, it's a pain in the ass.

BUT. (haha, see what i did there? the segue? from ASS to BUT?)

here are my resources:

1. cookies by lou seibert pappas, copyright 1980, nitty gritty productions
2. joy of cooking by irma s. rombauer and marion rombauer becker, copyright 1975, the bobbs-merrill company
3. the international cookie cookbook by nancy baggett, copyright1988, stewart, tabori & chang, inc.
4. favorite brand name old fashioned holiday recipes, copyright 2004, publications international, ltd.
5. the internet (i had to google the quaker oats oatmeal cookie because... i bought generic oats? last winter? in the midst of a HUGE oatmeal kick? and then it got warm again?)
   

cookies was bought second-hand from the helen kate furness library in wallingford, pa, for (i THINK) thirty-five cents. it's now held together with duct tape. joy of cooking was... a gift? or i bought it for myself. THAT narrows it down, doesn't it? the international cookie cookbook is a loan from my mama, who probably means to get it back someday, so i should probably copy out the one recipe i use. favorite brand name... was a gift from my mother-in-law and is full of fantastic recipes that i don't make, plus two super-easy fudge recipes and a biscotti made with cake mix that i do.

i'll be wrapping up the holiday baking on friday (or saturday) and then focusing on christmas dinner. and sometime in there, i SWEAR i will blog about bûche de noël. AFTER THAT, i promise a pasta-making tutorial for dear julia.

and, speaking of julias, while you're at it, you MIGHT AS WELL make a thousand. (this? is pretty much julia child in a nutshell. and my baking philosophy.)

guest blogger (mama, of course): another recipe for granola freaks with aarp cards

Homemade granola: why bother? Of course, at this point in my life, that’s my reaction to the idea of any homemade food. I’m officially done with cooking. But thirty years ago I was the cookingest girl in the feminist book group, the bakingest mom in the La Leche League. I had a baby food grinder and an electric yogurt maker. I grew sprouts in my kitchen window. No kidding.

And once in a while, even now, I get the urge to open the door of one of my ovens (I have three – which is a lot of ovens for somebody who doesn’t cook any more), pull out all the pots and pans I store in there, and see if it still works. I’m especially prone to that impulse when the weather turns cool and crisp and the only available outdoor activity is raking. Just because I’m over cooking doesn’t mean I’m into manual labor.

Which is how I ended up last weekend making six pounds of granola and five loaves of dense hippie-style multi-grain high protein bread while Clare’s daddy filled a 4’ x 10’ compost bin with shredded leaves.

Both of those recipes date from those halcyon days of yore when medical science told us that vegetarians had to eat complementary amino acids at each meal or risk kwashiorkor. So your granola had almonds and grains and nonfat dry milk and coconut and lots of oil and honey. And your bread had sunflower seeds and wheat germ and rice flour and cornmeal and soy flour and you slathered it with gobs of cream cheese and jam. And your burrito had beans and brown rice and a sky high pile of shredded cheddar. And your dessert had carob and wheat germ and almonds and butter and brown sugar with whipped cream on top. Because that was healthy eating.
Maybe I’ll write down the hippie bread recipe some day. It’s really good, if you don’t mind the fact that a paper-thin slice has the heft and texture of a roofing shingle and counts as three Weight Watchers points. We weren’t on Weight Watchers back then. We were on the Scarsdale diet or drinking Metrecal.

This is definitely the grooviest granola you ever finished a pound of when you were high and got the munchies. At least, that’s what people said at the time, through the haze, as they crawled around on the floor to find the rest of their clothes. Not me. I never ate more than half a cup at the most. On top of a big bowl of ice cream. While sober as a judge. SweartoGod.
The recipe’s coming soon. Two things first.

Thing one: For as long as I’ve been making this granola I told people it was from a magazine column by Julia Child. But when I looked up the recipe in my big box of magazine recipes from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 00s (an interesting archeological expedition, about which I’ll write some other time), the clipping doesn’t have Julia’s name anywhere on it. The headline is, “Another Recipe for Granola Freaks” and the text reads, “This one comes from Marilyn D. in San Francisco, who says it makes the best mixture she’s ever tasted, so much so that she is quite willing to ignore the cost both monetarily and calorifically.” It sounds like something Julia would say, and I swear Julia had a regular column in one of the mainstream women’s magazines back then (McCall’s? Redbook? Good Housekeeping?), but I can’t prove it from this clipping.

Thing two: The granola has morphed over the years to the point that Marilyn D. might not recognize it. I use half as much oil as the original recipe and I cut out the coconut altogether to eliminate saturated fat. Instead of a whole cup of honey, I sweeten it with apple cider and a little molasses. I add flax meal because it’s supposed to lower your cholesterol, and I leave out the salt because I have high blood pressure. So I guess that makes this

Another Recipe for Granola Freaks with AARP Cards

Ingredients

• 5 cups old fashioned rolled oats
• 1 cup sliced almonds
• 1 cup sunflower seeds
• ½ cup freshly ground flax seeds
• ½ cup wheat germ
• 1 cup Grape Nuts
• ½ cup powdered skim milk (optional if you’re vegan)
• ½ cup canola oil
• ¼ cup molasses
• 1 cup apple cider
• ½ cup dark, seedless raisins

Prep

• Throw all the dry ingredients into a huge bowl.
• Stir together the oil, molasses and cider in a separate bowl and pour over.
• Mix thoroughly.
• If you want clumps and clusters, you’ll need more oil and more molasses. My way, the granola is drier and less clumpy. You can double or triple or quadruple the recipe if you have a big enough tub to mix it in and enough pans to spread it out in for baking. And three ovens.

Actual Cooking

• Spread into a 13 x 9 inch baking pan.
• Bake at 350 degrees, about 40 to 45 minutes.
• Stir every 10 minutes, adding the raisins in the last 10 minutes of baking.
• Remove from oven; cool.
• If you want to blow your friends’ minds the next time they get the munchies, add about a cup of chocolate chips when it’s ALMOST cool. They’ll melt just a little and ramp up the deliciousness significantly.
• Store in an airtight container.

I usually mix an ounce or so of granola with some nonfat plain Greek yogurt for a total of 180 calories (140 per ounce for the granola) and lots of energy to start my day. We didn’t have Greek yogurt back when I began making this granola. Well, I guess the Greeks had it, but where I come from we didn’t. Instead, we had to take the yogurt out of the electric yogurt maker (they still make them: http://www.vmc-health.com/index2.htm ) and let it drain through a tea strainer lined with cheesecloth overnight. Because life was hard back then. Nasty, brutish, and covered in sesame tahini.