Shrimp or Clam Salad
This is the salad we are taking today. As a new bride, my far more exprienced upstairs neighbor, Sarah, was always sharing her best recipes with me. More than fifty years later, I still think of her with gratitude when I use one of her recipes.
Today, I intended to do a clam salad, only to discover I had no clam juice! I did, however, have a big package of frozen jumbo shrimp, so I boiled some water, threw it over the shrimp, strained the water after letting the shrimp cook maybe two minutes, and had a tasty shrimp broth to use for the rice.
Sarah, I am blessing you in my heart; we love this salad as much today as the many years ago you shared it with us.
Shrimp or Clam Rice Salad
3 cups freshly cooked hot rice
3 -4 Tablespoons Mayonnaise
2 Tbls cocktail sauce
2 -3 chopped green onions
1 stalk chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped sweet pickle
12 – 16 oz cooked frozen shrimp
or
2 cans whole clams, drained
Cook rice; add solid ingredients (no need to thaw shrimp if rice is hot). Add sauces and very little pepper to the rice. Stir, cover, and refrigerate until cold. Serve on lettuce. Great hot-weather salad; can be used as a main meal.
Soused Apple Cake for the Fish Fry
It’s a three-day weekend, but I have things I need to do, so I am up at my normal time to bake while the day is still – well, not cool, but not so hot as later in the day. I need to make a salad; I need to bake a cake. We are invited to a fish fry – one of our favorite invitations. The host and his wife fry up a “mess” of fish, really good fish, and the rest of us are allowed to bring sides.
This cake, Soused Apple Cake, is easy, except for remembering to slice the apples a day before and soak the slices overnight in brandy. I could be like those famous cooks who tell you, “use a very good (olive oil, brandy, etc),” but honestly, here it would be a waste of good brandy because the brandy is a supporting actor and will be competing with cinnamon and nutmeg, so just use something you would use for cooking, not drinking.
It is also a very sweet cake. I have tried over the many years I’ve been making it, to make it healthier. It just isn’t the same. Today, I followed the original “can’t stop eating this cake” recipe.
Soused Apple Cake
4 cups sliced apples
brandy
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup salad oil
2 eggs
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped pecans
Peel, core, and finely slice apples; put into bowl and cover with brandy. Let sit overnight.
Combine sugar, salad oil and eggs. Set aside. Sift together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt. Add to oil mixture. Drain apples, mix in, adding chopped pecans. Mix well (it will be thick) and pour into a greased and floured 9”x13” baking dish. Cook at 330°F for 1 hour.
Let stand ten minutes while you prepare topping.
Pecan topping
1 stick butter
2 Tablespoons milk
1 cup brown sugar
1 1/4 cups chopped pecans
Combine butter, milk, and sugar in a saucepan; bring to a boil, then boil for one minute. Add pecans, mix well, and spoon over apple cake while it is still hot.
The original recipe invites you to serve with whipped cream, but I find it to be overkill.
Pork with Apples and Onions
This recipe was inspired by a Ken Follett novel where a local squire served a pork dish with apples and onions when the Earl visited. I was intrigued, and found a recipe my family loves.
Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Apples and Onions
YIELDMakes 4 servings
INGREDIENTS
1 large pork tenderloin (about 14 ounces)
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 tablespoons whole grain Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1 large onion, sliced
2 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, sliced 1/4 inch thick
1/2 cup dry white wine or apple cider
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 450°F. Season pork with salt and pepper.
Heat 2 tablespoons oil in large nonstick ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add pork and sear until all sides are brown, turning occasionally, about 5 minutes.
Transfer pork to plate. Cool slightly. Spread mustard over top and sides of pork; press fennel seeds into mustard.
Add remaining 1 tablespoon oil to skillet. Add onion slices and apples; sauté over medium heat until golden, about 5 minutes. Spread evenly in skillet and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place pork atop apple-onion mixture.
Transfer skillet to oven and roast until apple-onion mixture is soft and brown and meat thermometer inserted into center of pork registers 150°F, about 15 minutes. Transfer pork to platter and tent with foil. Let stand 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, pour white wine over apple-onion mixture in skillet. Stir mixture over high heat until slightly reduced, about 2 minutes. Cut pork on diagonal into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Spoon apple-onion mixture onto plates. Top with pork and serve.
From Epicurious who credits Bon Appetite February 2004
Autumn Plum Torte
We are watching the farmer’s markets for the first of the Italian plums, those elongated plums that show up around this time of the year. We are getting eager for Pflaumekuchen, or Autumn Plum Torte.
It’s really more like a pie. And I hate to tell you how easy it is to make.
This is my mother’s recipe:
Autumn Plum Torte (Pflaumekuchen)
1/4 Cup Butter
1 T Sugar
1/4 t. salt
2 eggs
1 c sifted flour
10 – 12 purple prune plums
1 c sugar
1 T Flour
Dash nutmeg and cinnamon
1/2 cup half and half
1. Cream butter and sugar, add salt and 1 egg yolk. Blend well, add 1 cup flour, mix well.
2. Press mix into bottom of greased 8” pie pan.
3. Cut plums in half or quarters; place cut side up on top of mix. It is pretty if you make a kind of circular pattern out from the center.
4. Combine sugar, 1 T flour and spices. Sprinkle over plums.
5. Beat 1 egg and 1 white, add half and half, pour over top.
6. Bake at 425 for ten minutes, then turn down to 350 for 40 – 45 minutes, until custard sets and plums are cooked.
The smell as it is cooking is divine. You can serve it in wedges, warm or cold.
You can also double this, and make it in a 9 x 14 pan, to serve to larger groups. It goes FAST!
Treasures From the Past: Cookbooks and Salmon Burgers
I used to collect cookbooks, and, at my prime, I probably had close to three hundred. I loved them, some more than others. When it comes to books, I think I may even have hoarder tendencies; it is very hard for me to part with a book.
ThIs is the first cookbook I ever bought for myself. I still love it and can’t part with it. I bought it in Nairobi in 1973. It has some great recipes, but most of all, it has an entire culture full of differences, with a guide to organizing a large camping trip into the wild, foods for invalids, pages of instructions for servants on how to do laundry, clean, etc., and an entire section on asking for what you need in Swahili.
Maybe it’s an age thing, but there came a year when I realized that I really only used a few of my books, and it was time to simplify. I am now down to about thirty cookbooks, and each one reflects on stages of my life with which I am not ready to let go. Germany. Tunis. Saudi Arabia. Jordan. The South (you can’t beat the South for desserts.) And Alaska.
Both my Alaska cookbook (1947) and my Pacific Northwest cookbook (1946) are older than I am. The Alaska cookbook is from my Mom; she knew I would treasure it. I love looking through this cookbook and last night I cooked from it.
I can imagine there might be a way to fix moose burgers that would be tasty and delightful. As a child, I remember moose burgers as being tough, always, and chewy, and, well, game-y. Our dads hunted in the Fall. There were big hooks in our basement where they hung the deer or moose when they brought the hunt in, and where they skinned and quartered the meat. The butcher would grind the moose meat and package everything up in white freezer paper. The meat would be stored in the cold storage locker, and Dad would stop by during the winters and bring something home. The only thing worse than moose burgers were bear burgers.
We never killed what we didn’t eat. Nothing was wasted. It was like it would be disrespectful to the creatures we hunted.
This book was left to my by my aunt. I use it to make a Pacific Northwest Bouillabaisse, and several fruit desserts made with fruits which were plentiful in season – cherries, blueberries, rhubarb, as well as apples, peaches, apricots, etc. This book is another one I will pass along rather than get rid of.
So last night I wanted to make Salmon burgers. I looked in my Alaska cookbook, and there it was.
It made me laugh when I read through it. Canned milk – yes, well there are times in Alaska when fresh milk just isn’t available. Salmon was canned in big cookers in jars, and was an all day task. Corn flakes – we don’t even keep processed cereals in the house anymore. And no egg for binding, but I also remember that in the winters sometimes we didn’t have real eggs, only powdered eggs, which were good for cooking, like pancakes, but really were not at all egg like on their own.
So I used it as a guide, but changed things a little. I did brown the onion and green pepper and add it into the salmon mix. I actually did use milk, not believing it would absorb, but it did. I added an egg, just one. And I used half a cup of plain bread crumbs in place of the corn flakes. Because we like the taste of smoked salmon, I added a couple drops of liquid smoke.
BIG hit. These were moist and delicious. I started with a medium high heat, then turned it down when I flipped the burgers.
I served them with snow peas (mange tout) sauteed in garlic and butter.
I love it that salmon is so healthy and so available, and that these old cookbooks still have relevance; sometimes the oldies but goodies make a grand come back. I miss my Mom, and I miss the Aunt that gave me the PNW cookbook, but having their cookbooks keeps them a little closer.
Pork with Roasted Apples and Onions
“Where did you get this recipe? What gave you the idea?” AdventureMan asked as we feasted on a meal I wasn’t even sure we were going to like when I started it.
“Ken Follett,” I said slowly, trying to remember which book. I think it was A Column of Fire. The characters serve a meal of pork and apples, and it’s not anything I have cooked before, that combination, so down the rabbit hole I went. I have my Kindle on my laptop, I can check maps of where books are set, I can look up obscure words, and when something intrigues me, I can take a few minutes and follow that path.
I wasn’t sure how these ingredients would go, I wasn’t sure we would like fennel seeds, I wasn’t sure this was really a good recipe for us, but it sounds so good on a cold winters day and I had a pork tenderloin in the freezer. I pulled it out early in the day, read through the recipe, discovered my tenderloin was larger so I increased the amount of apples and onions by half. Actually, when I made the recipe, I didn’t really measure that closely; you can sort of tell from the instructions that this is another of those very forgiving recipes.
AdventureMan had some tiny potatoes left from his Bourride with Aioli, so he roasted them up with oil and garlic, salt and parsley, we put together a small green salad, and a feast was on the table. One bite and we agreed we have had such things on winter nights in France – and in Germany. These ingredients are so simple and the preparation, while a little fiddly, goes very quickly and easily. The combination is yummy.
Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Apples and Onions
Makes 4 servings
1 large pork tenderloin (about 14 ounces) (ours was 24 oz.)
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 tablespoons whole grain Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1 large onion, sliced
2 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, sliced 1/4 inch thick
1/2 cup dry white wine or apple cider
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 450°F. Season pork with salt and pepper.
Heat 2 tablespoons oil in large nonstick ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add pork and sear until all sides are brown, turning occasionally, about 5 minutes.
Transfer pork to plate. Cool slightly. Spread mustard over top and sides of pork; press fennel seeds into mustard.
Add remaining 1 tablespoon oil to skillet. Add onion slices and apples; sauté over medium heat until golden, about 5 minutes. Spread evenly in skillet and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place pork atop apple-onion mixture.
Transfer skillet to oven and roast until apple-onion mixture is soft and brown and meat thermometer inserted into center of pork registers 150°F, about 15 minutes. Transfer pork to platter and tent with foil. Let stand 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, pour white wine over apple-onion mixture in skillet. Stir mixture over high heat until slightly reduced, about 2 minutes. Cut pork on diagonal into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Spoon apple-onion mixture onto plates. Top with pork and serve.
From Epicurious who credits Bon Appetite February 2004
Thank you, Epicurious, and thank you Ken Follett!
Never Fail Appetizers: Sausage Cheese Puffs and Artichoke Cheese Dip
These two recipes are so easy that even a ten year old and a seven year old can make them – as we did last night to say farewell to 2020 (and good riddance!) and to welcome 2021. The kids love these, and so do most adults. At one party, I watched a shy man eat almost the entire recipe of cheese dip, he loved it so much. We are trying to give our grandchildren tools for living, tools for self-reliance and confidence in themselves and their skills.
They are both from an old cookbook from my military wife days – The Fort Leavenworth Cookbook. Things change; I don’t know if military wives still have the same expectations, but we needed fool-proof, quick recipes we could prepare from the pantry in a heartbeat. These two fit the bill, and are great crowd pleasers.
Sausage Cheese Puffs
1 pound hot or sweet bulk sausage
1 pound sharp cheddar cheese
3 cups biscuit mix
3/4 cup water
Brown sausage, drain and cool. Add cheese, biscuit mix and water. Mx with fork – or fingers, until it sticks together. Roll into 1 inch balls. Bake at 400 degrees for 12 – 15 minutes, until lightly browned. Makes about 80.
Artichoke Cheese Dip
1 14 ounce can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped (or one jar marinated artichoke hearts, drained and chopped)
1 small jar chopped red pimentos
(optional: chopped up pickled jalepeno pieces, to taste, one or two tablespoons)
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup Monterey Jack cheese
2 cups grated sharp Cheddar
(I use 16 ounce bags of Mexican mix cheese in place of cheddar + Monterey Jack; they keep in the freezer)
1/8 teaspoon cumin powder
1 cup mayonnaise (we use 1/2 cup mayonnaise, 1/2 cup sour cream)
Combine all ingredients, turn into baking dish (we use a quiche dish) and bake at 350 degrees until bubbling hot. Serve with corn chips.
Both of these recipes are very forgiving. Christmas Eve, I made the Sausage Cheese Puffs, only to discover I had forgotten to put in the sausage, cooked and cooling on the stove. I added it to the remainder of the dough, and we had two kinds of puffs, Cheese and Sausage-Cheese, and both were delicious.
The Artichoke Cheese Dip can use various kinds of cheese, and the extra cup of cheese I add doesn’t impact on the results. Nor does cooking it at 400 degrees, while I am also cooking Sausage Cheese Puffs. We need more of these fool-proof, flexible and delicious kinds of recipes!
Happy New Year and happy cooking 🙂
Monday is Homework Day
This is not the life we expected – it is so much better. Before we retired, my husband asked me what we would do, and I said I knew what I would do, but I didn’t know what he would do; he would have to figure out what he wanted to do. But I was wrong. I didn’t know what I would be doing.
Life evolves. One decision leads to another, down paths you can’t foresee.
I had no idea I would love my grandchildren so much. I had no idea how much joy being close to our adult son and his wife would be, watching them mature, seeing them parent so lovingly and patiently. The other day, he spotted a photo of a time we were on our way to a German Military Ball; he said “How old were you in this photo?” and as we figured it out, we were almost exactly the age he is now. That was a moment of wonder to all of us. It helps us to remind ourselves that he no longer needs parenting, no more than we did at his age. He needs respect, and the support of a loving family that can mind their own business unless asked for input.
Doing kindergarten homework is mind-numbing. Q, who is a smart little boy, looked at me and said “when you do the same thing over and over, it is really boring.” He loves new words, so I said “when you do the same thing over and over again, that is called ‘repetitious’,” and he said “Yes, so it is repetitious and BORING.” We both laughed.
While it IS boring, what he is doing now is also crucial, mastering his numbers and how they work together, and his letters, and distinguishing “b”s from “d”s, and “g”s from “q”s and a lot of learning just requires that repetition to engrave it in your mind. He is learning to write, and he is adept at reading books above his level – but it all takes work.
We have some break activities. He can run laps around my first floor, running a circle which I make him change direction every now and then. He can jump on my running trampoline. He can play hide and seek with his Baba. We are working on jig-saw puzzles, and for fun, he gets to play one of Baba’s computer games requiring strategic thinking skills.
We still do our volunteering, our church activities, our house things. We have lunch out almost every day; we are free until after school.
While the homework is for the whole week, we have discovered that dragging it out is just that – a drag. Get it done! Just do it! We are learning to focus, and the work is not that hard. When we finish the homework, we have the rest of the week to play!
Today I was exploring online, looking for an old African recipe I have for African Gingerbread. This is a really old recipe; what I liked about it is that when you add the baking soda and molasses, it fizzes and bubbles. I looked in all my books, but in my never-ending quest to get rid of, get rid of, get rid of, not to burden myself with too many THINGS, I must have given away that particular book. But as I was looking for the recipe online, the only place I found it . . . was here. On my own blog! Old Fashioned Gingerbread. It makes me grin, thinking of how thrilled this five year old will be when we make old fashioned African gingerbread and it all starts fizzing. Woo HOOOO!
When the homework is done, the fun begins!
Day Off From Work
It’s funny, you think when you retire you will have a carefree life, but we human beings being who we are, it turns out retirement looks a whole lot like the life we had before. Or maybe it’s because we choose the lives we get?
We are busy. We have taken on obligations. We have deadlines to meet, meetings to attend, groceries to buy, church duties, volunteer jobs – people are counting on us. It’s very much what our working lives looked like, even then, we had jobs that weren’t always fun, but had a lot of moving parts that we thoroughly enjoyed. I mostly worked in libraries, fund raising and social services; AdventureMan worked managing people and resources. Not a whole lot has changed, except the hours are better.
But it is easier to take a day off. Today I am usually at my volunteer job, but when they called last night to ask if I would be coming in, I just laughed and said “No, see you next week.” They were probably as glad as I was; less prep for them.
No, I needed today to bake my Soused Apple Cake for the Thanksgiving gathering, chop the nuts for the Mom’s Cranberry Salad, pack up the Rosettes, and get the broccoli marinating. I know, I know, broccoli for Thanksgiving? Yes. We get older, we need broccoli. I soak it in good olive oil and garlic, with a little salt, then roast it on Thanksgiving at 400° for about 30 minutes and it is tasty and delicious and you hardly know you are eating broccoli.
Soused Apple Cake
From Quail Country: The Junior League of Albany, Georgia.
If you don’t have brandy, don’t bother with this one – the brandy give it the punch, even though all the alcohol cooks off during baking. Kids hate this cake, adults love it.
4 cups cooking apple
1 cup raisins
brandy
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg (grate it fresh, it matters!)
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup salad oil
1/4 teaspoon mace
2 eggs
1 cup chopped pecans
2 cups flour
whipped cream
Peel, core and finely chop apples; put into a bowl with raisins and cover with brandy, and soak overnight. Drain apples and raisins, set aside.
Combine sugar, salad oil and eggs. Set aside. Sift together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, nutmeg, salt and mace. Add to oil mixture. Mix in apples, pecans and raisins. Mix well and pour into an oiled 9 x 13 baking dish. Cook in 325 degree oven for 1 hour.
Cut into squares, serve topped with sweetened whipped cream. Yield 15 – 20 servings.
** I use a tiny bit of ground cloves instead of mace. I also have used all sorts of whiskeys and brandies, but my favorite remains calvados or . . . rum! It is one of my favorite recipes.
I need to get in and out of the kitchen, finish my clean up so AdventureMan can make his famous Pecan Pie – he makes it with chocolate, it looks very fancy and tastes divine. Everyone oooooh! and aaaaaahs! when they see his pecan pie. 🙂
There is a great joy in this work, knowing we will be with people we enjoy, people who are full of thanks and interesting stories. We will do a lot of catching up and share a wonderful meal. Happy Thanksgiving!
“Pesto; The Quiche of the ’80’s”
It’s still hot, hitting the nineties, but something is changing. You can see it in the angle of the sunlight, especially at sun rise and sun set, the directions have changed, the angles have changed, and the colors are richer.
Time to harvest the basil. This is not my garden, nor my basket, nor my garden, but the resemblance is uncanny, and this is a great photo for illustrative purposes.
We grow a lot of basil, pots and pots of basil. After early church, I hit the pots with my garden shears. I trim off all the little flowers on top (I’ve been doing this all summer, but I never seem to keep on top of it) and then I trim back the branches, laden with basil. I have an entire basket full of Genovese, which, after picking off the leaves, washing them and spinning them dry, come to 12 cups of basil.
Doesn’t everything go better with a little pesto? I love to smear a little on my BLT’s, I love to pop a spoonful into a soup, and oh my holy tomato, basil pesto on pasta, to die for. I know what I want to do, but I want to be sure I get proportions right, so I go to The Silver Palate Cookbook, it came out years and years ago and has a lot of basic but really really good recipes. So, how old is this cookbook? When I was looking at the Pesto page, there was a box that said “Pesto – the quiche of the ’80’s” or something like that which implied pesto was the newest, most wonderful thing – in the ’80’s.
“????” I thought.
Isn’t pesto one of those classics? Maybe it’s because we frequented Italian restaurants when I was going to high school in Germany, but I remember pesto. It’s not like quiche (which, by the way, is my grandson’s favorite thing), it’s no passing trend, pesto is classico!
I made all the batches with garlic, lots of garlic, about triple what the recipe calls for, and I roasted it before I tossed it in. One batch I made with almonds, one batch with sunflower seeds and the last batch with my all time favorite, walnuts. I labeled little snack bags, put globs of pesto in them, sealed them up, put them all in one big gallon sized plastic bag and sealed that up and put the whole lot in the freezer, to pull on on those days when I need a pop of flavor and a taste of the long hot summer.
Here is my variation on the Silver Palate recipe:
Basil Genovese Pesto
4 cups basil, packed, washed, dried in salad spinner (or whatever) still fresh and green
8 – 12 cloves garlic, peeled, roasted
2/3 cup really good olive oil
some salt and some pepper. The best thing is coarsely ground salt and coarsely ground pepper that you’ve ground yourself.
about 1/2 cup nuts. Pine nuts are classic, as are walnuts, but pesto is one of those dishes with a lot of variation based on what God’s great earth hath provided. I don’t even measure the nuts, just eyeball it. I used walnuts, almonds, and sunflower seeds in separate batches.
In a nice large food processor, put in nuts, garlic, salt, pepper, oil and then pack in 4 cups of basil. Process until you have a gritty ball. You won’t be able to see any leaves, but you will be able to see specks of white. Spoon into freezer containers in usable amounts and freeze.
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