Moving Day

This blog has now moved to The Last Jar, www.thelastjar.com. See you there!

Wealth

It's Guest Post Poet day! Charla Kramer, Chief Farmbrarian at Echo Bend farm, has graciously offered up some inspiration today. You can follow her on Facebook or Twitter (@Echobend). If you are ever in Northern Michigan you can find her farm stand just off scenic M-22, where she provides fresh vegetables, jams, and delicious homemade bread.

Wealth

Oppressive heat and glaring sun of August

Would send me creeping

Into cool, dusky depths of the basement.

Grabbing hold of the colorless thin curtain

Pulling it back, crick crick, in its ball bearing track,

To reveal cool, shining jars

Full of garden jewels.

Rubies and garnets of tomatoes,

Deep jade greens of Shellie beans,

Amethyst blueberries,

Carnelian and opalescent jams.

A wall of beautiful jars

Stretching the height and length of an entire wall,

Representing the richness that my mother created for our

family through hours in the garden and over the hot, boiling

canning pot.

I would drag my child's finger,

Thunk, thunk,

Along the rows of chilled jars,

Visions of my own stocked pantry

Of goods and memories, preserved,

In the cool heart of my own home

Just beginning to take root.

In a single jar, there, in childhood,

It began.

Kitchen Fail: Molasses Cookies

Not every cookie can be perfect

Lucie’s recipes often list “flour” with no measurements as if to say “If you know what you’re doing you should be able to figure it out”. At first this really freaked me out. After a couple of successes by adding just a cup at a time, I was comfortable with it. Maybe a little cocky.  

Then Molasses Cookies happened.

This recipe called for “enough to roll”, which meant I was to cut them out with a cookie cutter. Challenge accepted. But after four cups the so-called dough was the consistency of a mud pit. In went more flour, which merely bumped it up to spackle.

 “But it says you have to roll it out!” I whined to the voice in my head telling me to give up. If I tried to roll this monster out it would just smear like newborn baby poo on skin.

By this time I was committed. I was going to roll out this freaking dough. In the end I think I added 10 cups of flour. I’m not sure because at some point I gave up and just started pouring flour straight from the bag, muttering my disbelief.

Finally I was staring down a mountain  of taupe-colored dough that would have been better suited for a science fair project than cookies. But when I was a kid, whenever something I was learning in the kitchen didn't turn out (more than a few times), my Dad always implored my Mom and I to cook it anyway. After all, we lived just outside Cereal City, where everyone knew the story of how Dr. Kellogg’s kitchen fail led to the first ever Corn Flakes™. So I put those buggers in the oven and cooked them.

What came out was no eureka . It was edible, if a bit floury. Thankfully my kids aren’t too picky when the word “cookie” is involved,  so the flop wasn’t a total waste. Even when you aren’t perfect, someone might just appreciate it anyway.

Home from Oz

All of my chickadees are under one roof again. Two flew away for summer camp and a business trip, and to celebrate their homecoming I made the long awaited Crullers for breakfast.

Crullers are a forgotten standby of American farm life. When I first happened across the recipe in Lucie’s collection, it didn’t exactly jump out at me. But then I watched the Wizard of Oz.

In the beginning of the movie after the farmhands help Dorothy out of the pigpen, Auntie Em enters the scene with a plate of what looks like biscuits. But she calls them something else:

"Here, can't work on an empty stomach. Have some crullers. Just fried."

Which then meant that my family had to wait while I replayed the line five times to make sure I heard her right. What are the chances:  a fictional Midwestern farm wife with Crullers in a movie set in 1939, and an actual 1930’s Midwestern farm wife with a recipe for Crullers? This was a thing worth looking into.

Everywhere today, a Cruller is described as a fried doughnut with ridges and a hole in the middle. Recipes call for a thin batter that can be squeezed out of a pastry tube, sort of like a fancy funnel cake. I don’t like pastry bags. The idea of cleaning them makes me nervous. I will not be making those at home any time soon.

But what Auntie Em hands out and what Lucie’s recipe describes is a biscuit-like fried dough, a cross between a biscuit and a doughnut. A bisnut, to quote my friend Ronne. In short, a stiff dough that is rolled out, cut, and fried. The small amount of dough was easy to handle and surprisingly quick to make.

Clearly these are not the same thing.

It strikes me that something so simple has evolved into something entirely different that few people recognize. Isn’t that what we do with things though? We take something utilitarian and add to it to make it better. This is good, but sometimes we get so caught up in our own invention that at some point this basic thing changes into an unapproachable masterpiece. So we quit trying. We quit using it.

I encourage you to try these Crullers sometime soon. Because searching beyond what we know is good and necessary. We reach, learn, grow, and hopefully come away all the wiser. But sometimes, when things get too complicated, it’s good to go home again.

Recipe:

 Ingredients

1 Tbl. Sugar

3 Tbl. Buttermilk

1 egg

¼ tsp soda

¼ tsp salt

1 ½ cups flour

2 cups lard, shortening, or vegetable oil

Instructions:

Heat 2” of oil over medium heat in a deep skillet. Mix all of remaining ingredients and roll dough to ¼” thickness. Cut into 2” biscuits or 4” doughnuts.  Fry for 3 minutes on each side. Drain on paper towel. Eat while warm. 

Chocolate Chip Cookies

originally published in the Battle Creek Enquirer & News

These recipes are magic, and this one proves it. I am cursed in the chocolate chip cookie department. No matter what I’ve tried, they come out like flat, crispy pancakes. But this recipe is the first one ever to break the curse. I’m not sure why—at first glance it doesn’t look much different than any other chocolate chip cookie recipe. But tucked into the instructions it calls for dissolving the baking soda first, something I’ve never seen. Is that the trick? Or is it the all-bran? Who knows. But my family is enjoying the change.

Straight from Lucie's collection:

Photo by Arnold Gatilao

Ingredients

½ pound semi sweet chocolate*

¾ cup shortening or softened butter

¾ cup brown sugar

¾ cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp baking soda

2 Tbs. hot water

2 ½ cups flour

¼ tsp. salt

1 tsp vanilla

½ cup chopped nutmeats

½ cup all-bran (or wheat bran)

Chop chocolate coarsely. Blend shortening and sugar well. Add eggs and beat. Dissolve soda in hot water and add to mixture. Sift flour with salt. Add flavoring, chocolate, nut meats, and all-bran. Drop on baking sheet and bake 7-10 minutes at 375°.

*Or 1½ cups chocolate chips, and omit the instructions for chopping the chocolate. Nestle didn't start selling chocolate chips until 1941.

If you try these I'd love to hear how they turn out. Now go make some magic!

The Last Jar

It’s July and we are down to our last jar of tomatoes. Woo hoo! That we have made it this far without running out is a sign that it’s been a good year. There are times when I don’t have the time or money to get more than a couple of batches finished. When that happens, every trip to my parents’ house ends with me lugging a box of quarts home from my Mom’s overflowing pantry.

I vividly remember many days sitting across from Mom while she shook the water out of a jar of tomatoes before adding them to a pan of spaghetti sauce or goulash. Draining tomatoes in the jar is an art form; you have to simultaneously block the tomatoes from falling out and keep them from trapping the water inside. She would place one hand over the mouth, one hand on the bottom, and shake it into the kitchen sink, staring in concentration out the picture window that overlooks the farm.  It’s a constant memory of my childhood.

Now that I’m on my own I stick to the basics that Mom taught me: blanch ripe tomatoes and slip off the skin, pack them tight, and use the end of a rubber spatula to get out the air pockets (the plastic doesn’t tend to pierce the tomatoes). 

But since those early days I’ve learned from other women along my way. Sue told me about putting a little diced onion, garlic, and bell pepper in each jar for an even easier way of cooking, and now I do almost all of mine this way. Meg taught me to zip them in the food processor for a smooth kid-friendly sauce.

And my repertoire has expanded beyond spaghetti and goulash. Coconut chicken curry, eggplant parmesan, pizza sauce, and a multitude of soups-- canned tomatoes are the most versatile thing in my pantry.  It’s funny the things that you can learn, how a solid foundation can lead into so many good things.

So with this last jar waiting to be enjoyed and tomato harvest only a month away, I feel like I’ve made it, at least this year. When Mom asks if I need any of hers to take home, I can stand on my own two feet and say “Thanks Mom. I have plenty.”

Strawberry Day Part 2: Kids with Knives

I thought about writing something like “10 Easy Steps to Making Jam with Young Children”, but that would be a lie. Kids cooking in the kitchen is not easy. It takes patience, and remembering your yoga breath is helpful. But if it were easy, everyone would do it. AmIright?

Nice, but not real.

If there were 10 Easy Steps, the first would be to adjust your expectations. As in, “As long as there are no trips to the ER and we don’t have to call the fire department, it’s a success.” This isn't about the perfect batch of jam, folks. It’s about the process.

The second tip, which I assure you will not show up in any Cooking for Kids! cookbook, is to keep your children up late in the nights before your day of jam-making. 

This way they are used to sleeping in. On the day of, you get up early and have your first batch of jam finished by the time they come yawning out of their bedrooms. Later, when you are getting frustrated by your lack of progress, you can remind yourself “Hey, I already have a finished batch. This is EXTRA.”

First batch-- DONE.

Also, they will see the jam when they wake up and get a taste (literally) of the fun that is about to happen. Trust me, they will want to help make more.

And be flexible. Just about the time you want to pull your hair out because of their  s l o w n e s s, they will get bored and want to go play with the dog. Let them go. You will all be glad, and your kids will come back after burning off some steam.

All joking aside, we have a steadfast No Tomfoolery rule in our kitchen. 

Hot stoves and bubbling sugar do not mix well with little faces that are at eye level with the stuff. Playing tag in the kitchen gets you kicked outside.

 For a true adventure, hand your child a big knife:

Deep breaths, Becky

 Then follow it up with something less challenging (for her and your nerves), like mashing fruit, to keep up her confidence.

And without them even knowing they are getting a science lesson, you can explain the physics behind creating a vacuum when doing this:

Not USDA approved. More on that later.

And to really make a memory out of strawberry day, nothing beats Strawberry Pie. My kids insist on it every year. The best part is that you have to do it in stages ahead of time in order for everything to cool properly. It’s the perfect kid-friendly thing to make.  And really, who needs a Cuisinart when you have small humans thrilled about pounding on plastic bags of graham crackers with wooden spoons?

The perfect end to Strawberry Day

All in all the best way to teach kids to cook is to start them young, little bits at a time. When they are very young it will slow you down (not always a bad thing, to tell the truth).

But if you’re lucky, by the time they’re 10 or so they will surprise you by actually helping, like my daughter did this year. Without being asked, she jumped right in to help jar up the last batch of jam. Her extra pair of hands surprised me and warmed my heart.

What are you favorite memories of cooking as a child?

Strawberry Day Part I

Here’s what our house smelled like last Friday:

There are no jam or jelly recipes in Lucie’s collection, even though canning was something she did (for the local school, no less). It’s something us Olmstead women just do, usually following the instructions from the pectin box or the well-worn Ball book, but mostly following the lessons taught to us by our mothers.

In that spirit, you have a window into my Friday at home with the kids, puttering in the kitchen, taking breaks for naps and dipping graham crackers into warm jam, and getting two flats of strawberries processed.

No recipes. But I will entertain you.

Here's where everything starts:

Fresh, picked-ripe, first-of-the-season berries from my husband's farm visit to Grossnickle Farms in Kaleva, MI.

These are the big ones, and easier to hull for processing. The little berries that come in a little later in the season are much sweeter, better than candy. But their size makes them more tedious to process. So these berries are perfect.

A Note on Timing: Sometimes I do fruit a little bit a time, a batch of jam here, some frozen quarts there, but this year everything fell in place to do it all in one day. This happens once a decade. 

Which leads me to. . .

Full disclosure: things do not always get done on time around here.  There have been mushy peaches and moldy cucumbers and don’t tell my Mom that some of the rhubarb she sent home with me two weeks ago is still in the fridge, uncut and unfrozen.

I tell you this so that when I brag that everything was beautiful this year, birds chirping and no sick children, with only one bad berry in the whole 16 quarts, you don’t feel bad.

For the ADD part of me, this was a dream day. I had a million things going on at once and never got bored. While the jam was cooking, 

That's rhubarb in there. Strawberry-rhubarb is a killer combination.
It costs less than straight strawberry jam too.

a sheet of berries was laid out for the freezer. 

Freezing berries on a cookie sheet before bagging them keeps them from becoming a solid brick.

In between measuring sugar,

Racks ready for cooling jars, a small pot for sterilizing lids, and sugar staged for adding to the fruit.

prepping jars, 

This step is only necessary (in my book) if you aren't processing the jars once they're filled.

mashing fruit, feeding children and bagging up frozen berries into quart bags, I was in heaven.

For all of the Type A, born-organized people out there, this might be overwhelming and confusing. But for me it was a nice break from a world where I fight the stigma of scattered and cluttered. 

Multitasking rules! 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, I hull. Does everyone use a spoon? 

The curved edges of a spoon wastes less fruit than a paring knife.

That’s how I was taught.  Bonus: your kids can help without blood mixing in with the berries.

Next up, washing:

Fill a bowlful of berries with water and pour off. Do this a few times.
And, I need a real camera.

If you have a lot of fruit to do, wash and hull them in batches of 4 quarts or less. You might be tempted to wash your fruit as soon as you get home from the market or farm, but don’t do it! They will stay fresh longer if kept dirty. Once they’re washed, the countdown to mushy fruit begins. 

One last tip: canning is a lot like painting walls.

You think it’s all about the actual thing, but you really spend most of your time prepping. Washing jars, measuring ingredients, sanitizing equipment, prepping the fruit-- it's important to get organized before the fruit hits the heat, because the actual cooking of the stuff happens really fast and you don’t want to be hunting for your jar gripper thingy while your jam scorches. 

And once that sugar starts to boil, never, ever stop stirring.

That is all today. 

In Part 2 I will talk about keeping your sanity with kids in the kitchen and, not unrelated, breaking all the rules laid out by the USDA. We will end with Strawberry Pie.  Stay tuned!

Just Cake

Just Cake was "written and made up by Lucie Olmstead". An original!

This one pretty much sums up my Midwestern upbringing. Get it done, make it good, then move on because there's a lot of work to do. When you have 6-7-8 mouths to feed and firewood to get and cows to milk and bills to pay, there is no time to fuss over the food. Be thankful you have some.

So here's your Just Cake: no expensive ingredients, no complicated techniques.  

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar                                                

1 TBL shortening (medium)                        

1 egg                                             

⅔ cup sweet milk                                       

1 ½ cup flour (more or less)                       

1 ½ tsp baking powder                             

Flavoring and salt             

There were no instructions with this one, so I followed the theme and decided to just mix it all together. If you want to get fancy, you can follow the standard cake-mixing routine: cream sugar and fats together, add the egg, then alternately add liquid and dry ingredients until just mixed. Bake in a 9" square or 8" round cake pan at 350° for 30 minutes.

In the printable version I've cleared up some of the random measurements for you.

I can't give you a review yet, but the batter was good. Here it is all baked and ready for the freezer:

Why the freezer, you ask? Because I baked it on Monday in preparation for the Grand Bake Sale this Saturday to benefit Issy Stapleton's treatment. (Read about the Stapleton's here. To donate and for updates on fundraising go here. ) Because stale cake just won't do, I'll be baking all week, freezing, and frosting on Friday night. 

This one's waiting for the Caramel Frosting that I've been dreaming about all week. Next up: Salad Dressing Cake. 

Lunch with the Sisters

Last week Lucie's sisters gathered for lunch at my parents' house. They brought along their stories and answers to many of my questions, and better yet, Aunt Ilene brought a stack of recipes! A couple were Lucie's originals, saved over the decades in my grandmother's original handwriting:

Lucie's Salad Dressing Cake was a family favorite. I also found out that Sunshine Cake, one recipe in the notebook, was always made on childhood birthdays.

An original recipe page with recipes for Molasses Cookies and Noodles. I love the food stains-- proof that they were used over and over again. And note the options for flavoring "based on what you had to use", according to my Aunts.

But the best find of the day was Lucie's chart for everyday baking. It's a simple 5-ingredient cheat sheet for biscuits, shortcake, meat piecrust, and dumplings:

Cool, eh? I need this in my life, and so do you. Here's a printable version.

So thank you Aunt Helen, Aunt Sally, Aunt Ilene, and Mom for your time this afternoon. And Aunt Alice and Aunt Edna, you were missed (but I enjoyed your creamed corn Edna!). Stay tuned for more stories about the women behind the recipes.

Honey Cookies

Mmmm, honey. I could talk about my favorite sweetener all day, but let's just get to the point:

Mary Dexter’s Honey Cookies

Sept. 1, 1949

Best dipped in coffee. These reminded me of a miniature coffee cake, perfect for a quiet morning and a good book.

Ingredients

1 cup honey

½ cup shortening or softened butter

1 egg

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

*Vanilla

*Flour to drop

Cream honey and butter together. Add the egg and vanilla. Sift the remaining ingredients together and add to the mixture. Drop onto cookie sheets and bake for 12 minutes at 350°.

*A Note About the Random

So here's where a 1940's housewife just winged it. She went by feel and didn't treat a recipe like a chemistry experiment.  I am not a 1940's housewife. I am an Instruction Follower, and if something doesn't tell me exactly what to do I get a little panicky. 

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like we need to be told how to do most things these days. We want exact directions and reassurance that we won’t fail.

Or maybe we just don’t spend as much time in the kitchen with our busy modern lives. Maybe we don’t have the experience to just know these things. 

In any event, I went with it and guessed at 1 tsp. vanilla and 2½ cups of flour. It worked out fabulous. This little foray into Not Following Instructions reminded me that I can trust myself. A little bit.

Just the right consistency for drop cookies

                 

Crossing Lines

Reading the Tomato Jam recipe by Irene McFadden, my mom said "The McFadden's were a Black family that lived down the road. My Dad used to hunt squirrel and trade them with Mr. McFadden."

Photo by Eric Eberhard

Squirrel stew anyone?  And what did my grandfather trade for? Hooch, probably. Or maybe some of Mrs. McFadden's fabulous Tomato Jam.

What I wonder is how did racial lines work pre-WWII? Did they all hang out together, or was it strictly squirrel-bartering, recipe sharing business?

I don't know, but either they were friends or Mrs. McFadden was an amazing cook-- her name pops up more than once in Lucie's collection.

A Barrel o' Pickles

Ever wonder how they made those giant barrels of pickles back in the day? Here's a recipe just for you.

This would definitely be a day-long project for more than one person-- imagine harvesting and washing that many cucumbers. And the ingredients are a little vague, so this is one of those "go by feel" recipes. The last line especially made me laugh. Just roll with it.

Dill Pickles

by Sarah & Walter

Put washed cucumbers in layers in barrel with dill and grape leaves. Make 3 layers, putting 5 pounds salt on the bottom, center, and on top, 15 pound in all.

Mix 1.5 pounds mixed spices the same way. Add 2 gallons vinegar and fill barrel with cold water and put top on. Let work. Roll occasionally.

Tomato Jam

This is really more like a chutney, a sweet chunky relish that can accompany meat or be poured over  cream cheese and served with crackers as an appetizer. Unlike true jam it contains no pectin and although it’s thick, it's not meant to set up like jam.

This recipe grabbed my attention the first time I read through Lucie's recipes, but finding 3 hours to string together while it cooked was a challenge. When I spent a fall afternoon cooking my husband’s birthday dinner, it turned out to be the perfect time to try out the Tomato Jam. I could watch it while working on other things-- otherwise I’d put it on the stove, take a nap, and scorch the whole thing. And we had tomatoes left over from canning-- not enough for another batch of quart jars, but too many to eat fresh—so everything sort of fell into place.

The toughest part of this recipe was figuring out how to tie up the spices. I thought I had cheesecloth but couldn't find it (of course, I stumbled over it a week later). Your kitchen MacGyver tip of the day: Teabags. Tear them open, dump out the tea, and tie with a bit of string you find in your junk drawer.

Besides that, it was super simple to make. When the jam was finished cooking I didn’t have time to can it up right away due to the birthday feast. Glenn stole some from the pot for his chicken tandoori, with tabbouleh and baba ganouj on the side. He claimed this accidental addition to the meal pulled it all together, and since then it’s been a staple condiment in our kitchen.

Tomato Jam

by Irene McFadden, friend of Lucie's

Ingredients

5 lbs. ripe tomatoes

5 cups brown sugar

2 ½ cups cider vinegar

1 Tblsp. whole cloves

1 Tblsp. whole allspice

1 Tblsp. stick cinnamon

3 cups seedless raisins, chopped

Blanch, peel, and chop tomatoes into 1” chunks. Tie spices in cheesecloth. Place all ingredients except raisins into a large saucepan and boil slowly for 2 hours. Add raisins and boil 1 hour longer. Remove spices, pour into hot jars, and seal.*

*See the Canning Page for links to food preservation techniques.