Pies

I made my first "seasonal" pie yesterday -- pumpkin. I have to admit it tastes really good. My father didn't particularly like pumpkin pie. He liked french apple. But mom always made a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and another one for Christmas. Mom made crust using the cold butter, flour, and cold water method. Too much trouble for me. But, I have to admit I recall that her pie crusts were light and flaky.

When the "packaged" pie crusts came out (Mrs. Smith's had a pie crust shell) she tried them, but dad still preferred her light and flaky crust rather than Mrs. Smith's thick and chewy crust. He didn't object, however, to the store prepared graham cracker pie crusts, but I think mom still always made her own.

Don't get the idea that mom baked a lot of pies. She didn't. Getting a piece of pie in our house was a real treat. And I think that's one reason why we liked the holidays so much -- we got pies. Aunt Annie always brought a pie with her when she came to visit on Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I recall that we always had a lemon meringue pie, but I don't recall who made it, that is, whether it was my mother or Aunt Annie.

So, it's time for me to start peeling apples for my annual apple pie (that's really a stretch, I usually make more than one apple pie a year, but not many more than 2). And this afternoon the smell of a freshly baked apple pie will permeate my habitat. Can't wait.

ttfn

Chocolate pudding with heavy cream

I'm not even sure my brothers and sister will remember this dish, but I offered it to Alan tonight, and he wasn't so sure he wanted to try it.

When I was growing up we always had heavy, whipping cream around. The cream rose to the top of the milk and our milk was delivered with this wonderful heavy cream on the top. Sometimes mom would just shake it into the milk. I guest I got used to drinking half-and-half milk instead of whole milk and that's why whole milk tastes watered down to me.

But, tonight I made chocolate pudding, and I remembered that my mother would pour just a little bit of cream on the top of the pudding, it would settle along the sides and you would get a scoop of chocolate pudding and a little bit of the cream. Basically, it was unwhipped whipped cream.

Alan didn't comment on it until I told him what I did. Then he said, "I prefer my chocolate pudding plain." Oh well, so much for trying new dishes.

Heavy cream is wonderful in coffee. It basically floats on the top of the coffee so while you get some of the "milk" taste, you get more of the coffee taste. Now, if you prefer your milk with a little coffee, rather than your coffee with a little cream, don't try it the way I just mentioned. It's another trick I learned from my mom -- long before Starbuck's had lattes with or without or whatever.

Back to the chocolate pudding and cream, I guess Alan's non-preference is based on the fact that when you scoop your pudding with a bit of cream it dilutes the sweetness of the pudding -- good for me, because I'm not partial to very sweet treats, but bad for Alan or anyone who likes chocolate-flavored sugar.

Canning season

Here in Northern Kentucky, except for apples and pumpkins, canning season is over. I used to can veggies and fruits and make jams and jellies, but I found freezing was easier on the back, and store-bought jelly is pretty cheap. On the other hand, nothing, and I mean nothing, tastes as good as home-made ketchup or home-made tomato sauce, made with fresh tomatoes, not canned tomatoes. But since I'm "elderly" my body doesn't tolerate this activity. So, I now am relegated to using canned tomatoes to make my spaghetti sauce. Also, the heat of the kitchen is not something I get along with either. Those hot flashes are enough for me, without adding more heat to my life. But, I digress.

When I was a child, mom canned. Every summer, she canned. And she stored the jars of food she canned under the cellar steps where there was this really neat closet which my dad had me convinced had a false back which opened and led to a tunnel that connected to the church. Yeah, right! And there was a wonderful jelly cabinet, which my sister is concepting restoring, where mom stored the rest of her yield.

Now, folks, there was no such thing as air conditioning in those days. We had fans. I think the large department stores in Philly had a/c, but our homes did not. And canning was a hot, steamy process.

Mom would first boil the jars to sterilize them. Meanwhile she was stewing up tomatoes or peaches or green beans or pickles or apples with her special seasonings. She did make up spaghetti sauce, she just canned the tomatoes whole. I think she did that because daddy loved stewed tomatoes, especially the Italian way (no peppers) and if she opened a can of tomatoes she could get double duty from it. Make the stewed tomatoes, used the left over and make spaghetti sauce.

I know she made jelly, and would melt the wax in another pan that was all dented and good for nothing, except melting wax. The wax was carefully poured on top of the jelly mixture. Now, most folks use sure-jell when they make jelly, but "back in the day" we just cooked down the fruit and sugar until it thickened naturally, and then poured it into the jars.

My first canning job was to make sure the jars which had been sterilized were turned right-side-up just before the fruit or vegetable was put into the jar, and then to plop the lid on and tighten the screwy part. When the seal took, the dot in the middle bent downward. If the seal didn't set, then we had to eat those veggies real soon.

I think my favorite thing mom made was peach jam -- or peach-pit jam. She would can the peaches in sugar water, and then boil the pits, which still had some bits and pieces of peaches on them (no freestones were used), and those bits and pieces would boil off the pits and when you took the pits out of the mess and added sugar, cooked it down a little longer, you had wonderful peach jam.

One time someone gave us a large bag of oranges, brought back from someone's Florida trip, and mom made marmelaide with them. That's how I learned to make marmelaide, which I did quite often when I was doing my own canning.

I recalled a couple of years she made grape jelly -- what a mess. That had to be pressed through a sieve -- my job, sort of like Lucy stomping the grapes in that famous episode of I love Lucy except the stomping was done with a wooden spoon and a sieve and you pushed the juice and bits of cooked fruit through that into a pan, then added the sugar, then boiled it again until it started to thicken, then you put it in a jar, covered it with wax, and you had grape jelly. Daddy loved it.

Grape jelly was never my favorite because it always went with peanut butter, and I have to say I never in my life liked PB&J.

Mom's gourmet pizza

I was watching something on the cooking channel last night and the advertisement was for a home-made pizza that children would love make with English muffins.

My mom topped that and we really thought we were getting a great treat.

We rarely had left-over spaghetti sauce at our house since I think spaghetti was our favorite meal. And boy could mom stretch one pound of ground beef so we each got at least two nice-sized meatballs. Anyway, when she did have leftover sauce we knew we were in for a really good lunch treat the next day or soon after.

Mom would take almost stale Italian bread, slice it pretty thin, then sprinkle it with EVOO (olive oil), put some sauce on top of that, and put a slice of American cheese on top of that, then sprinkle it with oregano or basil. Then she'd pop the slices (having put them on a cookie sheet) into the oven and heat them up for about 15 minutes at, I would assume 350, since that seemed to be everyone's favorite temperature for baking everything. And out popped our great, gourmet pizza. Beat anything you could get at a pizza parlor, which by the way were only available in South Philly or at the shore.

Now, there's a pizza parlor on as many corners as there are McD's, but let me tell you, today's pizza is nothing like the pizza we got when we were young either from Mom or at the shore. Nobody makes pizza like that.

Ginger ale and milk and other gourmet treats!

Does anyone in the family remember a special treat -- at least at the time I thought it was special...

Ginger ale and a little milk mixed in, or was it the other way around -- milk with a little bit of ginger ale mixed in?

Mom must have thought it tasted like an ice cream soda, but since we didn't have any ice cream around she mixed this concoction. I loved it -- before I became a teenager. Now, the thought of it makes me bilious.

Another goody...cream cheese and olives. I visited my cousin Robert last year and he told me he always liked the way Aunt Rose made him cc&o sandwiches. My cousin Betty Boyll also likes cc&o. Believe it or not, Alan and I still enjoy cc&o often. Can't remember, but I think we had cc&0 the last time my sister and I visited. Maybe not. The old brain is getting tired and not remembering as well as it used to.

And lest we forget -- pastina and butter -- our favorite Sunday night dinner. I tried it a few years ago -- yuck! What did I ever see in that dish?

Smelts -- I loved smelts. I probably would still love smelts, but who knows where to buy them? I've tried baking fish the way my mother did. I've only had success on one occasion and for the life of me I can't remember what I did to make that fish taste good that time. Alan and I went to Max & Erma's (a local eatery) and I ordered the baked haddock -- I don't often order fish in a mid-west restaurant). It tasted just like my mother's baked fish (albeit she usually baked flounder). So, I found a place that makes fish like mom used to make. And it is now my favorite restaurant dish.

Because we had a fish monger who came by every Friday with fresh fish, which he would fillet right there in front of my mom, we had fish for dinner on Friday nights. Sometimes it was flounder, sometimes it was smelts, sometimes it was scallops.

I sill love fish and seafood, unfortunately Alan won't touch the stuff, except once in a while when I can get him to eat tuna salad, if I mask it with eggs and relish and stuff that shouldn't be set on the table with fish. So, I take the opportunity to order fish as often as I can when we eat out--which I have to say is rarer than hen's teeth!

Daddy had to have bread and jelly with his dinner. I never took up on that habit, and I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to end a meal with bread and jelly instead of a good salad with oil and vinegar dressing! We children used to fight over who would get the last portion, because then we'd get to slurp up the dressing (drink it actually). The danger with waiting to be last at the salad was that you didn't get much salad, so you had to weigh getting as much salad as you could eat, or waiting to get the drippings.

Silly memories!