Chicken and Asparagus Pudding

This recipe is a combination of several of my favorites and made a delicious casserole.

CHICKEN AND ASPARAGUS PUDDING

• 2 cups cubed bread (something hearty like Italian bread is good)
• 1 cup shredded cooked chicken breast
• 1/2 cup red bell pepper, sliced
• 1/2 cup onions, sliced
• 2 tsp. olive oil
• 1 cup of asparagus, steamed and cut into 2″ pieces
• One hard-boiled egg
• Thin white sauce (recipe below)
• Topping of 1 cup of bread crumbs tossed with 1 Tblsp. of melted butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  Oil or spray a 9″ casserole dish

Place two cups of bread cubes in a single layer in the bottom of the prepared casserole dish.  Place the shredded chicken on top of the bread cubes.

In a medium skillet over medium heat, saute the red pepper and onion slices in the olive oil until pepper and onion slices are tender.  Spoon the vegetables over the chicken in the casserole.

Arrange the steamed asparagus slices over the top.  Peel the hard-boiled egg and cut into small pieces, sprinkling over top of the asparagus.

Make the thin white sauce:

THIN WHITE SAUCE

• 2 Tblsp. all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup cold milk
• 3/4 cup hot milk
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• Grating of black pepper
• Grating of nutmeg

In a medium pan over medium heat, place the flour and whisk in the cold milk.  Whisk in the hot milk and cook, whisking constantly until mixture begins to bubble.  Lower heat slightly and continue whisking for two minutes.  Remove from heat and stir in salt, pepper and nutmeg.  Pour the sauce over the chicken/vegetable mixture in the casserole.  Sprinkle the crumb/butter mixture over the top.

Bake uncovered in a 375 degree F oven for 25 minutes.

Yield:  4 generous servings

Easy Italian Bread

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State Fair Blackberry Pie

In 1986, my oldest daughter had been entering needlework in the Ohio State Fair for several years.  She kept nudging me to enter something in the food division but I was hesitant after seeing all of the beautiful entries that come in from all over the state.  Finally, I gave in and decided to enter a blackberry pie to use up some of the buckets of wild blackberries we picked every day in a thicket on the far edge of our property.  I used a recipe from a book by Susan Purdy that my daughter had just given me (unfortunately, I lost the book and I’m not sure of the title*) and made the long trip from Cincinnati to Columbus to enter the pie for judging.

I was pleased to win a third place ribbon on my first Ohio State Fair entry.

We no longer live in the house with the blackberry thicket but there were some beautiful blackberries at my farmers’ market in Loveland, Ohio (Blooms and Berries) and the pie turned out great.

STATE FAIR BLACKBERRY PIE

• Pastry for a 9″ two-crust pie (click here for my favorite recipe)
• 4 cups fresh blackberries
• 1-1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp. cider vinegar
• 3 Tblsp. cornstarch
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 2 Tbsp. water
• 1 Tblsp. quick cooking tapioca
• 2 Tblsp. butter
• 1 Tblsp. milk

Preheat oven @ 375 degrees F

In a heavy pan combine the blackberries, sugar, vinegar, cornstarch, salt, and 2 Tblsp. water.

Mash fruit very slightly with wooden spoon to start juices flowing.  Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, just until mixture nears boiling point (3-4 minutes).  Remove from heat and cool completely.  Stir in tapioca.

Pour into unbaked pie shell and dot with butter.  Fit top crust over fruit, sealing well.  Brush top crust lightly with milk and cut vents.

Place on flat pan to catch spills and bake @ 375 degrees F for 45-50 minutes until crust is golden brown.

Cool on a wire rack.

The flavor of this pie is so delicious – even the leftovers the next day were good.

*UPDATE:  I was able to identify the book – As Easy as Pie by Susan G. Purdy and found a nice hard-cover 1984 edition on eBay.com.  I feel better now.  That was the only cookbook that I have ever  lost and I’m happy to have a copy to complete my collection.

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Fresh Peach Crumble Pie

I’ve been traveling a bit – peach-wise – the past couple of weeks.   I’ve had South Carolina Peaches, I’m waiting on the Georgia Peaches, and this week my farm market had Ohio grown peaches.  This recipe is a combination of a favorite filling and a favorite streusel topping plus my all-time favorite pie crust.  It’s a perfect dessert for a summer day.

PEACH CRUMBLE PIE

• Pastry for a 9″single crust pie, unbaked (click here for my favorite recipe)

Filling:

• 4 cups sliced fresh peaches
• 1/4 cup Minute Tapioca
• Pinch of salt
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 Tblsp. fresh lemon juice
• 1/8 tsp. almond extract

Crumble Topping:

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 4 Tblsp. butter, cut into small cubes

Preheat oven @ 375 degrees F

In a large bowl, combine peaches, tapioca, salt, sugar, lemon juice and almond extract.  Set aside.

In a small bowl, combine topping ingredients:  flour, sugar and butter.  Set aside.

Stir peaches and pour into pastry lined 9″ pie pan.  Spoon crumble topping on, covering all of the top surface of peaches.

Place on a flat pan to catch spills and bake @ 375 degrees F for approximately 45 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack.

Best served after cooling to room temperature.  Servings:  6 to 8

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Spicy Bread and Butter Pickles

I first made these pickles on September 21, 1985, and thought they were good enough to take to the county fair in 1986.  I don’t believe they won a ribbon, but the family enjoyed them.

The recipe is from a great book, Garden Way’s Pickles & Relishes – 150 recipes – Apples to Zucchini, by Andrea Chesman. The original recipe made 4 pints, but I cut it in half for this batch which will give me one jar to use this summer and one jar to save for next Memorial Day and July 4th.  The addition of Tabasco sauce makes them spicy but not hot.

SPICY BREAD AND BUTTER PICKLES

• 3-1/2 cups thinly sliced pickling cucumbers, unpeeled
• 1 medium sweet onion, thinly sliced
• 1 quart water
• 1/4 cup pickling salt
• 1/2 teaspoon Tabasco sauce

The Brine:

• 1/2 cup white vinegar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp. mixed pickling spices
• 1/4 tsp. turmeric
• 1/2 teaspoon Tabasco sauce

Combine the cucumbers, onions, one quart of water and 1/2 tsp. Tabasco sauce in a stainless steel or glass bowl and let stand for 3-4 hours.

Drain the vegetables and rinse 3 times with cold water; let stand in fresh water for 5 minutes, then drain again.

Combine the vinegar, one cup of water, brown sugar, granulated sugar, spices and 1/2 tsp. Tabasco sauce in a stainless steel saucepan; stir and bring to a boil.  Add the drained vegetables to boiling brine, bring to a boil again, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Fill hot sterilized pint jars with the pickled mixture, leaving 1/4 inch headspace.  Seal.

Process in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes, counting the time after the water begins to boil again after the jar has been inserted.  For small batches like this, I like to use an asparagus steamer for processing the pickles.

Cool on a wire rack.

Let pickles cure for at least 2 weeks before serving.

Click here for a good website on canning and preserving.

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Yukon Chicken Salad

This is a combination of a couple of favorites, made with the little Yukon Gold potatoes.  My husband was growing Yukon Golds in his garden in the late 1990s, before they became so popular on all of the cooking shows.  We loved them then and I’m happy they’re available in all of the grocery stores now.  Combined with chicken, gorgonzola cheese and walnuts – what’s not to like?

YUKON CHICKEN SALAD

• 10 small Yukon Gold potatoes (2-2-1/2″ diameter), unpeeled
• 1 large tart apple, thinly sliced (Golden Delicious)
• 1/4 cup sweet onion, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup toasted walnuts, coarsley chopped
• 1/2 cup crumbled gorgonzola cheese
• 1 cup chopped, cooked chicken breast
• 1 Tblsp. fresh basil, chopped
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
• 1 tsp. honey
• Salt/Pepper to taste

Wash potatoes and put in a large pot.  Cover with cold water and cook over medium heat until tender (30-45 minutes depending on size).  Set aside to cool.

When potatoes are cool, cut into bite-size pieces and place in a large bowl.  Add apple and onion slices, toasted walnuts, gorgonzola, cooked chicken and fresh basil.

In a jar or other container with a lid, mix the olive oil, vinegar and honey.

Pour over the potato mixture and toss to mix.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste, cover and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Makes 4-6 servings

This is not a very photogenic salad, but it sure is good.

Along with the salad, I served an old favorite summertime pie, Nancy’s Chocolate Lime Pie.

It was a nice summer lunch for my two daughters and two grandchildren.

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Irish Lemon and Blackberry Sponge Pudding

My oldest daughter made several trips to Ireland and always brought back an Irish cookbook for me.   In May of 1987, she brought home a copy of Irish Country Kitchen and on June 17, I made this wonderful sponge pudding for the first time.  We were living then in rural Blue Jay, Ohio, on the Indiana border, and every day I went to our back yard and picked a big bucket of wild blackberries.  I made several kinds of pie, jam, jelly, preserves and was running out of ideas when I tried this recipe.  It took a little adapting because of conversions and size of baking pans, but became a favorite.

This is a simple, light dessert of blackberries with a light sponge cake on top – just right for a summertime meal.

IRISH LEMON AND BLACKBERRY SPONGE PUDDING

• 2 cups fresh blackberries*
• 2 Tblsp. butter, softened
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar, divided
• 1 Tblsp. fresh lemon juice
• 1 tsp. grated lemon peel
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 eggs, separated
• 1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven @ 350 degrees F

Have at hand 4 individual casserole dishes.  Mine measure 4-1/2″ diameter across the top and are 2″ deep.

Have a large pan with sides in which you can bake the 4 casseroles.

Heat water for the pan in which casseroles are baked.

Place about 1/2 cup of blackberries on the bottom of each of four individual ungreased baking dishes and set aside.

With an electric mixer, cream the butter and 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar.  Add the lemon juice and lemon peel, beating to blend.

In a small bowl, mix together the remaining 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar and the flour.  In another container, mix the two egg yolks and milk.

Add the dry ingredients to the lemon mixture alternately with the egg mixture, beginning and ending with the dry.

In a separate bowl, beat egg whites until stiff but not dry.  Fold into the batter.

Pour the batter over the berries (about 1/2 cup per serving).

Place the puddings in a flat pan with sides holding 1″ of hot water.  Bake the puddings @ 350 degrees F for approximately 30-35 minutes until tops are golden brown and gentle pressure with a finger tip leaves no impression.

Carefully remove pans from hot water and place on a rack to cool.

*I can’t say whether frozen blackberries would work in this dish or not.  The original recipe called for fresh and that’s all I’ve ever used.

We like this dessert slightly warm or at room temperature.

We used to love this as our dessert after having a supper of a serving of meat and multiple servings of vegetables fresh from the garden (like new potatoes, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, green onions, leaf lettuce, radishes, etc.).

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Blueberry Lemon Muffins

This recipe was adapted from one I first made in November of 1988, from a cookbook called Taste of New Hampshire. I had rated the original muffins “Very good”, but thought the adapted ones were “Excellent”.  I think the addition of lemon extract and lemon peel made the difference.

BLUEBERRY LEMON MUFFINS

• 1/2 cup  oil (Canola)
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp. lemon extract
• 1 cup fresh blueberries (rinsed and as dry as possible)
• 2 cups all-purpose flour, divided
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. grated lemon peel
• 2-3 tsp. granulated sugar for topping

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F

Lightly oil bottoms only of a 12-cup muffin tin (greasing bottoms only allows muffins to dome).

In a large mixing bowl place oil, sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla and lemon extracts.

In a separate small bowl, place blueberries.  Measure flour into a medium bowl and from this, take two tablespoons of flour to mix with blueberries.

To the remaining flour add baking powder, salt and lemon peel.  Add to oil mixture, stirring just enough to blend.  Gently stir in the blueberries.

Spoon mixture into prepared muffin tins.  Sprinkle the tops with sugar.

Bake @ 350 degrees F for approximately 25 minutes.  Let pan cool on rack for 3-4 minutes, then remove muffins to rack to cool.

Yield:  12 muffins

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Sunbonnet Quilters Wall Hanging

For my birthday last September, my oldest daughter made up a bunch of redwork embroidery pieces featuring sunbonnet ladies doing various phases of quilting.  She got her patterns from Quilting Bee Designs.  I chose five of the panels to make this wall hanging.

I spent months looking for fabric that I thought would complement the embroidery but not overwhelm it.  I found three pieces at Fabric Shack in Waynesville, Ohio, that I thought would work well.  Then, I tried out some blocks, again not wanting to detract from the embroidery.  I wasn’t happy with anything until I got this book for Christmas.

There were 111 vintage blocks to choose from and in leafing through the book, The Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt”, on Christmas Eve, I was immediately drawn to one called, “Flower Garden Path”. The book has a CD to print out templates for sampler blocks which are 6″ but I wanted 9″ blocks, so I used my Electric Quilt 6 software to re-draw the pattern and print it out for rotary cutting in the 9″ size.

I machine-pieced the blocks and put the quilt top together.  It’s a rather time-consuming block to sew, but I like the way it seems to frame the redwork panels.

I do only very simple machine quilting and was happy that my daughter offered to hand-quilt this piece.  Her beautiful stitching was just what the quilt needed

…and we liked the idea of vintage buttons in the center of the pieced blocks.

I made a scrappy patchwork backing and scanned recent pictures to print on the label.

It makes a nice, cheery wall hanging for my living room.

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Fairground Food

The midway – Carthage Fair, 1932

When I was growing up in the 1930s-40s, the fairground was a fun place to go with the family in the summer and fairground food was cotton candy, fried fish sandwiches, taffy apples and ice cream candy.  When my father was growing up in the 1920s, a fairground was his home for much of the year.  My grandfather was a blacksmith and horseshoeing was his trade…

My grandfather and my father, ca 1914

He took his business on the road during the county fair season and his large family came along.

Grandma Lillian, Annie, Frank, a neighbor, my father – Johnny

My grandmother (the original Lillian) did the laundry in a washtub outside the barn…

…and cooked the family meals on whatever kind of stove she could rig up.   My father brought along the memories of fairground meals when he married my mother in 1932.

I still make these two dishes today at age 77.

FAIRGROUND PANCAKES

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 1-1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 2 Tblsp. vegetable oil
• 1 cup milk

In a small bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.  Add the oil and milk, mixing well.  Cook on a hot griddle until bubbles form on the surface.  Flip and continue cooking on the reverse side.  Serve hot with butter and syrup.

This makes six 4″ pancakes or as my father would have made them, two large griddle-sized flapjacks.

My father would have used bacon drippings or lard instead of oil and the milk would have been diluted evaporated milk.  He made syrup by mixing the right ratio of dark brown sugar and water (which I’ve never perfected) and boiling until of  syrup consistency.  And the meal would not have been complete for my father unless there were two sunny-side-up eggs on top of the pancakes, everything liberally sprinkled with black pepper.

My oldest daughter and I always have a pancake and egg breakfast, called our Fairground Breakfast, before we start out on a long trip.  It’s sure to hold us until lunchtime.

Another of my father’s fairground favorites was his chili.

FAIRGROUND CHILI

• 1 lb. ground beef
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 large can of kidney beans
• 1 medium can of tomato puree
• Water to fill one kidney bean can and one puree can
• 1/2 to 1 tsp. salt
• Grating of black pepper

In a large pot, brown the ground beef and onion until no pink shows in the meat and the onion is tender.  Add the kidney beans, puree and water from the two cans.  Simmer on the stove for at least one hour.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.   Serve hot – 4 servings.

My father liked his chili with lots of chili powder and saltine crackers.  He usually broke the crackers up in the chili.  One of the favorite aromas of my childhood was of beef and onions frying in preparation for chili.

I continued to take my children (and now my grandchildren) to county fairs.  Back in the 1960s, I took my three young children to the Owensville (Clermont County, Ohio) fair and stopped in a trailer parked on the fairgrounds to visit my father’s cousin and his very large family.  Bill was also a blacksmith and hauled his family around the fair circuit to make a living.  Inside the small trailer, 5 or 6 little kids were seated at a table and Bill’s wife, Mary, was at the stove frying mush in a big cast iron skillet.  She would slice the mush, throw it into the hot grease, flip it and then put it on one of the kids’ plates.  For the 15 or 20 minutes we were there, she never stopped flipping and serving slices of hot mush – there was always an empty plate and a hungry child yelling for more.  She invited us to have some, but we said no thanks and left her there to feed her kids.

So, when you hear the term, “Fairground Food”, it’s not always an expensive treat out on the midway – it could very well be somebody’s favorite meal.

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Blackberry Glory Pie

I found this recipe in a magazine in 1999 and it gave me another kind of pie to make with the wild blackberries that we had all over our back yard.  My favorite farm market, Blooms & Berries in Loveland, Ohio, had some beautiful big blackberries for sale this week.  They aren’t as tart as our wild ones were, so I reduced the sugar to compensate.  It makes a great pie for the Fourth of July or any other summer holiday – truly glorious.

BLACKBERRY GLORY PIE

• Pastry for 9″ single crust pie (click here for my favorite pie crust recipe)
• 4 cups blackberries
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup granulated sugar (depending on how tart the berries are)
• 1 cup sour cream
• 3 Tblsp. all-purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup fine dry bread crumbs
• 2 Tblsp. granulated sugar
• 1 Tblsp butter, melted

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F

Cover the pie shell loosely with aluminum foil and bake for 5 minutes @ 450 degrees F.

Remove foil and bake for another 5 minutes.  Place on rack to cool.

Set oven to 375 degrees F

Rinse and drain blackberries.

In a small bowl, mix together 1/2 to 3/4 cup granulated sugar, sour cream, flour and salt.  Set aside.

In another small bowl, mix together the bread crumbs, 2 Tblsp. of sugar and melted butter.  Set aside.

Place the rinsed and drained blackberries in the baked pie shell.

Cover berries with the sour cream mixture.

Sprinkle the bread crumb mixture on top.

Bake @ 375 degrees F for approximately 45 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack.

Makes one 9″ pie – 6-8 servings

This pie is all about the berries – the filling is about 2″ high.  The flavor of the blackberries seems to intensify the next day.  The pie can be warmed in a 350 degree F oven for about 10 minutes.

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