Cooking as Autobiography - Zucchini Bread

 

Cooking as Autobiography .

Zucchini Bread

In years gone by, people kept recipes on 3.5 inch cards in files in boxes. I have a box like that and I also treasure the very old box from my deceased mother-in-law. The cards told us how to prepare specific dishes, with more or less detail. But they do more than that sometimes. They remind us of the circumstances that prompted us to write and save them. That can be reminders of our life experiences or events. When I dig around in my old box, I see recipes from old friends and relatives, from old cookbooks of the past, from forgotten but newly remembered times. And then there are recipes about how to prepare something without having to find the old cookbooks that provided them. Boxes of memories.

Here’s a happy example from when we lived in Green Bay. I was surprised one day when daughter Elizabeth (Libby), then about eight or nine years old, came home with a card in her hand. She had been playing with neighbors Leah and Erica. It was summer and the zucchini was ripe. The girls’ mom, Randee, had a recipe for zucchini bread, which Libby wrote onto a new recipe card and brought home. It is written in Libby’s little-kid writing with associated little-kid misspellings. I didn’t ask for it but was glad to have it. I look at it now and it warms my heart for all the good times those kids had when they were little. It reminds me of Randee’s neighborliness in offering me a way to cook something. Zucchini bread is very good.

I have been making zucchini bread from that recipe on the old card ever since. I made it again yesterday, with a bit of modification. When I eat and share the bread, I share the memories. Recipe cards can be autobiographical. Now my recent recipes are word processed and placed in a 3-ring binder. The old box is obsolete but remembered.

Here is the recipe as given to me on that beautiful summer day, with misspellings corrected. Libby is a smart adult person who now spells words better. She cooks well too. 

Zucchini Bread (2 loaves)

2 cups sugar                                                1 teaspoon salt 

1 cup oil                                                       1teaspoon baking powder

3 eggs                                                            3 teaspoons cinnamon

2 cups chopped zucchini                        3 cups flour

2 teaspoons vanilla                                  2 teaspoons baking soda

Mix sugar, oil and eggs until well blended. Add zucchini, flour, soda, salt, making powder, vanilla and cinnamon. Mix well. Put in 2 medium sized greased and floured loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees for one hour. Use tooth pick test. 

p.s. My modification is to use less sugar. It’s still good with 1 ½ cups sugar.

 

Door County Recipes: It's Our Cookbook

Wow! It’s still with us after thirty years. Do you want to know how to do a Door County fish boil? Make desserts with Door County cherries? Read some Door County history? Look at drawings of Door County points of interest? It’s all in one little book.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of Door County Recipes Old and New and a Little Local Lore. Dolores Allen, my mother, wrote it and I illustrated it. It was self published in 1989, with a second printing in 1994. It is still available on Amazon today but has been out of print for a long time.

My mother and I worked long and hard on it, but as author she assembled many recipes from her program, Five Minutes With Dolores Allen, that ran on radio station WDOR of Sturgeon Bay. Her program lasted more than fifty years and was about recipes from listeners and other sources. She put them and some local history into 131 pages with illustrations from my pen.

Here is an example. The chapter called Traditional Door County Recipes says, “The famous Door County Fish Boil originated with the early lumberjacks who found it a convenient way to cook the abundance of trout and whitefish found here. Today it has become a tradition and is served as a specialty in many of the Door County restaurants.” On the same page is my drawing of a person photographing the boil-over that makes fish boils unique and attention-getting. The next page tells how it is done.

The book is ours in that it includes plenty of good cooking recommendations and includes names of people who gave her their recipes. It has Mrs. Bassford’s Strawberry Pie, Corrine’s Pioneer Bread Pudding, Bobbi’s Sauce for Ham, Ruthie’s Ministrone Soup, and more. This makes a personal experience out of cooking as well as a family one. My lentil soup and potato soup are there. Mary Lou Allen (my brother Eddy’s wife) gave her hash brown casserole and Mother offered plenty of her own creations.

It is ours also as one of many ongoing creative projects of my parents, Ed and Dolores Allen, who started several businesses, one of which continues today, Radio Station WDOR. Our family was WDOR starting in 1951. My mother worked in the office, did billing, broadcast her daily Five Minute With Dolores Allen. My brothers worked on the air as soon as their voices changed. (Brother Eddy is still managing it.) I wrote commercials and news and did office work as a teenager. The cookbook is part of this shared responsibility as another Allen business. They had a publishing company and printing business in Sturgeon Bay, which my mother operated with a staff assistant. The cookbook was part of it and she drew me into it with drawing.  She did the setup and had a Wisconsin company print it.

Door County Recipes is thirty years old and still good. Mother went to the great kitchen in the sky in 2005 at age 92.

Peanut Butter Cookies

People like these. Just ask my (adult) kids, who grew up eating them. Homemade is better than any other way to have ttem, including Girl Scout cookies. My cookies are easy to make and worth the time. My sentiments are stated in this quote from the late Peg Bracken: “When you hate to cook, you ask a lot of a cooky recipe. It must call for no exotic ingredients. It must be easy. It must not, above all, call for any rolling out and cutting. It must produce extremely good cookies. And quite a lot of them.” (The I Hate to Cook Book, 1960)

These peanut butter cookies fit that description. They are from my 1948 cookbook that has never failed me: The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, 8^th edition.

Peanut Butter Cookies

½ cup butter                            1 egg

½ cup peanut butter               ½ teaspoon vanilla

½ cup white sugar                   ½ teaspoon salt

½ cup brown sugar                 ½ teaspoon soda

                        1 cup flour

Cream butters, beat in sugar, add other ingredients and more flour, if needed, to make mixture still enough for drop cookies. Arrange by spoonfuls on buttered cookie sheet, press flat with floured spoon and mark with floured fork. Bake in moderate oven (350 degrees).

My comments: I suggest mixing the flour, salt and soda together before mixing them with the other ingredients. This recipe makes about 24 cookies, but the number will depend on size.

Chocolate Brownies

Here is another way to overeat and love it. Plain old chocolate brownies from my disintegrating 1948 cookbook continue to be the ones I like best. One of my daughters has requested the recipe, so here it is with my adaptations, from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, 1948 edition.

Chocolate Brownies

7-inch square pan – double this for 9-inch square pan

2 squares (2 ounces) unsweetened chocolate            1/8 teaspoon salt

¼ cup butter                                                                ½ cup all-purpose flour

1 cup sugar                                                                 1 teaspoon vanilla

2 eggs                                                              ½ cup cut walnut meats (optional)

Melt chocolate over hot water in 2 quart saucepan. Remove from heat. Add butter and stir until melted. Add sugar, eggs, salt and vanilla and mix together. Add flour and optional nuts. Grease the baking pan and spread the mixture evenly in it. Bake about 50 minutes at 300 degrees. When cool cut in squares.

The book says to line the pan with heavy waxed paper, which I have never done. It’s easy to grease the pan.

Pumpkin Bread - One Loaf

My daughter Sarah has a shelf filled with canned pumpkin, which she bought for a purpose that is not part of this discussion and no longer matters in her life. In response to her need to find something to do with it all, I offer her and the world a recipe for pumpkin bread. She lives alone with her cats, so this continues my theme of preparing foods for one or two instead of a family of humans. Here is the opportunity to make one loaf of pumpkin bread.

Great recipes often turn up in church cookbooks. Often the contributors to these books have simple and delicious ways to prepare foods. I found this in a book that I bought long ago in my Green Bay years, St. John the Baptist Church Family Cook Book, created by the church in Howard in 1982. I shrank the quantities and revised ingredients a bit. It is sweet and almost cakey.

One problem might be what to do with the other half of the can of pumpkin. I suggest pumpkin soup, which exists elsewhere in my blog. On the other hand, one can double it and make more pumpkin bread.

For Sarah and not her cats, but maybe her deceased dog, here it is.

Pumpkin Bread – One loaf

1/3 cup shortening                                                          1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup sugar                                                                         ¾ teaspoon salt

2 eggs                                                                                   ¼ teaspoon baking powder

1 cup canned or cooked pumpkin                             ½ teaspoon cinnamon

1/3 cup water                                                                    12 teaspoon ground cloves

1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour                                            ½ cup raisins

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour one standard loaf pan. I learned the hard way that just greasing the pan caused the baked bread to stick to the pan, so I suggest sprinkling a dusting of flour on the bottom and sides as with cake.

Stir together until well mixed the flour, soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and cloves. In a large bowl cream the shortening and sugar. Add eggs, pumpkin and water and stir until blended. Mix in the flour mixture. Last add the raisins. Nuts can be added. Pour it into the bread pan and bake about 70 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the loaf from the pan immediately.

Turkey Quiche for Two

Leftover turkey is the aftermath of Thanksgiving cooks. Our family gathered at my home and ate plenty, but still I have leftover turkey. I made a big pot of turkey soup and still have leftover turkey. I thought of something else to do with it, and here is a non-traditional quiche that is easy to make and won’t last all week. It has more refined processed food than I prefer (Bisquick), but it tastes good. It’s non-traditional because there is no crust to roll. The Bisquick makes crust while the quiche bakes.

This recipe is a reason to have an 8-inch pie tin in the cupboard even though stores don’t sell them anymore. To solve the 8-inch pie dish dilemma, I think the quiche can be baked in a six by eight inch glass baking dish that Pyrex sells. I didn’t try it since I have a round 8-inch pie pan.

Leftover Turkey Quiche for Two

Put into blender container and blend for ten seconds:

2 eggs

1 cup milk (I prefer whole milk)

1/3 cup Bisquick – regular or gluten free

1/3 cup melted butter

¼ teaspoon salt approximately

Pepper

Pour the blended mixture into ungreased 8-inch pie tin or 6x8-inch baking dish.

Distribute on top:

¾ cup or more chopped cooked turkey (chopped cooked chicken works too)

½ cup or more grated Swiss cheese – or cheese of your choice

Bake it at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. Eat it hot.

It is possible to find 8-inch pie plates in thrift stores such as Goodwill.

Date Bread

My maternal grandmother was legendary for two things, date bread and chocolate chip cookies. We called her Sweetie Pie because she was uncomfortable with people knowing she was a grandma. She was glamorous most of her life, with a petite figure and plenty of curly artificially colored red hair. She was one of the rare divorcees of her time, and she had plenty of dates but no second marriage. When Sweetie Pie was at our home or we were at hers in Chicago, we ate her delicious home-made cookies and date bread. Later she moved to Sturgeon Bay to be near us as we grew up.

Her date bread recipe was in her head and not on paper. At one time my mother tried to get it in written form. Mother said that Sweetie Pie wasn’t specific about how much she used of most ingredients, so Mother patiently asked her, “How much flour, a teaspoon or ten cups? How many eggs?” and so on. Here is the result for my family and everyone else.

Date Bread

1 cup dates                                                        1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda                                    1 heaping teaspoon butter

1 cup boiling water                                          2 eggs

1 cup nuts                                                          2 cups flour

Cut up the dates.  Add soda and water. Cool. Cream butter and sugar. Beat eggs and add. Pour date mixture on this and blend. Add nuts and flour. Pour into buttered loaf pan with wax paper on bottom. Bake at 300 degrees about one hour or until done. Remove from pan immediately.

Cheese Souffle for One or Two

The only way you’ll get this is to make it at home. Hardly anyone hears about souffles in the media or restaurants. If Martha Stewart has shown how to make one, I haven’t seen it. A soufflé lives in a cookbook.

I hadn’t made a soufflé for many years but suddenly I had a reason. After the dentist extracted a front tooth, she told me to eat soft foods for a while. I ate some tomato soup, yogurt and bread pudding, and then decided that I could use some imagination in my new eating regimen. Cheese soufflé seemed to be a good idea. I went to my big fat worn out 1953 Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook and found the recipe, which I adapted by reducing the ingredients and rewriting some words.

Once again I thanked my seventh and eighth grade home economics teacher, Mrs. Robertson, whom I haven’t seen for about sixty years and who probably is in the great kitchen in the sky, for teaching me the procedures that this recipe requires. Actually, it’s easy to make a soufflé. This is a small one. It’s supposed to be puffy when it comes out of the oven, and it will fall from its glorious volume almost immediately, so it must be eaten right away.

Cheese Souffle

2 tablespoons butter               ¼ pound cheddar cheese, shredded or in small pieces

2 tablespoons flour                 2 well beaten egg yolks

¼ teaspoon salt                       2 stiff beaten egg whites

1/2 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 300 or 315 degrees. Melt the butter. Add flour and salt and blend. Add milk gradually and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sauce is thick and smooth. Add the cheese and cook until the cheese is melted. Gradually stir the hot sauce into the beaten egg yolks. With electric mixer, beat the egg whites until they are stiff but not dry. Carefully fold the cheese sauce into the egg whites with a wide spoon.  Pour the soufflé into an ungreased one-quart baking dish. To make a crown, trace a circle through the top of the mixture one inch from the edge.   Bake about one hour and fifteen minutes until it is firm and brown on top. Serve immediately.