Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee

My mom doesn’t like to bake. Heck, she doesn’t even like to cook that much. So it was interesting that she decided on cookies as a great holiday gift for teachers, ministers, postmen, etc. We would make eight to ten kinds of cookies during the weeks before the holidays, all of them going into the freezer. Nothing fancy, just the basics: chocolate chip, oatmeal, snickerdoodles, peanut blossoms, sour cream with almonds, frosted sugar, brownies. Then one afternoon we would put all the cookies out on the dining room table, each take a box and walk around the table, loading up the box w/ an assortment of cookies until it was full and then we start again with a new box. We were still doing this each holiday when I was in high school.

Without even meaning to, she handed down a baking tradition that I cling to, to this day. I don’t do as many cookie gifts as when I was in school, but I still do plates for my vet, my hardware store guys, my library and my milkman. Most of the cookies, however, end up being taken to various parties throughout the season, or brought out for visitors. And eaten with hot chocolate while watching holiday movies.

Nonny doesn’t bake anymore, although she does help out when she visits around Thanksgiving. She won’t measure, pour, stir or any job that requires that she get her hands dirty. However, she LOVES to clean so we are a perfect pair. I mix and measure and every time I’m done with a cup or a spoon, she whisks it away and washes it. On the years that she isn’t visiting when I cook, I really miss that!

This year we did 13 kinds of cookies in three days. Peanut Blossoms, Chocolate Chip, Vanilla Crescents, Peanut Butter Bon Bons, Oatmeal Scotchies, Chocolate Crinkles, White Chocolate Ting-a-Lings, Frosted Shortbread Sticks, Red Velvet Shortbread, Ginger w/ Caramel Filling, Spritz and 2 kinds of fudge.

Do you have a favorite holiday cookie?

Header photo by Luke Jones via Flickr – CC 2.0

Today’s post comes from Barbara in River Town

According to Wiki, a pot luck dinner is:  “a gathering where each guest contributes a dish of food, often homemade, to be shared. Synonyms include: potluck dinner, spread, Jacob’s join,[1][2] Jacob’s supper, faith supper, covered dish supper, dish party, bring and share, shared lunch, pitch-in, bring-a-plate, dish-to-pass, fuddle, and carry-in.” I always enjoy learning where words like this come from, and Wiki says:  “The word pot-luck appears in the 16th century English work of Thomas Nashe, and used to mean ‘food provided for an unexpected or uninvited guest, the luck of the pot.’[this quote needs a citation] The sense ‘communal meal, where guests bring their own food,’ appears to have originated in the late 19th century or early 20th century, particularly in Western North America, either by influence from potlatch or possibly by extension of traditional sense of ‘luck of the pot’.” The only rule, unless you’ve been asked to bring a particular type of dish, is to bring enough to share with several other (not necessarily all) attendees.

I remember once reading an advice or manners column (which one is lost in the mists of time) stating that when hosting a Holiday Dinner, it is incorrect to ask the guests to bring food. I heard myself saying aloud to the newspaper, “What universe do you live in??”

So far in December we’ve been invited to 8 potluck Christmas or Holiday gatherings. This week alone there are Husband’s pool group (billiards, not swimming) party, our Harmonica Group and Wellspring Singers, my T’ai Chi group, the Wiscoy Community Farm carolers, and the Unitarians (Garrison would have a field day here) after caroling at nursing homes on Saturday. The folk dancers have their party on the 30^th…

This is in addition to non-holiday pot lucks – November 12 we joined a spontaneous “sing-in” out at Zephyr Community Farm, sort of a coping tactic after the election. Last week was the Frac Sand Ban Victory bash put on by the Land Stewardship Project – the Winona County Commissioners voted in November to ban all further frac sand mining here.

Of course, this will all come to a screeching halt in January, and we will go through Party Withdrawal, along with Christmas Music Withdrawal, and Colored Light Withdrawal. At any rate, I hope there is one pot luck somewhere in January.

What’s your “go to” dish to bring to a pot luck?

Today’s post comes from Jacque

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, my niece got married.   She wanted homemade wedding pie, rather than the traditional wedding cake. Years ago, when this niece and her cousin and her sister were tiny, my mother started the pie thing. Then the first niece requested of mom that she have graduation pie, so Mom asked us for help. Ten years later, this has come home to roost on the shoulders of my sister and I because my mother no longer does pie. It was all we could do to get her to the wedding itself.

My sister and I and our nieces had done the mass pie bake three times before for high school graduations. All three of them wanted this for their tradition Iowa High School Graduation Open Houses, which is no small party. Our only expectation of each of them is that they help for their sister/cousin’s celebration. They all did.

For the wedding pie my niece Annie was part of the baking in my sister’s church kitchen. Jo and I made and froze all the pie crust in the weekends preceeding the wedding. She ordered pie tins and pie boxes from Amazon which made things stackable and efficient. Assembling and baking the pies took two days, with Thanksgiving Day planted in the middle of the bakefest. The 3 of us made 46 pies, 3 of which we served for the Thanksgiving meal dessert (pumpkin, minced meat and cherry).

Here is the breakdown of pie types:

Cherry (2 crust) 9

Apple (2 crust) 5

Apple crumb (1 crust) 5

Blueberry crumb (1 crust) 5

Strawberry Rhubarb (2 crust) 6

Bumbleberry (2 crust) 3

Pumpkin (1 crust, my least favorite, why even bother. Hrmph) 2

Lemon Meringue (1 crust) 4

Rhubarb Custard Meriginge (1 crust) 3

1 apple which fell on the floor and we scooped up the part that did not touch the  floor and                  ATE IT!

3 Thanksgiving pies

3 types of whipped creamed were served with it: vanilla, cinnamon, and rum.

The whole thing was a hit. Many guests had been at the girls’ High School Graduation parties and came ready for pie. My sister and I got to eat right after the wedding party. We were still eating when our sister-in-law ran over and said,   “People are already serving themselves at the pie station. I hate to hurry you, but look.” We ran over and started serving. It was like bugs to light—wedding guests attracted to pie.

One young man who had two or three slices of various kinds, came over asking, “Can I just have the cinnamon whipped cream. I have had enough pie.” There was plenty. I gave him a plateful.

Our feet were sore and we were exhausted. This was our gift to the bride and groom. Nobody else made them pie! Mom said her pie was good—she had apple crumb with cinnamon whipped cream.

What’s your odd family tradition?

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

We have five grocery stores in our town.  We gained one large Cashwise during the oil boom, along with a brand new, bigger  Family Fare that joined the two smaller Family Fares we already had. Walmart  was already here. It really is too many stores for a town our size, but none have closed since the oil bust.

Daughter chose recipes for Thanksgiving this year that called for lots of fresh sage, rosemary , and thyme, as well as parsley. I waited until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving buy the last  of the ingredients, certainly not the last minute I thought, especially with so many grocery stores in town. Well, daughter and I searched all the stores for the herbs, and came up empty except for some limp parsley. We were told at each store “we might have a truck in tomorrow night, but we’re not sure  if they ordered more herbs. People just snapped them up last week as soon as we put them  out”.

This called for some creative  thinking.  I knew we had a large Lemon Thyme plant on the south side of the house that was a little ragged but still greenish, and a smallish rosemary plant in the front that might not have quite froze, but what about the sage?

We were in the Walmart produce section after one of the produce workers made an unproductive search of the back cooler for errant herbs, when I saw them–four medium sized pots filled with fresh sage and thyme plants, each at a price identical to one of those  plastic boxes fresh herbs come in. This was true serendipity if not Divine intervention.  We bought two, and only used  the sage in one of the pots.  The extra pot is now in my office, along with the much pruned rosemary plant from the front yard.

What did it take to find your missing ingredient?

Today’s post comes from Barbara in Rivertown

Our good friend Walken (Husband’s BFF from the hippie farm days) lives several blocks from us here in Winona. Since the three of us are having Thanksgiving together, Walken suggested the other day that we look through his chest freezer for the Thanksgiving fowl, as he has a wealth of meat and poultry stashed there: some lamb, couple of chickens, and… a DUCK! So as I write this, sitting on a platter in my fridge is 6 ½  pounds of water fowl, begging the question:  what does one do with a duck?

First I go to the Joy of Cooking – on page 475 I read “About Wild Birds”, although there is no indication that this bird is wild-caught, being encased as it is in shrink wrap. At any rate I don’t need instructions for dry plucking or singeing it, but I did find these useful tidbits:

• Duckling Rouennaise – “Unless you choke your duck, pluck the down on its breast immediately afterward and cook it within 24 hours, you cannot lay claim to having produced an authentic Rouen duck… If, as is likely, duck-strangling will bring you into local disrepute, you may waive the sturdy peasant preliminaries and serve a modified version, garnished with quotation marks.” (p. 474)   I had no idea Irma Rombauer et al. could be so tongue-in-cheek!
• Roast Domestic Duck – “Most duck on the American market is not descended from wild native variety, but from a type bred in China where, of course, this bird is held in high esteem.” (p. 473)
• Besides duck, turkey, and goose; there are recipes for guinea or cornish hen, pigeon, grouse, ptarmigan, prairie chicken, dove or wood pigeon, pheasant, partridge, quail, and snipe or woodcock, just in case you come upon any of these. (Before cooking, you must read “About Small Game Birds”.)

There are recipes for Roast Duck Bigarade and Apricot Honey Glazed Duck (involving brandy and Cointreau, both of which we have!).  Or there is, on p. 326, a nice Orange Sauce for Duck or Goose. I have also found a couple of things on line, including Julia Child’s Duck L’Orange, which looks like a lot of bother and will probably lose out to the Roast Duck L’Orange recipe at food.com.

Whatever I decide upon, it will be fun to try something out of the ordinary.

What, if anything, do you eat during the Holidays that veers away from the Traditional?

Today’s post comes from Barbara in Rivertown

For not getting most our garden in till late June, we are having some luck. I’ve frozen some tomato sauce, and we’ve been keeping up with the zucchini by that old late summer standby, giving some away to our neighbors. I found a chilled cucumber smoothie recipe that has helped use up LOTS of those big honkin’ cukes, and which was delightful on some of those hot days.

But I’m feeling a little overwhelmed this week, as there are cukes AND tomatoes AND zucchini to process in some way. Also some windfall pears we found on a corner a couple of blocks from here, and our friend Walken’s kohlrabi… Knowing how Babooners mostly know these things, I thought I’d ask here for recipes.

Specifically, does anyone have an outstanding Zucchini Bread recipe? (The one I remember is nowhere to be found.)

Anyone have a good recipe for an offbeat tomato-based Salsa?

And how about a cucumber raita, or some other cooling cucumber salad recipe?

Oh, I know I can find these things online if I look, but it seems friendlier to get them from baboons – they taste better somehow – and we haven’t had a recipe day for a while.

What’s your favorite Harvest Recipe, whether you’ve actually made it or not?

Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee

My first tomato of the season! It’s small – a variety of grape tomato known as the Santa.  I noticed it starting to turn a couple of days ago and was hoping some critter didn’t get to it before it was perfectly red and ready.  There it was last night when I got home; it didn’t even make it into the house before I had popped it in my mouth. I try not to say “OMG” too much but OMG!

I’ve always loved tomatoes. I love big fat tomato slices on open-faced cheese sandwiches. I love little tiny tomatoes in pasta salad.  Chunks of tomato with orzo and basil.  Salsa with tomatillos.  Spaghetti w/ tomatoes, olive oil and spinach. Bruschetta with diced tomatoes and garlic.  Hardly a way you can make something with tomatoes that I don’t like.

For many years I tried, unsuccessfully, to grow my own. The garden plot was decimated by dogs; the “hanging” contraption was too heavy and kept falling over.  Plants just never grew in big pots.  It was so demoralizing that for many years, I didn’t even try.  Then, thanks to someone mentioning it on the Trail, I read Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook, an exposé on the tomato industry.  It was horrifying and I came away from the book with a new determination to grow my own tomatoes.  It was this determination that led me to straw bale gardening – finally a way to have my own home-grown tomatoes.

I know I’m probably not saving any money by growing my own (cost of bales, cost of water, cost of seedlings, etc.) but I do love picking a tomato, taking in the house and eating it for dinner. There is nothing like it in my book!

What summer produce can you hardly wait for?

Today’s post comes from Steve Grooms.

Uh oh! The warden has just informed you that your last appeal was rejected.

You might have won a stay (or even a pardon) if Hillary had won. But President Ted Cruz filled Scalia’s open chair with Dick Cheney, and there went your chance for any mercy. Pizzle rot! You should have voted Democratic.

But there is an upside to this. You do get to choose your last meal. That’s something to look forward to, right?

What will this meal be? Some options are not open. You don’t get to pick that famous Chinese dish, 100 year old egg, starting with an egg laid this week. You’ve gotta choose something that will take a reasonable time to prepare. But it is nice that the warden doesn’t insist you pick a fast food dish. Whew!

My first choice for a last meal is something our family absolutely adored. Sad to say, it is no longer available. Our favorite meal for years was takeout from Caravan Serai, the first Afghani restaurant in the United States. Nancy Kayhoum was the owner and main cook in the 1980s and 1990s. About once a week we ordered her incredible combination appetizer (the Marco Polo) and then each family member had a favorite standard dish. Chicken kabobs for the grownups, gyros for the kid. It was heaven. When we opened the takeout bags, our home reeked of delicious herbs and spices for hours. But Nancy closed her restaurant decades ago, so that’s that.

It surprises (and mildly embarrasses) me that my next choice of last meal is something quite common. It was a meal I cooked myself, and once again it was something we had regularly. But it was so satisfying that it would be better than any other last meal I can think of. When my erstwife left the US to live in Europe, she would occasionally make business visits back home. This was the meal she asked me to serve her each time she was a house guest. It impressed me that a woman accustomed to eating in famous four-star restaurants all over Europe dreamed of enjoying again something we could cook at home.

What was that meal? It featured grilled round steak from Lunds, steamed broccoli drenched in a homemade Hollandaise sauce and oven-baked Tater Tots. The steak was Lunds’ dry-aged round steak, but for my last meal I would upgrade to filet mignon. And we should not forget one or two of those French baguettes from the Lunds bakery. Since we are not cutting corners here, we can add butter from the Hope Creamery. And to wash it down, let’s have pinot noir from Oregon.

It isn’t the meal my cardiologist would endorse. We have been told we shouldn’t eat too
much meat, and I don’t think Tater Tots make anybody’s list of health food. But hey, that’s what is so good about a last meal. You can chow down like there is no tomorrow!

We didn’t use to have desert with that meal, but this is a special occasion, so we’ll make an exception. While I remember some incredible deserts we ate while traveling (crème brulee in a London restaurant comes to mind) my choice for a last meal would again be prosaic. Give me a slice of pecan pie, with a generous scoop cinnamon ice cream on the side.

Oh, my, that was good. Hey warden, could I have seconds?

What would you choose for your very last meal?

Today’s post comes from Cynthia in Mahtowa

Going through some old letters I had sent to my mother from my first teaching job in Port Angeles, Washington in 1964, I found a paragraph describing all the “new” foods I was eating. Foods I had never heard of in my small northeastern Minnesota hometown such as artichokes, zucchini, Swiss chard, eggplant, turnips, parsnips. (I led a very sheltered food life.)

I remember that first taste of an artichoke – a more worldly friend teaching me how to tear off a leaf, dip it in butter and scrape off the soft inner part with my lower teeth. How exotic. Later that friend’s aunt taught me to use mayonnaise with dry vermouth and garlic for dipping — still my preference.

Washington state firsts: Dungeness crab. Fresh salmon. Fresh apricots. Carrot cake.

So this got me to thinking of all the “exotic” foods that I was introduced to since then.   Five months in Switzerland, four of them living above and eating in a bakery/tea room — cheese fondue with bread dipped in kirsch (cherry brandy), lamb curry, gibfeli (croissants), café au lait, escargot, tripe soup. I have fond memories of all but the tripe soup.

On the small Italian ship I took to Europe in 1965 I had tongue and my first cappuccino. When we landed In England I had coffee with Demerara (brown) sugar. Did I try steak and kidney pie? I might have. But that really hot Indian curry in a English restaurant made me feel guilty for not eating it all because of the hungry children of India.

In Greece I watched a man slam an octopus repeatedly on the rocks. Was he trying to kill it or tenderize it? But I did not eat octopus until many years later and then in a sushi restaurant. (A friend traveling in the Orient had octopus so fresh the sucker stuck to the top of his mouth. But that may have been the least exotic thing he ate on that trip…was it duck bills or duck feet?) Squid entered my eating repertoire much later, though the first time I had it I was unnerved by the little tentacles.

When I was a child my father paid me to eat asparagus – or, tried to. He had tricked me into eating horseradish when I was five. How could I trust him to steer me right? Asparagus cooked to a gray mush? Then in 1972 I paid $2.50 for three spears of properly cooked white asparagus in a San Francisco restaurant. There I also had a “bird with a long beak” for an entrée. It had four legs and no wings…a rabbit, perhaps? Did the waiter mistranslate or was he leading me astray and making fun because I didn’t know French?

Asparagus was the first thing I planted when I moved to this farm. It still comes back every spring. I eat it sautéed it to a bright and crispy green.

First time food that has not been repeated: Rocky Mountain “oysters” (our kid goats’ testicles). Foods have become favorites: really, really hot Mexican food, goat meat, spanakopita, lobster, clams, mussels, lamb. Swedish Princess cake made with marzipan, whipped cream, raspberries and custard. Every cake I ate in Norway. Scandinavian open face sandwiches (smørsbrød). French goat cheeses and Norwegian brown cheese. I could go on…but won’t.

What “exotic” foods have you tried and fallen in love with….or not?