Paul Prudhomme and my stove

Even though I haven't cooked a lot of Cajun food, I have had a special fondness for Paul Prudhomme for a long time.  That fondness was cemented when we ate at his restaurant, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen about 15 years ago. It was one of the best meals we have ever eaten in our lives and despite how miserably full I was, I did not leave a crumb on the table.  I don't remember now what we ordered, but it was all delicious.  I hope to go back there one of these days.

My friend pointed out this Paul Prudhomme book at an estate sale this week.  She said she already had it, so I picked it up to look through it.

When I opened it up and saw that it was inscribed to Betty, I took that as a sign that it needed to be with my stove, Betty (okay, I saw it as something I could rationalize... po-tay-to, po-tah-to.) 

Betty, this book is for you!  I'll just hold onto it so you don't catch it on fire.

My girl Betty

Cornbread

No, I'm not dead!  I'm still here! 

I have been cooking, but I either seem to make something that's not novel enough to post about or I forget to take a picture.  Which leads me to cornbread...  I made this so I could make Farm Boy's mother's chicken and dressing.  The dressing turned out pretty good (I think it would have met her expectations), but I forgot to take a picture.  I did, however, get a picture of the cornbread and since it's a recipe I really like, I'm sharing it so I can say I've posted something.

I always make the Canary Corn Sticks recipe from the 1950 Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, but I bake it in a cast iron skillet instead of a corn stick pan.  The key is to heat the skillet beforehand in the oven, then throw in a couple tablespoons of butter to melt.  When the butter is sizzling, add the cornbread batter and pop it back in the oven.  This gives the cornbread a great crust, especially where the butter oozes over the top of the batter around the edges.

That is some buttery goodness around the edge of the pan

Most of this cornbread went into the dressing recipe, but we did have a couple pieces left.  The next morning they were sliced in half and toasted on the griddle, then drizzled with maple syrup.  Leftover cornbread makes for a mighty fine breakfast.

Cornbread (Printable Recipe)

from the 1950 Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book recipe, Canary Corn Sticks

Ingredients

1 egg

1 1/2 cups buttermilk

1/2 teaspoon soda

1/2 cup flour

1 1/2 cups corn meal

1 teaspoon sugar

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup melted butter

2 tablespoons butter (for skillet)

Directions

Preheat oven to 450F.  When the oven is hot, add a 10" cast iron skillet to the oven to heat it.  After about 5 minutes, add the 2 tablespoons butter and let it begin to sizzle before adding batter.

Beat the egg and buttermilk until well combined.  Stir together the soda, flour, corn meal, sugar, baking powder and salt.  Add to egg mixture, along with melted butter, and beat together.  Pour batter into heated/buttered skillet and bake for 20 to 25 minutes.

Coconut Bars

A local medical association has a twice yearly book sale to raise money for medical field scholarships.  Despite the fact that I'm in danger of being crushed to death by my cookbook hoard, 9 books followed me home from the fall sale.  Most of them came from the clearance room, so my total cost was $11.50, with the big splurge of $5 for the Julia Child book.

Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapes by James Beard, Austrian Cooking & Baking by Gretel Beer, The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken, Eat Great, Lose Weight by Suzanne Somers, Homemade Cookies Cook Book from Better Homes and Gardens, The Way to Cook by Julia Child, Magic Chef Cooking, Lorain Cooking, Southern Plantation Cooking by Corinne Carlton Geer

Don't ridicule me for the Suzanne Somers book.  It violates my rule against diet books and she can be a little "out there" sometimes, but she knows tasty food.  I had copied a few recipes out of that book in the past, so I couldn't pass it up for a quarter.

Interestingly (to me, at least), the Magic Chef cookbook is a later edition of the Lorain cookbook beside it. From my brief searching, it looks like Lorain made oven regulators that were used on many different stove brands, much like my Chambers stove has a Robertshaw oven regulator.  I would guess at the time the Lorain book was  published (1928), temperature-regulated ovens were a modern marvel.


I wanted to justify adding more books by baking something from one of them for Sunday tea and crumpets.  Alas, I had a serious craving for these coconut bars and since I hadn't blogged about them before, I decided to go for it.

Cookies by Bess (1980) by Bess Hoffman

This book did come from one of the previous book sales, so that counts for something, right?  Right?  It has also become one of my favorite books for cookies and bars.  Bess Hoffman knew a good cookie!

These are really good, with a brown sugar shortbread base, topped with a gooey butterscotch/coconut filling that becomes brown and crisp on top. It's been a hit every time I have made it.

Snowflakes!

Coconut Bars (Printable recipe)
from Cookies by Bess (1980) by Bess Hoffman

Crust
1 cup sifted flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/8 teaspoon salt

Topping
2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
2 Tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups chopped shredded coconut

Directions
For the crust: Sift together the flour, brown sugar and salt.  Cut in the butter.  Press  mixture into greased 8x8x2 inch pan.  Bake at 375F for 10 minutes.

For the topping: Beat eggs slightly; add sugar.  Add flour, soda and salt to eggs.  Fold in vanilla and coconut.  Spread evenly over hot baked crust.  Bake for 20 to 25 minutes longer at the same temperature.  Cool and cut into squares.

Apple Squares

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but a bag of mushy apples is the mother of apple squares.  Or something like that.

I usually eat an apple every day but by the end of summer, my fa-vo-rite apple, Pink Lady, had been out of season for a while.  When I saw a new (to me) variety, Ginger Gold, I decided to give it a try.  While they don't compare with Pink Lady, I liked them well enough.  When I was back in the same store a few weeks later, the same apples were marked down to fifty cents a pound, so I bought another bag of them.  Alas, like most summer apples, it turns out that Ginger Gold apples don't keep very well.  They had lost some of the sharpness and begun to go mealy.  Time to bake something.

I turned to the stack of books sitting beside the computer (because the book shelves are overflowing...) and found a candidate in Favorite Recipes from our Best Cooks (1968) from the St. Agatha Church, Bridgeville, PA. 

That big grease stain on the front has to be a good sign, right?

The title makes me wonder if there are other books available.  Maybe Second Tier Recipes from our Best Cooks or Favorite Recipes from our Worst Cooks (Try at your own risk!). 

Since we were running low on eggs, I opted to use 2 eggs and I replaced the 1 cup of cooking oil with 1/2 cup of melted butter.  While I was making edits, I also decided to use some brown sugar instead of all white sugar.

The batter was really stiff and when I combined it with the apples and nuts, I was beginning to fear that there wouldn't be enough, but it puffed up significantly while baking. 

 

It snowed! 

These turned out even better than I expected.  The cake was moist, with a pronounced cinnamon flavor that really complemented the apples. 

Apple Squares (Printable Recipe)
adapted from Favorite Recipes from our Best Cooks (1968) by the St. Agatha Church, Bridgeville, PA

Ingredients
2 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 stick butter, melted and cooled
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 small apples, peeled and cubed
1 cup chopped nuts

Directions
Lightly grease a 9x13" pan.  Preheat oven to 350F.

Blend first 4 ingredients. Sift next 4 ingredients.  Stir into egg mixture.  Fold in apples and nuts.  Bake at 350F for one hour.  Cool, cut into squares and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law picked up some cookies from a local cookie shop and shared a few with us.  I opted to try the oatmeal chocolate chip and I thought it was a nice combination of oatmeal, chocolate and cinnamon.  I really liked the cinnamon with the chocolate.  As  I usually find with bakery products, the cookie was undercooked to my tastes, so I thought I would see if I could replicate it at home. 


For inspiration, I turned to the 1980 Toll House Heritage Cookbook.

I didn't find an oatmeal chocolate chip recipe, but I did find one for Oatmeal Scotchies.  I didn't have any butterscotch chips at home, so I would have had to substitute chocolate chips anyway.  Plus, I would almost always choose chocolate over butterscotch.  Because it is chocolate.

To change the recipe to what I was looking for, I added a teaspoon of cinnamon to the flour, replaced the orange extract with vanilla and substituted chocolate chips for the butterscotch morsels.  And my mom says I can't follow directions!

Add caption

Man, these were good!  I couldn't taste the cinnamon as much as in the bakery version, but the chocolate chips and oatmeal are a good match.  Move over raisins, chocolate chips are taking over the oatmeal cookie!

In other news, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous for the last week and the butterflies have been showing up in droves.  We've even had a few migrating Monarchs stop for a visit.  Normally their migration route is a bit west of us, so it was fun to see so many at once.  I managed to catch a photo of one feeding from my bedraggled Mexican sunflower.  This poor flower came up right in the middle of my garden path, so I have been walking around it all summer.  It's about 7 feet tall now and has been blown over twice in storms, but it just keeps on blooming.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies (Printable recipe)
adapted from the 1980 edition of the Toll House Heritage Cookbook

Ingredients
2 cups unsifted flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup softened butter
1 1/2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon water
1 1/2 cups uncooked oats
12 ounces chocolate chips
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions
Preheat oven to 375F.  In a small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon; set aside.  In a large bowl, combine butter, brown sugar, eggs and water; beat until creamy.  Gradually add flour mixture.  Stir in oats, chocolate chips and vanilla extract.  Drop by slightly rounded measuring tablespoons onto greased cookie sheets (I used parchment paper).  Bake 10 to 12 minutes.

A couple of vintage scores!

Last week I was determined to get the flowerbeds whipped into shape, so I dove head-first into the project.  I bought a flat of pansies plus some perennials and shrubs to add to the landscape, then started ripping out dead plants and weeds.  This, of course, brought on 5" of rain over the last few days, so I haven't been able to plant any of the things I bought.  Since I couldn't plant, I shopped.

Fortunately, my sister suggested we go to our mom's church rummage sale (only to find that our mom had decided not to go!) and a few other places on Saturday, so that took my mind off of my planting woes.

I was the one that introduced my sister to estate sale and junk store shopping, but it turns out that she is much better at it than I am.  She found many treasures on our excursion, but I was beginning to think I was going home empty handed when I finally found a Pyrex Snowflake casserole:

 

It's in really nice shape, but missing its lid.  As it happens, I had found a lid for a quarter in a thrift shop months ago, but hadn't seen an appropriately sized casserole for sale since.  So yay, a complete casserole dish!  This brings my total Snowflake count up to 3 (well, 3 dishes, 2 lids).  Does that count as a collection?

I really like the space saver Pyrex dishes. More!  I want more!

On my way home from my sister's house, I noticed a sign for an estate sale that I hadn't seen advertised.  The sale was wrapping up, so there wasn't much left, but I found 3 rectangular Pyrex storage containers with plastic lids for $7, plus this little gem for $1:

Because, really, who doesn't need one of these?

I gave it to Farm Boy because he sure does love his weiner.  Dog.  He loves his weiner dog.

Arlo the weiner dog

I'm going to try to find an air plant to put in the little planter.  Between the cats and my regime of forgetfulness and neglect, most houseplants don't stand a chance around here.

On the cooking front, I didn't do much in the way of vintage cookery this past week.  We had guests over for dinner on Sunday (for Farm Boy's famous ribs - mmmm!) and I made my first coconut cream pie.  I sent the last piece home with one of the guests and then sorely regretted that decision after Monday's lunch. <sigh>

Cinnamon Praline Flan

As a certified estate sale junkie, I've run into flan pans at sales for years, mostly in 1970s shades of orange, avocado and harvest gold.  Despite my apparent desire to own every baking utensil in the world, I could never figure out how you used them to make a custard-like flan, so I just ignored them. Until the day that I read you are supposed to bake a sponge cake in them, then fill the depression with all sorts of deliciousness.  It's effectively a bowl made of cake.  I had to have it.

So began my search for a flan pan.  Alas, much like my search for a backup cookie spatula, flan pans disappeared from estate sales as soon as I started looking for one.

Desperate desires call for desperate measures.  Hello, eBay.

I didn't have a recipe to go with my pan, so I borrowed one from a picture of an avocado colored pan I found online.  Unfortunately, those pans must be bigger than mine because my flan runneth over.  That just meant that Farm Boy and I had a little cake to snack on before time for Tea and Crumpets with my mom.

For the topping, I used the caramel frosting recipe from my jam cake attempt, adding a little cinnamon to the frosting and some toasted pecans on top of the cake.

Results:  Only one lonely piece came home with us after Tea and Crumpets, so I call that a success!  While I need to either scale down the cake or find a different recipe, that topping is a keeper.  For the next round, I will fill it with custard and top it with fruit.  If it has fruit, it's a health food, right?

Cinnamon Praline Flan (Printable Recipe)

Flan
from the back of a NordicWare flan pan

Ingredients:
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
3 egg yolks
1 1/4 cup sifted cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 

Directions: 
Beat butter, sugar and yolks until fluffy. Sift dry ingredients; add alternately with flavoring and milk; blend well. Pour into greased and floured flan pan. Bake at 350F about 25 minutes. Remove to rack and cool completely.

Cinnamon Praline Topping
 adapted from the 1968 edition of Everybody's Favorite from the Minnesota Catholic Daughters of America

Ingredients


3 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon


toasted pecans


Directions

Mix butter, cream, brown sugar, salt and cinnamon in a sauce pan.  Boil constantly until it reaches soft ball state.  Remove from heat, add vanilla.  Cool slightly, then beat until of spreading consistency.

Arrange toasted pecans on top of baked flan.  Pour caramel over pecans and allow to cool before serving.