Category: Stories
Grandmother’s Ice Cream
I have a small ice cream maker, the kind that has the frozen bowl. It works really well and makes creating new gelatos, sherbets and ice cream super easy. My grandmother had a large, hidously loud ice cream maker. I remember her making this ice cream, packing the ice around the container, adding freezer salt,…
Grandma–again with the mashed potatoes?
I was perusing through the family recipe book (compiled from all the recipe cards, newspaper clippings, and envelopes with scribbled recipes that we found stashed away in her house), and I came across her “Everlasting Bread Recipe.” Again, just like in her potato salad recipe, she used leftover mashed potatoes. You might think the family…
Antique Cookbooks and Society’s Mores
I have a number of old cookbooks, some from my grandmother’s collection and some that I have purchased. They crack me up. Here are a few things that I find the most humorous (or perplexing): The Dallas Jr. League Cookbook (1976) actually has a menu for “Lunch on a Private Jet.” It reads, “Texans need…
Cake Show Pound Cake
As I believe I have mentioned before, it is my mother who first got me started in competitive cooking. At the age of nine, I found myself old enough to join 4-H, which meant that besides making the obligatory triangular fringed poncho for a sewing project, I could now enter the Cake Show. Mom always…
Grandma’s Mashed Potatoes
One of my grandmothers did make potato salad out of leftover mashed potatoes, but my other grandmother had the making of mashed potatoes down to an art. I remember them being so creamy that they almost poured off the spoon, full of butter, cream and lots of pepper. There was no making potato salad out…
Potato Salad and You
I just started reading Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life. (I find myself only reading foodie books now—in fact I just got Anthony Bourdain’s new one, Jay Rayner’s The Man Who Ate the World, and my very own copy of Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires delivered to my door. Thanks, Amazon! ) In one of Wizenberg’s chapters, she…
OMG! It’s Anthony Bourdain!
What an evening! Well worth the money I plopped down in February for these tickets. It was a fantastic show (and of course he entered stage right with a beer in hand). Loved his opening Rachel Ray story! I think some of our friends who went might have been offended, but who did they really think…
Skeletons in the closet!
OK–Have you ever delved into your family history to wish that perhaps you hadn’t have been so inquisitive? As I was working on my new page last night for this site, “Cookbooks that I Can’t Live Without” (see Foodie Reads), I listed one from my grandmother’s collection, a collection of about five or six cookbooks…
Traveling Along I-70
Having family in Colorado, we travel I-70 often. Let me tell you, that is one long stretch of Kansas geography! We have our little landmarks along the way–the top hat guy, the wind farms, and the roadrunner. (If you have ever made this trip, you know what I mean.) We located a Shimpo pottery wheel…
At least one summer trip is planned!
We are planning on returning to Taos this summer and I cannot wait. The entire family will be there and we have rented a wonderful house that promises “unparalleled views of Taos Mountain and the Sangre de Cristo range.” I hope there is truth in advertising on this one. One of our family traditions is…