First Public Appearance: Chocolate Joy Cake, Milk Chocolate Cake, Cherry Torte, Swedish Shortbread & Blueberry Muffins

I apologize for the delay in posting my recap of The Found Recipe Box’s first public appearance. It’s been a crazy week and my scanner decided it didn’t want to work for a while!

Last Monday night, I did a presentation about The Found Recipe Box project for the Visual Journaling Collective at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. There were about 25 people in attendance at the meeting, including two very special guests: my husband and my mom. I got a surprise the week before when I found out my mom would be coming to help me bake and to watch the presentation. She was a huge help in the kitchen and it meant a lot to have her there because there was a lot I had to thank her for (click here to read about how she got me involved in art). 

Celebrating the Arrival of Summer: Spinach Salad & Cornbread

Summer has arrived with a vengeance. Technically, it doesn’t officially begin until the middle of June, but the record-setting high temperatures we had in Minneapolis this week have left everyone agreeing that summer has settled in for the season.

It was too hot to tackle the weeds in the garden so I decided to cook instead. Murphy hates the heat so he stayed curled up on the cool kitchen floor, right in the middle of all the activity. He thought about cooling off in the pool a few times, but as soon as I opened the door and the heat hit him in the face, he turned around and returned to his spot at my feet.

To celebrate summer, I wanted to make a meal complete with all the wonderful treats we get to enjoy this time of year. My goal was to make dishes that didn’t require turning on the oven, but that didn’t happen.

I started with a spinach salad. When I began reading the ingredients on the card, I was intrigued by the combination of flavors in this salad. I never would have thought to combine bacon, oranges and avocado, but I have to say that I was more than pleasantly surprised. This is a refreshing and very tasty mix of flavors and textures. And the dressing is the perfect way to top it all off. I usually make salads with green leaf or romaine lettuce and just add some spinach leaves in, but I loved that this salad was entirely made of spinach. The leaves seem to have more density to them; they feel thicker and more robust than regular lettuce. It reminds me of eating whole wheat bread or whole wheat crackers. There’s just more substance to the bite. 

Dressing for the Spinach Salad

To accompany the salad, I chose to make cornbread. I’m so used to getting the little blue box of Jiffy mix from the store that I feel embarrassed to admit I wasn’t even sure of what goes into making real cornbread. But, as I’ve learned from so many other recipes in this box, it’s really not very complicated at all. And the other benefit of making it from scratch is it tastes SO much better. This cornbread has a full flavor that isn’t overly sweet and makes you mumble “mmmmmm” as you take your first bite. It was a great side dish to serve with the spinach salad.

For dessert, I chose to make a variation of the Tiny Shortbread Tarts. As I mentioned in the original post for these little cookies, I thought fresh raspberries would be a great way to top them off as opposed to the can of pie filling. Now that summer is unofficially here, the price of raspberries is starting to come down so I bought a carton and decided to test my theory. Instead of making the tarts, I patted the dough down into an 8” x 8” pan (which caused the baking time of the original recipe to increase by almost 10 minutes). While that was cooling, I made a cream cheese mixture to spread across the top which consisted of 1 package of cream cheese, ¼ cup sugar and ½ teaspoon of vanilla. Once the cookies were cool, I frosted them with the cream cheese mixture and topped it all off with raspberries. And I was right, it was divine. This variation would work for the tiny tarts as well. 

As I took the last bite of dessert and savored the explosion of fresh raspberry in my mouth, I thought of how much this project has expanded my taste buds and forced me to break out of my comfort zone. As I’ve said before, I’m a picky eater and although I enjoy oranges, bacon and avocado on their own, I never thought I’d be as bold as to throw that odd mixture of flavors into one dish and eat them all together. But, as I learned from my adventure to Canada, it’s good to break our boundaries, to push ourselves a little farther every now and then. Who knows, we may just discover something about ourselves we never would have known had we not taken that leap of faith. Each discovery makes us just a little wiser and just a little stronger. And in addition to broadening our minds, sometimes our discoveries will leave our bellies full of wonderful summer treats as well.

Fuel for the Road: Best-Ever Refrigerator Bran Muffins

Today I start a 3-day journey to see my grandmother. I’ll be driving six hours to IL where I’ll get in the car with my mom and dad and then we’ll make the 16-hour trek down to Florida. My bags are packed, my selection of books are tucked into the car and as soon as I post this, I’m giving Murphy one more cuddle and then I’m hitting the road.

Road trips can be bad for your health — sitting in one position for multiple hours, poor selection of food along the highway, sleeping with your head against a window and when you wake up you have a twinge in your neck for a week. So it’s important to plan ahead. We have a tradition in our family of eating egg salad sandwiches on car trips. My mom started it when we were kids and drove to Florida for a couple of weeks in the summer. She didn’t want to leave the eggs in the fridge so she’d hard boil them and we’d have a container of egg salad in the cooler and a loaf of bread to make sandwiches for lunch. In our family, a road trip just isn’t complete without them.

The Found Recipe Box also had a recipe to offer for a long car ride: Best-Ever Refrigerator Bran Muffins. They’re easy to make, healthier than eating at McDonalds and travel well. The recipe calls for bran cereal and I wasn’t sure if it meant flakes or buds. I chose the All-Bran BranBuds cereal, but I was concerned that the buds would be chunky in the muffins so I put them into the food processor, which worked out really well. These muffins are actually kind of sweet, which I wasn’t expecting, and they’re really good with just a little bit of butter and some honey, especially when they’re fresh out of the oven. And the recipe makes a ton, so if you have a long car ride ahead of you, you’ll be all set. 

Well, it’s time to hit the road. I can’t wait to see my grandmother and share stories from my adventures in the kitchen. And I can’t wait to dig through her recipe boxes to see what treasures she has hidden inside. She is an avid recipe collector. I have dividers in my box to separate the categories, but she has entire boxes dedicated to a category. She has been such a huge inspiration for this project and I can’t wait to thank her in person.

I’ll be back in a week, but be sure to check The Found Recipe Box Facebook page for updates! Until then, happy cooking!

A Lesson From “Leave It”: Raisin Scones

I am not a huge fan of breakfast. A glass of milk stirred together with Carnation Instant Breakfast will usually suffice. I typically only eat a full morning meal when I stay with my parents (my mom makes the best morning feasts!). But since I’ve been trying to get back into running, I’ve needed to find something to fill my stomach and give me a little extra boost of energy in the morning. I found a recipe for homemade granola in the Everyday Food magazine that I am absolutely in love with. I put it over plain, non-fat yogurt with banana slices and top it all off with a drizzle of honey. Yum!

Before I had too many consecutive granola-breakfast mornings and got burned out on my new favorite food, I turned to the box for some inspiration on how to change up my morning routine. My search led me to Raisin Scones. Although they are not the healthiest morning meal, scones are a nice treat that I love to give myself every once in a while. I’ve noticed, however, that a truly great scone can be hard to come by and sadly, this recipe was an example of that.

I’m not sure if it was the combination of buttermilk and nutmeg that I didn’t enjoy or if it was because I swapped Craisins for raisins and the taste didn’t mix well with the nutmeg, but these weren’t my favorite. I was pleased to discover though, that scones are a lot easier to make than I imagined. Now I just need to find a better recipe. Perhaps I’ll come across one in a recipe box yet to be discovered (I’ve acquired two more recipe boxes from antique stores, but there isn’t a scone recipe in either one). 

Another morning routine that needs some adjusting is my workout. I had a pretty decent schedule of going to the gym in the morning, but then the weather got nice and I felt guilty leaving Murphy at home. So I’ve been passing on the gym and have been taking him for walks instead. “Walk” is a term I use loosely here, because honestly, our morning jaunts have absolutely no redeeming athletic quality whatsoever. Murphy, being a retriever and a male dog, has his nose attached to the ground throughout the entire route, raising his head only to watch squirrels play or plan an ambush when a cat dares to cross his path. He stops to smell everything – trees, stop signs, piles of leaves – then lifts his leg on each to claim it as the property of His Highness, Sir Murphy of Minnesota (90%  of the time he’s lifting his leg, but there’s nothing coming out to label the spot as his). I spend most of the walk pulling on his leash and telling him to “leave it.” I swear that the people in my neighborhood think that’s my dog’s name. I keep reminding him that I’m trying to walk all the way to France and it’s going to take a long time to get there if we smell every lamppost along the way. He doesn’t seem to care.

He’ll pick up the pace for a few blocks, enough to raise my heart rate and get me excited about finally finding a good rhythm, but then he feigns exhaustion, stops, and looks at me as if he’s about to collapse. Anyone who comes across us at this point must think we’ve walked about 20 miles and that I’m being inhumane to make him go on. Little do they know that this dramatic display typically begins as early as the end of the driveway…at the beginning of the walk. I lean down, cuddle him up, urge him to go on and start the countdown: “Only three more blocks, Murphy. Come on, you can do it!”

But this act never fools me, because I know that as soon as we make it back home and I turn him loose in the yard, he’ll run around like crazy. Usually he runs in circles as fast as he can with a squeaky toy in his mouth, biting hard enough so that everyone in a five mile radius can hear that, yes, Murphy made it home safely from his walk. Maybe I should just skip the walk and join him for laps in the backyard. I’d have to pass on the squeaky toy though. Maybe this is his way of helping me get to France. Maybe he’s trying to tell me that sometimes, in order to make progress, you need to go off course and try something different. It might be like combining buttermilk, Craisins and nutmeg: a good attempt, but it falls a little short of the goal. But other times, what might seem crazy, such as running in circles in the backyard, just might be the ticket to get you to where you want to go. Because if you run enough laps, pretty soon you’ve run a mile…then two…then three, etc… To my neighbors, it might appear a little odd. But Murphy doesn’t care, he’s running like no one is watching. And what do they know anyway, they think his name is Leave It (well, except for the ones who live close enough to hear me yell “Murphy NO!” when he’s digging holes).  

From Battle Plans to Backyard Picnics: Popovers

I hate spring.

I haven’t always. I used to long for the days when the temperature would creep a little higher each day at about the same rate as the snow turning into dirt. When it seemed you could track the progression of change in season by watching jackets morph from puffy marshmallows to a thin layer added more for style than warmth.

Then I got a dog and spring became a dirty word.

I thought last spring was bad. Murphy had packed the snow in the entire yard down to create a thick layer of ice. When it began to melt, we had a lake in our yard covering what was left of the ice field. It was so bad that Murphy didn’t even want to go out there; he just sat on the deck and waited patiently for it all to soak into the ground so that he could resume his summer routine of afternoon naps in the sun beneath the pine tree. 

Spring 2009

But this year, we had so much snow that Murphy only blazed three trails through the yard, leaving the rest virtually untouched. And now that it’s melting, it’s a sloppy, wet mess. Add a dog with severe cabin fever to the mix and you have a mud pit. To make it worse, the squirrels have left their winter homes and are ravenously searching for food. Apparently Murphy is very upset about this and has declared a full-scale war. He’s so determined to defeat his rodent enemies, in fact, that he has created a militia. The draft started a few weeks ago when he began to line his toys up by the back door to see what I’d allow him to take outside. He’s always been very good about leaving his “indoor toys” in the house and keeping his “outdoor toys” in the yard. Not anymore. Now every toy fair game and they’re not all happy about being recruited. As I let him out the other day, he had his Mr. Bill doll tucked in is mouth and as he walked out to the battleground, Mr. Bill’s cries of, “Oh nooooooooooooo,” faded into the distance as Murphy walked off the deck and added his newest soldier to the ranks. (Here's a website that has a picture of the doll and a clip of what he says.)

I’m not sure where he learned about battle strategies, (I leave HGTV on for him to watch when I’m gone, not the History channel) but Murphy has started constructing trenches in the backyard, a tactic that I am not very happy about. I thought I had a few more weeks of solid ground before I had to worry about the dog digging holes. I greatly underestimated the power of a determined dog, especially one whose nails are in desperate need of a trim (Have you ever seen a stuffed grizzly bear at a museum? You know what their claws look like? Yeah, Murphy’s nails look a lot like that. They are serious weapons of mass destruction.). He dug through a foot of soft snow, to the ground, and down about another foot. He did it with such force, that he blasted the back of the garage with mud. Perhaps he is creating camouflage to confuse the squirrels? 

His next plan was to create something of intrigue to attract the enemy. Since they’re hungry and they like to eat walnuts (he knows this because they sit in the pine tree and throw the shells at him – I’m not kidding, it’s actually quite amusing to watch) he dug up my soaker hose that I accidentally left in a garden over the winter and then proceeded to chew it into little bits of black rubber that resembled the squirrels’ favorite food. 

All in all, it was quite an impressive execution of a very sophisticated battle plan. I should be impressed. I’m not. Not in the least. If anyone has been thinking about getting a Golden Retriever, I might have one available if he doesn’t find a new hobby very quickly. But thankfully, I had a hobby of my own to turn to when I couldn’t deal with the devastation that was once my backyard. So I headed inside to the kitchen and made something that gave me happier memories of spring.

My favorite part of spring is when the buds begin to appear on the trees and the green heads of the day lilies and hostas pop through the soil. It’s a sign that in a matter of weeks, winter will be but a memory and I’ll soon be sitting on the deck, bathing in the warm summer sun, reading a book and watching Murphy nap in the grass (if there’s any left by then). Aside from the braches that fell from the pine tree popping through the snow and reminding me that I need to do something about them, there hasn’t been much sign of green sprouting from the ground just yet. So to give the plants a little encouragement, I made a recipe that does a little “popping” of its own: Popovers. This recipe was like so many others in the box, something that I always thought was difficult until I tried it. Popovers really aren’t more complicated than cupcakes and they follow pretty much the same process (except for the frosting). I used an over-sized muffin tin and it made six popovers. The recipe instructs to bake them for 1 hour, however, mine were done in about 35 minutes.

The kitchen smelled so sweet I wanted to bite into the air. It wasn’t sweet like cake or cookies, but instead reminded me more of bread baking with pancakes and drizzled in honey. The first bite was even better than I had envisioned. These are definitely my new favorite roll to serve with dinner. 

By the end of the weekend, 95% of the snow was gone from our yard. The record-breaking temperature of 64 degrees on Sunday helped accomplish that feat. And to celebrate, Murphy had his first picnic of the year (that’s what we call it when he eats his dinner on the deck). The bits of hose were removed from the yard, the pieces of broken pine tree braches were piled up, and even the hole Murphy dug didn’t look as bad once the snow was gone and the mud settled back into place. Maybe soon the hostas and the day lilies will begin to show their faces and then we can put this whole dreary winter behind us. When they do, I’d better warn them about Murphy’s militia because something tells me, they’ll be the next ones on his list.

The Recipe Not Taken: Maple Syrup Muffins

 

 

Memories are tied to our senses. When we hear those opening chords of a song, smell fresh-cut grass, or eat a slice of home-baked pie we’re instantly transported to a moment in our past that we’ve attached to that sound, smell, or taste. Usually these memories are good and we want to remain there indefinitely, but sometimes they’re moments we wish we could use a Magic Eraser to permanently scrub from our mind. Our current economic climate has people across the globe searching for those portals that will send them to a happy place, even if it’s just for a few, brief moments of escape. Last week, I was able to provide that service to several friends.

The members of my Thursday night poetry group have graciously offered to be taste-testers for many of the recipes from the box. Like me, most of them possess a strong sweet tooth and have been excited about the ratio of dessert-type recipes the box contains. Last week, however, we opted to take a break from the sweets and instead take a taste from the bread category: Maple Syrup Muffins. I’m glad we did.

Upon first bite, all of us sat back, inhaled, and began recalling memories. It’s amazing the effect food can have on our minds and the journeys it can take us on. For me, that bite reminded me of my great-grandmother. It seems that whenever we get together with my mom’s family, someone at some point brings up my great-grandmother’s cooking; specifically her biscuits. She put so much love and care into her cooking that it oozed out with every bite. Every time my mom or grandmother mentions those flaky, buttery biscuits my mouth waters.

I’m learning a lot from this little box and one of the biggest lessons has been the difference between “made from scratch” and “store-bought or processed” foods. Most of the muffins I’ve made over the years have been prepared by opening a box, dumping it into a bowl, mixing it with water (sometimes oil and maybe an egg), stirring the batter, and pouring it into a muffin tin. The Maple Syrup Muffins really aren’t that much more difficult to make and the difference in taste is worth the few extra steps. The recipe calls for ½ a cup of maple syrup (real maple syrup, not the “fake” stuff) and I expected an overwhelming syrup taste. Instead, they have just a hint of sweetness and the flavor seems to twirl on your tongue before sliding down your throat. My great-grandmother’s biscuits had a similar effect, giving you a moment of real butter exhilaration before you swallow and dive in for another bite. 

Times have changed and people’s schedules don’t allow them to make all their meals and snacks from scratch. We reach for the quickest thing we can find, throw it in the microwave and eat it in the car on the way to work, our next appointment, or a child’s soccer game. Maybe that’s why when we taste something made from scratch it halts us in our tracks and takes us back to those memories of loved ones or special occasions. I haven’t thought about my great-grandmother in a long time, but that one bite of muffin flooded my mind with visions of her house in Florida, the black glasses she used to wear, and her huge orange cat named Morris that I carried around the every time I visited (he was a very tolerant cat).

So thank you Mike for suggesting a detour from our usual path through the Found Recipe Box. I learned that “made from scratch” isn’t always time consuming and had the pleasure of revisiting memories of someone I love and miss very much. I hope everyone in the group had a similar experience.

Sometimes we need that reminder to try a different path in life. It can come in the form of an unexpected and prolonged unemployment. Or it can be as simple as choosing a different recipe from a box. Either way, the outcome can have a profound effect on our lives. I think Robert Frost said it best in his poem “The Road Not Taken:”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.