Gratitude: Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

Recently, while reorganizing some stuff in the house, I came across a journal my mom gave me in 1998. It is one of those notebooks I was afraid to start using because it was so beautiful. The cover has a deep green background and a beautiful fairy with a flute who sings to the woodland creatures. 

Looking at the picture always makes me happy, partly because it reminds me of my mom and partly because it portrays a scene of love and festivity. I finally put words into it on January 14, 1998. The first entry was a quote my mom had written in my 21st birthday card:

    “Optimism, like the happiness habit, can be learned. Start today with a little experiment. Smile at everyone you meet. Today, expect something good to happen to you no matter what occurred yesterday. Realize the past no longer holds you captive. It can only continue to hurt you if you hold onto it. Let the past go. A simply abundant world awaits.”  -- Sarah Ban Breathnach from the book Simple Abundance

I began to fill the book with lists of things that I was grateful for. Looking through the list that is now 12 years old, I realized two things: 1.) that none of the things I had written were material possessions, they were all irreplaceable people, places or moments and 2.) that 12 years later, not many of them had changed. I’m still grateful for each and every one of them.

All-In-One Thanksgiving Dinner: Chicken & Stuffing Casserole

As the days get shorter and colder, more and more signs that the holiday season is quickly approaching begin to pop up everywhere. Stores are already decorating for Christmas. Reminders to order your Thanksgiving turkey are in grocery stores and farmers markets. And when we were visiting friends last weekend, their 5-year old was already watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special on DVD (I had to applaud her for that one, it’s one of my favorites and always makes me happy, no matter what time of year I see it). 

But the cooler temperatures and leafless trees trigger more than the desire to bundle up, they also stir up cravings for comfort food. One of my favorite types of comfort food is casseroles (or hot dishes as they are typically called in Minnesota). So after I closed all the windows and flipped the switch for heat in the house, I dove into the casserole section of The Found Recipe Box to see what I could find. And I found just the recipe to get us all in the mood for the upcoming November holiday: Chicken & Stuffing Casserole.

This is yet another very simple recipe to prepare: throw some chicken breasts in a baking dish, cover them with Swiss cheese, stir the stuffing mixture, pour it over the top of the chicken, and then throw it in the oven. The hardest part is waiting the two hours for it to bake. But it was well worth the wait. Upon first bite, my husband and I both agreed that it tasted just like Thanksgiving dinner. The only thing missing was a side of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie (or perhaps pumpkin chiffon pie – either version 1 or version 2 from The Found Recipe Box). The only change we’d make is to skip the Swiss cheese layer the next time. 

If you’re looking for a way to get into the spirit if the holidays without stepping foot into a store that is all lit up and that bombards you with the smell of cinnamon pine cones, pop this dish into the oven. Soon your home will be enveloped in the aroma of Thanksgiving and even the first bite will warm you up enough to ward off the winter cool down for just a little longer. It’s a great way to enjoy all the senses of the season without all the stress that comes along with preparing a full Thanksgiving meal. And if that doesn’t put you in the holiday mood, pop in the Charlie Brown Christmas DVD – it always fills my heart with that warm, loving light of the season. 

First Taste of the Season: Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

I am happy to announce that canned pumpkin is back on the shelves at the grocery store! Halloween decorations are popping up all over the neighborhood and to celebrate autumn, and the return of canned pumpkin, I decided to make the first pumpkin pie of the season.

When we bought our house, I was excited to be able to decorate the outside for all the holidays. Since fall is my favorite season, I took particular interest in jazzing up the house’s curb appeal with pumpkins, gourds and corn stalks. However, my excitement was short lived when I discovered what a ruckus the décor would cause among the local squirrel community. They began by scaling the corn stalks in search of leftover ears, which they then threw to the ground and began to fight over. But that was only the beginning of the commotion. Next, they set their sights on my pumpkins. They chewed a hole into the side of each pumpkin, large enough for their rotund little bodies to fit through, then sat inside the bulbous food pit and ate it from the inside out. 

Thanksgiving Doorbusters: Cranberry Sauce & Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you had a fun holiday full of family, good food and safe travels. I didn’t host Thanksgiving dinner, but I did bring some Found Recipe Box creations to my husband’s family’s dinner table: cranberry sauce and pumpkin chiffon pie. 

Cranberry sauce is incredibly easy to make and is done in less than 20 minutes start to finish. I always looked at that red, gelatinous mass on the dinner table and thought it had to be really hard to concoct. If you can boil water, you can make cranberry sauce. It’s that easy. And it’s so much better than the canned stuff!

I am a huge fan of pumpkin pie and I think that this pumpkin chiffon pie just might be my new favorite. It’s almost as easy to make as regular pumpkin pie. The only additional step is to make a meringue that gets folded into the pumpkin mixture. It makes the pie light and airy, which is really nice after stuffing yourself at Thanksgiving dinner. You get the taste of pumpkin pie without getting weighed down by a heavy dessert. Because let’s be honest, no matter how full of turkey, potatoes, stuffing and bread we are, there’s always room for dessert! 

I also had a special request from my husband to make apple crisp. It was a tough choice between that and the apple kuchen, but we decided on the crisp. It was a hit. But an even bigger hit was the homemade whipped cream. We had a hard time keeping it away from my niece. She didn’t want any pie or apple crisp, just the whipped cream…6 plates covered in whipped cream. Can you say “sugar rush?” I should have tried that when I woke up at 5am this morning to go shopping. It was the first time I’ve ever shopped on Black Friday, let alone at 5 o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t bad though, I was on the road just after 5am and back in bed by 6am.

And now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s officially time for Christmas (although, if you’re one of my neighbors, Christmas apparently started about 2 weeks ago when they began lighting the herd of glowing animals in their yard). So tune into the 24-hour Christmas music station and get ready for cookie season! I’ll be posting lots of cookie recipes soon so if you’re looking for ideas for a cookie exchange, be sure to check the Found Recipe Box!

In Loving Memory of Buck: Green Bean Casserole

This recipe is almost exactly the same as the one on the French’s French Fried Onion can, but I wanted to post it anyway so you could see the card and study the tight, scipty font. There are several recipes written in this same handwriting and a few might require some detective work in order to get the ingredients and directions correct.

I like green bean casserole. In fact, it is the only way I’ll eat green beans. As a kid, my mom used to make us sit at the table until we ate all of our vegetables. For my brothers and me who are all picky eaters and will never be vegetarians, this scenario occurred quite frequently at our dinner table. Until we got our dog, Buck. I remember all the clever ways we found to distract my mom so that she wouldn’t know that we were feeding the dog under the table. Something tells me we weren’t half as sly as we thought. Looking back, I’m sure that (plus the fact I let the dog sleep in my bed starting the night we brought him home) had something to do with me and Buck becoming best friends. 

Buck and I went everywhere together. He loved car rides and didn’t care where we were going as long as he could sit in the front seat and hang his head out the window. He loved to have jobs and his favorite one was getting the paper. On the weekends, he and my dad had a routine: Buck would get the paper then hold it in his mouth in the car all the way up town to get Starbucks and all the way home. One time, one of the baristas noticed him from the window and said to my dad, “Hey, look at that crazy dog out in the car with the paper in his mouth.” My dad just smiled and replied, “That’s my dog.”

Like most dogs, he had an insatiable zest for life. He was the best running partner I’ve ever had. If we weren’t out for a run around town, then we were running in the back yard and playing Frisbee. And after a hard day of playing, I’d fall asleep at night with 90 lbs of Flatcoated Retriever lying across my back or wrapped around my head. I’m sure that is part of the reason for all the back problems I have now, but I wouldn’t trade those nights for anything.

Life can be cruel sometimes and insanely unfair. When Buck was 9 years old, he began to have seizures. The dog we had before Buck also had seizures and died at only 5 years old. It was awful and we were very careful in selecting Buck so that we’d never have to go through that pain again. Only it did happen again and this time it happened to my best friend in the whole world. The vet tried medication, but it didn’t work. On Buck’s last day, he went into a grand mal seizure that he never came out of. I will never forget crying, holding his head while he shook and watching as he tried to comfort me. That was Buck. He cared more for the people in his life than anything else in the world. Some people may say that dogs don’t have emotions, blah, blah, blah. They didn’t know Buck. I know what I saw in my dog’s eyes and it was 100% pure love.

Buck died the day before his 10th birthday. It took my family a while to bring another dog into our home and I didn’t know if I’d ever be able let another dog into my heart. I was convinced there would never be another Buck. But since Buck passed, my family has had four other Flatcoats and now I have a dog of my own, my Golden Retriever Murphy. Each of these dogs has filled that void in my heart left by Buck in their own special way. Murphy has even reminded me what it feels like to have 75 lbs of dog sleep across your back at night.

Now that I’m an “adult,” I can make whatever vegetables I want for dinner and don’t have to sit at the table until my plate is clear. But I still save a little bit to share with my dog. And I’ve discovered that green beans aren’t all that bad…well, when they’re covered in cream of mushroom soup and French fried onions that is. I bet Buck would have preferred them that way too.

Thanksgiving Classics: Football & Dressing for Turkeys – Thanksgiving 1949

With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, I wanted to be sure to post some recipes that could be brought to your table for the holiday. I am not making a turkey this year so I didn’t try this Dressing for Turkeys, but from reading the list of ingredients, I’m figuring it could feed your family, your neighbors’ families and still have some leftovers for the rest of the weekend.

I thought it was interesting that the person who wrote this labeled it with “Thanksgiving 1949.” Since I wasn’t around at that time and don’t have a personal recollection of the day, I thought I’d turn to my new best friend Google and find out what was going on. I’m figuring Google must be a guy because all he wanted to talk about was football. If your house is anything like the ones I visit on Thanksgiving, the television is always blaring with the sounds of a football game. This is, of course, after we watch the Macy’s Day Parade to see if this will finally be the year that the Snoopy balloon escapes and flies his Sopwith Camel to England to spread gratitude to the Old World.

I always figured that they aired football games to give guys an excuse for why they can’t help out with dinner. Apparently, this excuse has been around longer than I thought, as far back as 1891 in fact. An article printed in Harper’s Weekly that year talked of the importance of watching Princeton play Yale. The tradition of watching football caught on and by 1949, two million television sets were tuned to the game. I did a little more research to find out that the Chicago Bears played the Detroit Lions in 1949 and won 28 to 7. That year was a pretty decent year for the Bears. It was their 30th regular season, they played under Coach George Halas, their games were at Wrigley Field and they finished 2nd in their division. 

Sadly, 2009 doesn’t look as promising for the Bears. But I don’t get to watch my home team play this year. Instead, my husband’s favorite team, the Green Bay Packers (a rival of the Bears), will be playing the Detroit Lions in one of three games played on Thanksgiving Day. Apparently, guys thought football was such a great excuse for why they couldn’t help make dinner, they added a few games to extend the excuse as to why they couldn’t help clean up either.  Sorry guys, we’re onto your little ruse.

Thanksgiving Part I: Early American Pumpkin Pie

 

This weekend I was at home in Chicago celebrating a baptism and my first of two Thanksgivings. My side of the family won’t be able to be together this year for the holiday so some of us celebrated this week and others will celebrate on the actual day. I only had one request for the weekend: that I get to share one of the recipes from the box. In honor of the holiday, I chose to make the traditional Thanksgiving dessert, pumpkin pie.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest pumpkin pie ever made weighed 2,020 lbs and measured 12 feet, 1 inch across. That sounds like something that should be on Man Vs. Food, I’d love to see Adam Richman take on that beast! I’d also like to see the oven they cooked that thing in and know how long it took them to fully cook it. The pie I made took quite a bit longer to cook than the time suggested on the card, but we may have been having some oven trouble as we later discovered. If you make this recipe, which I recommend you do, keep an eye on the time and be prepared that it may take longer to cook. It will also need to sit for a while to cool and firm up. 

This was one of the best tasting pumpkin pies I’ve had. It was rich, but not overpowering and very easy to make. And if you’d like to try something a little different, there are two alternative recipes on the backside of the card. Any of the variations would be great for a Thanksgiving dinner table.

Moving Past “Just Add Water”: Apple Kuchen

 

In honor of apple season, I thought I would share one of the many apple recipes in the box. Kuchen, as I learned this week, is the German word for cake. I also learned that there are many variations of this German dessert, a tidbit I encountered while researching an error I discovered in the directions written on this card. If you notice on the top line of the instructions on the second side of the card, the first step is to cream butter with butter. As I stated before, I will never be mistaken for a chef, but this just didn’t seem right. So I did a search for Apple Kuchen recipes to see if I could find a similar one to confirm my suspicion that the second butter was really supposed to be sugar.

I was amazed at how many recipes for Apple Kuchen could be found online and how none of them seemed to be the same. Some call for lemon rind, some use sour cream, others have confectioners sugar and one even called for one box of yellow cake mix. It was then that I realized how many of the recipes in my found recipe box were made from scratch. All of the cake recipes list each of the individual ingredients, even for the fillings and icing. I have never made icing from scratch. In fact, I’ve never made a cake from scratch. It dawned on me that my cooking skills could pretty much be summed up by the phrase “Just Add Water.” 

At this point, I gave up on my search and trusted my instincts with the directions for the recipe. And I must note, I did notice that the recipe instructs you to sift the 2 cups of flour, etc. I didn’t think my cheese grater trick would work for that much flour so I invested in a real flour sifter.

The batter turned out to be a semi-thick, fluffy mixture that tasted like pancake batter and made me curious to sample the final product. The next step was to peel and slice the apples, which an apple corer turned out to be a huge help in accomplishing. I assembled the dessert, added the final touches and placed it in the oven to bake. It didn’t take long for my entire kitchen to smell like cinnamon apples.

As I was cleaning the dishes, something I feel like I’ve done a lot of lately, I came to my new sifter and smiled as I dunked it into the warm, soapy water. I owned a sifter. No recipe that has the direction “just add water” requires a sifter. I was proud of my accomplishment (and recent purchase) and reflected on the difference between making a dessert out of a box and one that requires a dozen more steps and ingredients. There is something cathartic about baking from scratch. It requires time, concentration and you put a little piece of yourself into what you are making. I think I understand now why they call it “comfort cooking” That night, after a dinner I can’t remember, my husband and I sat down to a dessert I’ll never forget.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, it doesn’t taste anything like pancakes. It has a moist cake bottom and soft cinnamon apples on top. The recipe suggests serving it with whip cream and that was a good idea. It’s like an apple pie, but not as strong of a flavor. It’s a great dessert to serve after Thanksgiving dinner. And I believe my instincts were correct, the first step is to cream the butter with sugar, not more butter.