Savoring the Memories: “I Remember” Baked Beans

It always amazes me how smelling a dish baking in the oven or the first bite of a favorite food can flood my mind my memories, some that I haven’t recalled in years. Sometimes, however, it’s even easier than that. The mere mention of the name can send me back in time. For instance, fried chicken will always remind me of summers in Pensacola, FL and going to the now defunct Hopkins Boarding House for fried chicken dinners. It was the best I’d ever eaten and my whole family was really disappointed when we learned they were closing down.

And peanut butter sandwiches, the staple of every kid’s school lunch, will always remind me of my grandmother and the way she used to make them when I was little: two pieces of white Wonder bread (each one slathered in real butter), a heaping layer of peanut butter was added to each side, then it was all topped off with a generous drizzle of honey. Looking back, I sometimes want to cringe at the utter unhealthiness of this concoction, but it still gives me that warm fuzzy feeling in my tummy when I think of it because it just tasted like my grandmother and no one could replicate the way she made peanut butter sandwiches.

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.