Category Archives: In the Kitchen

German Potato Salad

12 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home, Writing

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I like to try new recipes, though at best, most of my trials are one-hit wonders.

But occasionally, one runs across a recipe like this dish that has been in our family for almost forty years.  It became part of our lives, and part of Mom’s permanent supper rotation, when she brought the recipe home as a souvenir from one of the many trips my parents made to Houston to visit my Uncle Melvin and Aunt Wanda.

Mom and Wanda were the female response to The Odd Couple, who like Walter Matthau and Tony Randall, enjoyed a proverbial love-hate relationship; they enjoyed each other when they were on good terms and they thrived on dissension when they weren’t.  The quality of my mother and aunt’s relationship actually seemed to improve with physical distance — when separated by 500 miles, they were the best of friends — when separated by a fence, these next door neighbors often carried on a cold war — the fence might as well have been the Berlin Wall.

When a relationship like Mom’s and Wanda’s is encountered in fiction, it makes for hilarious reading.   The fictional situations that ensue inspire tears to roll down my face and the sides of my chest to hurt from overdosing on laughter.  But I can assure you it’s no laughing matter when these colorful and highly combustible relationships invade real life.  Life grows surreal, taking on the quality of a daytime drama.

When ‘things’ between Mom and Wanda were good, life was sugary sweet, to the point of making most everyone else sick from too much artificial sweetener.  When things grew ugly, tempers flared, they drew a line in the sand and both rallied support for their cause of ‘being right.’  Each would call the other the worse names they could think of — and the words whispered behind one another’s  backs would come home to roost, by the time the gossip mill churned it around and around.

One thing I learned from watching Mom and Wanda’s revolving door relationship over fifty years is this:  No matter how good a writer becomes, there’s no way any author can ever dream up the sort of outrageous situations that naturally transpire in real life, especially between two women that love and hate one another so well.  And when you throw into the mix that both women professed themselves to be God-fearing Christians — well, the irony of it all is just so delicious, it becomes hard to resist  —  just like this potato salad — sort of sweet… sort of tart.

Try it and see how easy sweet and sour can come together so nicely.

German Potato Salad

Serves 4    Preparation Time – 15 minutes   Cooking Time — 2 hours

Ingredients:

2 strips of bacon
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cans sliced new potatoes, drained

Dressing:

1/3 cup sugar (original recipe call for 1/2 cup)
1/3 cup white vinegar
2 cups water
2 tsp. garlic powder
2 tsp. dried parsley
1/2 to 3/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
 

In a cast iron skillet over medium heat, fry bacon crisp.  Drain on a paper towel.  Drain oil from pan and add olive oil.  (Original recipe does not call for the substitution).  Over low heat, saute onion until soft and translucent.  Add potatoes and cook for a few minutes, crumbling bacon on top.  Mix all skillet ingredients and add dressing until just covered.  There will be enough dressing for two applications.  Let the potatoes cook down, uncovered, over low heat, stirring occasionally.  Then add second round of dressing.  Once liquid has cooked into potatoes and thickened, remove potato salad from heat.  Cover with foil.  The salad can be reheated prior to serving.

Humble Quiche

26 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in Good Reads, In the Kitchen, Life at Home, Soul Care

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“Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.”  Les Brown — quote from The Artist’s Way

My friends in the workforce are beginning to daydream about their post-retirement lives.  One hopes to volunteer as an overseas English teacher while another plans to serve the elderly in some capacity.

Unlike my friends, I held no lofty goals when I retired eight years ago.  Instead I left a twenty-three year accounting career behind with two humble goals in mind — to read more for the pure pleasure of reading and to learn how to make pie crust.

Coming to know myself as I have during the last three years, it’s no surprise that the goal that required work was the one I accomplished while the one that required play is still blowing in the wind.  I am, after all, a recovering workaholic with perfectionist tendencies, which is to say, I tend to engage in never-ending work when I’m at my worst.  Meanwhile, my stack of unread books continues to grow and gather dust.

I uncovered the seeds of my problem during an Ignatius retreat last year.  But it was three years ago that I came to name perfectionism as the root to my problem.  I was reading a self-help book when I ran across these words in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:

“To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement.  The perfectionist calls this humility.  In reality, it is egotism.   It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best.  It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again…..

….We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly.  Instead, we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success.  Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled, smothered, despairing, bored.  But, yes, we do feel safe.  And safety is a very expensive illusion.  ….Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen.  “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I would try….””

How would you complete the rest of that sentence?  My three-year old list included modern dance, learning a foreign language, writing short stories and taking a watercolor class.   But writing was my biggest pie-in-the-sky desire.  In the case of writing, it was better to live with a dream than with the possibility of failure — in other words, it was better to be safe than sorry.

As silly as it now sounds, I once held similar fears about making pie crust.  Now I just get in there and do my best.  And this morning, the pie crust I rolled out was far from perfect.  Yet.  Once it was stuffed with a nice quiche filling, it ended up fulfilling its purpose perfectly with no one noticing its imperfections.

Could this truth apply to the human experience as well?  Could it be… that as imperfect as this human is, that I can fulfill my purpose as long as I remember to remain empty —  that is to remain humble —  so that I can be filled with something good — like God?

To be humble is easier said than done.  To be humble is to realize I can never be perfect.  To be humble is to realize that I am not my work and that my work is not me.  To be a humble is to realize that I must learn to let go — for the entire human experience is an exercise in letting go, as we let go of our stuff and our loved ones until all that we have left at end of our days is to let go of our own lives.

To be human may not be as easy as pie — though I for one, have never found making pie or pie crust easy — but its worth the effort, the time and the risk of failure with a trash can full of rejected pie crust.  To be human means “it’s no better to be safe than sorry.”  Life is full of a-ha moments… and perhaps more than a few servings of humble pie.

Simple Quiche

1 9 inch pie crust, baked to light brown

3 large eggs, slightly beaten
1 1/4 cups light sour cream
Dash of salt, white pepper, garlic powder and Tabasco sauce
1 1/2 cups grated Swiss cheese
1 cup grated Cheddar cheese
2 cups of pre-cooked chopped meat and vegetables  e.g.s (broccoli and ham) (spinach and bacon) (sausage and mushroom)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

In a large bowl, combine eggs, sour cream and seasoning with a wire whip.  Stir in remaining ingredients and pour into pastry shell.  Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until set and lightly browned on top.  Cool on wire rack for ten minutes before slicing.

Serve with a cup of soup or your favorite green or fruit salad.

Sweeties

21 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home, Mesta Park

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I could have been June Cleaver yesterday when the boys arrived with Amy to find me in the kitchen baking their favorite childhood cookies.

In our house, these pink and white swirled cookies never stick around for long.  Whether warm from the oven or not, people find them hard to leave alone.  I’m not sure whether the boys and Amy had taken off their coats or not before they enjoyed that first warm cookie.

An hour later, Don’s mother and stepfather came in just as I was putting the finishing touches on supper.  It wasn’t long, before out of the corner of my eye, I saw another Sweetie go by with a few words on how hard these cookies were to resist.  Then Kara and Joe arrived  — and I won’t tell how many Joe confessed to having before the night was over.

With fifteen gathered, it didn’t take long for the Sweeties to disappear.  Yet, to say that we gathered is a bit of a stretch, as the party was more like three gatherings in one.  As I traveled the circuit, I walked in and out of pockets of conversation.  Don and his parents were visiting in the kitchen; my children and their mates were gathered around the television watching a ball game; and my three youngest grands were playing ‘zombies’ in the basement.

At one point, I noted Kyle talking to one who  might as well  have been a zombie, for their lack of attention to his words.  This is the downside of big gatherings:  there’s just too much going on to take it all in; separate worlds collide, but then soon break apart to converse in more intimate settings.  Meanwhile, I floated from one room to another, trying to experience a little of all the parties.

When I finally sat down, my granddaughters came to see if they could extend their party by spending the night.  I was tired after cooking all day.  And while having no definite plans, my after-party most likely would have involved a rendezvous with  my favorite chair.  But I couldn’t resist after one long look at their sweet hopeful faces.  The girls were having so much fun playing together; and if they didn’t want it to end, I didn’t want to end it.

Someday, not too far off in the distant future, these sisters who admit to being best friends, will not want to spend their Saturday night with their grandmother.  So it was not too hard to put that favorite comfy chair on hold  to let their young world collide with mine.  They ended up having the best time, filling the house with happy noises, as they trampled up and down the stairs from basement to second story.  The girls played house, opened a restaurant, become artists with a set of watercolors and  built a fine set of tracks with my sons old wooden train set.

This morning, before they left, the girls told me how much fun they had playing at my house.  I learned that after I die, they are hoping that their mother will come here to live so that they can too.  But my youngest granddaughter will be repainting my wall colors.  And though she didn’t say, I’m guessing she has in mind her favorite pink — just like these Sweeties.

Sweeties

Makes 5 dozen

2 sticks butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 tsps almond flavoring
3 eggs
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
1 Tbsp baking powder
4 cups all-purpose flour
3 drops of red food coloring

Mix butter and sugar until fluffy.  Gradually mix in eggs and almond flavoring, then the dry ingredients until well combined.  Stir in drop of red food coloring, swirling the dough, until streaked with pink.  Chill in fridge for two hours.

Preheat oven to 350.

Shape dough into small balls, a little larger than a walnut.  Slightly flatten with hand on cookies sheet, covered with parchment paper or silicone baking sheet.  Bake 10 minutes at 350.

While still warm, glaze cookies.

Cookie Glaze

Mix until smooth:

1 cup powder sugar
1/2 tsp almond flavoring
4 Tbsp evaporated milk  (I use water instead)