This porridge is j..u..s..t right!

Thank you Amy for this picture

I wish I had more memories of Grandma and Grandpa when I was growing up. The few that are alive with me today are very dear and I remember them as if they were yesterday. One very vivid memory in Grandma’s kitchen (where else) was at a family reunion.

Probably within days of this picture when I was nine or so years old I had woken up before anyone else and made my way to the kitchen. Happy to find Grandpa playing solitaire at the table, I sat down next to him and watched quietly as he won his game. I said to him “Your cheating, Grandpa” then he said, “Go get some oatmeal!” Until this day, I win every game of solitaire I play.

From what I remember, Grandpa would get up early before anyone and make a pot of oatmeal. As we woke and made our own way into the kitchen, the oatmeal was waiting to be consumed. If I have misinterpreted my memory, please let me know.

I like my oatmeal on the clumpy and sticky side. It is often very difficult to achieve this texture unless the pot sits for a while and who has the time to wait? Occasionally I will eat out at Mimi’s Café where they have perfected the art of oatmeal. For anyone who does not know Mimi’s, the theme is a French Quarter New Orleans setting with French style art, music, instruments and jazz. A very fun and delicious place to eat. They serve an enormous portion of buckwheat oatmeal with sides of brown sugar, raisins, granola and milk. I like mine with the above except the granola.

Today I have made a pot of this Kellerman concoction and it is as good as I remember in Grandma’s kitchen.

I miss them.

Lev Gonick Fudge

Ethereal shoe leather

When I was little I thought Lev Gonick Fudge was a standard flavour like Russian or Whiskey Fudge. There were certainly lots of things that we ate at home that no-one else seemed to have heard of, but which I understood to be due to cultural differences between New Zealand and America.

I was quite old when I realised that, really, even in America no-one knew about Lev Gonick Fudge. That's because Lev Gonick was not actually a culturally exotic flavour but the name of the teenage boy who developed the recipe, one of my babysitters in Canada, where I lived until I was three.

This is such a simple recipe that I learned to make it when I was about 5 years old. It's also delicious, and quite robust, surviving pretty much any variation you can throw at it. But don't bake it too long, which is what I did yesterday, or goes rather on the tough end of the chewy spectrum. It's still yummy, but you have to work quite hard at it, and with fragile teeth like mine, that's not the kind of workout you necessarily need.

This week I've moved into a new share house, so a new kitchen with a bulging pantry of exotic delights and redundancies. I was determined to make Lev Gonick Fudge with whatever was available so used the following substitutions for the fudge pictured above:

• instead of vanilla I used almond marzipan flavouring
• instead of brown sugar I used up the last of a jar of sticky raw sugar, and topped it up to a cup with castor sugar
• instead of walnuts I used half a bag of slivered almonds of indeterminate age

The resulting version of Lev Gonick has a heavenly, ethereal quality from the marzipan flavouring. It smells divine but tastes delicately (rather than intensely) of marzipan which is a bit at odds with the shoe leather texture.

Here is the original recipe copied from my old recipe book, recently unearthed from storage with glad cries. It's an ideal sweet to make when you are craving brownies but want to bake with cocoa instead of solid chocolate.

Lev Gonick Fudge

Combine:

• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 2 tbsp cocoa (heaped)

Mix in a medium sized bowl:

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup plain flour
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup walnuts

Add the cocoa mix to the rest of the ingredients, mix well.
Bake in an 8" pan at 350 degrees for 25 mins (or just until firm).
Ice as soon as removed from the oven.

For the icing combine:
2 tbsp butter
1 1/4cup icing sugar
2 tbsp cocoa
2 tbsp hot water
When smooth and glossy spread over hot fudge.

Wait until cool and firm before eating (if you can resist that long).

I find my favourite recipes by turning to the pages stained cocoa.

The little red hens are: Kimberly,Meliors, Martha, Judy and Loretta

I have spoken with many of my lovely aunties and mother and cousins. They all are looking on Nourish us frequently looking for a treat or a story. They all have many stories to share and I have offered to post for the feint of heart. So bring me your stories ladies and I will post them. Betty, Edwina, and Jessie. I will accept hand written scraps of paper, emails or whatever you can send. Lets keep this beautiful site alive.

Thanks to Kimberly, Meliors, Loretta, Judy and Martha for all your wonderful stories and please keep them coming. They are more special than you could possibly know.

To my aunties and my uncle you are my first village. You all had a big part in me being who I am. I was with grandma and grandpa a lot growing up an was blessed with their love and was in the mix of whatever they had going on whether it be cooking or driving around on the emergency break picking up 4 carloads of people that needed a ride to church. They took me to church camp and on family adventures.

You are such a beautiful and diverse group of siblings. You all have a different story but it all seems to come back to love and grace no matter the path that you all have taken. We have a common thread, all of us. We saw love up close and with all the flaws we witnessed and were given unconditional love. Wow I am lucky!

I am getting to know my cousins more and more and they too are part of that legacy. We all seem to have some of the optimism that grandma served warm in her kitchen. We also have the strength she had to get done today what must be done no matter how she felt. She was no quitter and neither are we.

I remember having extreme discomfort in my sciatica during a pregnancy and was walking like a wounded duck. She said "Amy stand up straight and walk like it doesn't hurt and it will hurt less." she was right. She told me she always stood tall when she was carrying a child. She believed smiling could make you feel better and it does. Life was not easy for her but you never knew it by her smile.

I miss her everyday and you my dear family are my link to her and my larger than life grandpa. So lets continue sharing and remember the blessings. There were so many. So lets help with this feast of the heart.

Good Garlic

In my current research into happiness, I came across a reference to this study which found that adding garlic bread to a family meal decreased the number of negative interactions by 22.7% and increased the number of pleasant interactions by 7.4%. Apparently it's the garlic, not the bread that has the positive effect, and even the smell of cooked garlic is enough to improve family interactions!

When Louise was about 7, we were living on an organic garlic farm in upstate New York. That's where I learned to roast whole bulbs of garlic. We would slice off the stem end, and place the root end down in a generously oiled roasting dish, rubbing oil over the whole bulb. When roasted until soft and beige (not brown and hard), everyone would get their own head of garlic. We would squeeze each clove out of its skin, the flesh as soft as warm butter. This is delicious spread on bread or mixed in with other roast vegetables as a condiment. Roasted garlic is creamy and mild, without any of the sharpness of raw or lightly cooked cloves.


When I don't know what exactly I'm making for dinner, its usually a safe bet to start by sauteing some chopped onion and garlic, then adding whatever I can find in the fridge. Some of my favourite ways to get the aroma and taste of garlic going include:

• Sliced garlic and chunks of zucchini sauteed in butter or olive oil until the garlic and the corners of the zuccini just start to caramalise and turn brown. Sometimes I'll add tomatoes and fresh basil.
  
• Chopped garlic and sliced mushrooms sauteed slowly in butter or olive oil until the mushrooms are very very soft and the garlic has kind of melted into the mushroom juice. This is good with lots of finely chopped parsley and a squeeze of lemon or a dollop of wholegrain mustard.
  
• Chopped garlic and onion sauteed til soft (starting with the onions and adding the garlic towards the end so it doesn't burn and become bitter). Then when the onion/garlic is cooled down I mix in lean minced organic beef, a free range egg, soft bread crumbs and whatever vegetables, herbs and spices I feel like (today it's lots of cumin and and a little cinnamon). I enjoy squooshing the mixture in my hands like playdough, and then shaping into little balls which I bake on a rack in the oven until brown. The cooked meatballs sit in a box in the fridge and get added to spaghetti sauce, cooked vegetables, sandwiches, even salad as I feel like it. When Louise left home and I was only cooking for myself, I stopped cooking very often. This is one of the things I try and make once a week so that I have some proper food to graze on even when I'm not making a whole meal.
  

Jess comes home from work

When we were young children we took it for granted and didn't much notice it. Finally after three years at university, I came home during the summer that I became engaged to read Proust and only then did it strike me how very much in love our parents were. And by then I knew it wasn't the usual way married couples behaved.



One afternoon I was hanging out in the kitchen. Mom had started dinner. I noticed her cheeks were pink, her eyes were sparkling and she had a little smile. She was close to the door when Dad came home from work. He took her in his arms, leaned her backwards, and gave her a long, passionate kiss. Coming out of it, they both were smiling. He took his uniform jacket off, put a large bath towel around his waist and they went into the kitchen togetherto finish dinner in perfect harmony. I realised that was the way he had always come home before we lived in Japan which was a year when everything was different.



Their teamwork was so smooth that there was little room for us. As children we were given tasks like putting the applesauce through the food mill. We set the table and unset it and did the dishes but did little cooking. The cooking they did together was a public demonstration of their love for each other. As well, Dad's need to feed people with delicious food was his most open expression of love for others.



I should now describe the applesauce. Wash unpeeled apples, roughly cut up boil up skin, seeds, cores and all together. Put through a foodmill which lets the applesauce pass through and sieves out the skins, cores, and seeds. Cooked this way the spplesauce is a warm, pinky brown. While it is still warm, flavour the applesauce with sugar, butter,cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg. Strangely this wasn't dessert. It was put on the table with cottage cheese, pickles and olives, bread and butter as a side dish in an ordinary meal in addition to the main components of meat, a green and a yellow vegetable and a starch. Then there was a dessert: cake or pie or pudding. Remember the punch made with Coolaid and fruitjuice. My favourite was grape Coolaid and pineapple juice. Does anyone still make punch the way we used to? I serve the applesauce for dessert with a lttle cream or ice cream.



Now I will tell you why the Kellerman kids happlily ate their spinach when other kids hated it. They never served canned spinach, only fresh or frozen. Boil a couple of eggs. fry up some diced bacon, briefly cook the spinach, drain the liquid, stir through the crspy bacon and a little of the bacon fat, salt and pepper, slice the eggs and arange on the top of the spinach. Very beautiful and tasty too. Not so often we had creamed spinach and it was just as good.

Now I challenge Edwina to post the browned butter carrots and Judy to post the perfect gravey.

Betty and Jessie, Jeannie and Will what were the everyday foods that you liked best? Do you still make them? Did you teach your children?

Give me pies, give me sweet little pies: Fudge Pie (Part 2)

This pie is from the other side of my family - the Southern side. 

 

In both name and location - my sweet Southern aunties have tasty many goodies!!  My auntie Valerie (Southern) Fulkerson shared this recipe with my mom Judy back in 1995.  It has since become a favorite of my brother Jeffrey, my mom and myself as well as my cousin Amy and, well, anyone who tries this pie!  The pie is very tasty and sinful.  It is good "naked" or with a meringue on top.  Whipped cream or ice cream will do in a pinch.  :)  Enjoy!

Fudge Pie

Ingredients:

• 6 tablespoons flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 tablespoons corn starch
• 3 tablespoons cocoa
• 2 cups milk
• 3 egg yolks – beaten
• 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons) butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• Pastry shell, baked (regular or graham crust)

Directions:

• Mix flour, sugar, cornstarch and cocoa in a medium saucepan.
  
• Gradually stir in milk.  Cook over moderate heat until mixture thickens and boils.  Boil 1 minute.
• Stir half of hot mixture into beaten yolks.  Add the yolk mixture back to the boiling mixture.
• Stirring constantly add butter and vanilla.
• Boil and stir constantly until very thick.  Remove from heat.
• Pour into pre-baked crust
• ENJOY!

(Kimberly & Amy enjoying Auntie Valerie's Fudge Pie, January 2009)

Playing with the Devil

I flew back to New Zealand a few days ago, after nine months of living in Australia. Mostly I was living places where it was impossible, or almost impossible, to bake (which shouldn't lead you to assume that Australia is without ovens, just that I was living a bit rough). Starting this blog was like paying attention to an itch I couldn't scratch, so when I got to Hamilton I asked Martha and Norman if I could bake a cake at their house.

Martha keeps a copy of the Devil's Food Cake recipe on the pantry door

I wanted to try making the Devil's Food Cake with the controversial substitution of buttermilk for sour milk, and mum suggested I make cup cakes to make the result easier to freeze or give away. Given the general lack of enthusiasm for cake eating among most of the people around me in Hamilton (Norman made a face like I was forcing him to eat worms), combined with the chocolate alternatives available everywhere I go (chocolate mousse, chocolate macaroons, chocolate bars etc etc) this seemed like a smart move.



I was very excited to use the big enamel bowl in which the batter is always mixed in Martha's kitchen. It has a groovy '60's sunflower pattern and really high sides so the batter doesn't slop even after you pour in the hot water at the end. As a child I learned to bake using that bowl (which was also our big salad bowl for years and years). It was a wedding present to Martha and Norman in 1965 and is still going as strong as their marriage, if a little chipped and scratched- the bowl, not the marriage!


I can't say I was very impressed with the buttermilk version of the cake, which seems to me a less moist than the sour milk version, possibly with a finer crumb. Also the colour wasn't the rich reddish almost-black brown I remember. So, these buttermilk ones were a bit bland in colour, texture and taste. I'm going back to sour milk for sure next time.

A few years ago, I learned that using less sugar will stop the top of the cake from cracking in the oven, so I always use 1 1/2 cups instead of the 2 called for in the recipe. So these cupcakes have lovely smooth tops.


If you haven't checked back on my original Devil's Food recipe post, Martha added a detailed historical caption to the photo of grandma Ada and there's been a lively debate in the comments section. Worth a look if you are interested.