A Cajun Pantry

A Glass of Wine and Counsel

 It's been awhile since I treated you all to some Baked with Love but I have an offering I think you'll enjoy and it's just in time for blackberry picking season:

Prayerful Meditating features a delicious Homemade Blackberry Wine Cake

"The bubbles popped and crinkled their fragrantly smiles upward along the peach-colored tile. My notebook and pen sat ready and waiting for my reflections, as did my fresh cup of coffee sweetened with cream and sugar. Kathleen Norris and Sarah Ban Breathnach promised me counsel. It was all so inviting and intimate.

"Then the phone rang.

"It was my oldest son on his way over the bridge to a college final. He needed to hear a 'friendly voice' before meeting his assumed doom. The poor child suffers text-anxiety. Passing the class hinged on this final test grade. Never a good thing.

“ 'I need prayers, Mom.' It was the voice of someone on his way to the guillotine."

Read the rest HERE and leave me a comment at the site.

* On a side note: Corey passed the exam with 88% (giving him the added reward of dropping his lowest test grade) which resulted in his completing the course with a high B average.  He has a 3.7 GPA at the moment. We are very happy and very proud!  :-)

Cooking with Annie

She's seven but I decided that she was old enough to start chopping and dicing using a "real knife."  

The Pampered Chef paring knife is child-friendly but it made her feel so big and important. This was a big deal!

"Mommy, I'm so good, aren't I? I've never had so much fun in my life! Slicing things up is neat!"

Okaaaay! What am I encouraging here? Tell me.

 

She also felt very superior taking over her sister's job of stirring a very hot pot of olive oil, sliced tomatoes, minced garlic, diced bell peppers and chopped onions.

Who needs a vocabulary list and a home ec classroom when you explain the different cutting methods while the child is chopping in your kitchen?

 

Please excuse the pajama to clothes change in the middle of this production. We don't stay in our pajamas all day long. Really...we do change eventually, even if it isn't until 4:00 PM.

Have I mentioned lately that we are homeschoolers?

Annie dicing and arranging the carrots on the salad.

Annie cutting and layering the pears.

 

Annie sliding the garlic bread into the heated oven.

 

What a delicious looking salad.

 

It wasn't our regular Great Depression fare but it was another Class A meal at the Cajun Cottage! Yummy!

 

Wednesday Depression Cooking

Part of our Great Depression unit study is to cook the recipes offered at Great Depression Cooking with Clara.

Tonight's dish was Peppers and Eggs.

Chelsea re-watched the video clip and cooked it. We used butter instead of cooking grease and added some chopped onions and sprinkled a bit of grated cheddar cheese on top. We did not add any salt to it but got a ridiculous delight in watching this 90+ yr-old woman add extra salt to hers.

I have to say I was stunned...stunned, I tell you...at how delicious this dish was/is. I could eat it every day, I think. Which gave me greater reason to be disappointed in my 21st-century children who refused to partake of this Depression banquet.

Only I ceased being disappointed in them with the first diaper change.

 

Corey bravely...grudingly...stubbornly...resisted until I got the fork to touch his lips. Then he obliged. "We aren't living in a Depression, Mom."

"Oh, yes, we are. Haven't you watched the news?"

"Well, last I checked, Burger King was still open..."

Kayleigh called from work to see if I was cooking because Kei's mom was and should she come home or...?

I enthusiastically explained that her sister was cooking a Great Depression meal and Wednesday nights would serve the dish. Tonight was Peppers and Eggs.

There was a pause. Then..."Don't you think you're taking this thing a little far, Mom?"

Beastly young adults-slash-teenagers! They spoil all the fun.

The younger group wasn't much better.

Garrett raided the refrigerator, Chelsea claimed exemption because she was the cook, and Annie was just plain defiant and settled on her regular scrambled eggs w/ cut-up ham.

Mark and I thought it was simply delicious.

And then there was the pie. The dessert pie. The blueberry dessert pie. Everyone ate the pie.

 

Which Annie and Chelsea diligently stabbed to death. I think they learned that you should never over "pine-tree" because it then breaks the baked crust. Ah, well, we bake and we learn.

 

The blueberry pie and fresh whipped cream was in recognition of today's Catholic feast day: The Feast of the Annunciation. The day Mary said "Yes!" to God's request that she bring forth the Son of God into the world.

She could have said "No!" and where would we all be today?

My husband called on the way home from work. "Need anything?"

"Yeah, could you stop and pick-up some blueberries and a pie crust? It's the Feast of the Annunciation and I saw that Cathy's doing a blueberry pie. I have a headache but that's easy enough to pop in the oven."

"Sure, but why blueberries?"

"They're blue, honey. Blue is for the Blessed Mother."

We have to tell our men-folk this. They just don't "get it."

 

Blue is for a lovely lady, our heavenly Mother, who submitted her will to God's Almighty Plan. She had faith the size of a mountain. She did not know the plan or the future but she believed in a God greater than any plans she could make.

This is the day, for all Christians, that God's word was made flesh.

From Catholic Culture and Holy Scripture:

"This day celebrates the actual Incarnation of Christ, the day the Son of God became man when Mary spoke her Fiat, or "yes" to God. St. Luke records the events:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!" But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.

He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end."

And Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I have no husband?"

And the angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.

And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible." And Mary said, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:26-38)"

Brie-Burgers & Pie

These brie burgers are good, oh-so-good!

A warning: the brie cheese is addictive and is a tasty way for your mouth to pass the time while the burgers are cooking.

Yum!

And this Crustless Pumpkin Pie...was it as good as the aroma promised and as pleasing on the palate as it looked to the eyes?

Let's just say...

It was sinfully scrumptious!

These recipes can be found in the cookbook Coming Home to Gooseberry Patch.

Seed Ponderings

Here is our Watermelon Cake...

6 yr old (waiting for her little friend to come visit): "Mommy, do you think Michael will know those aren't real watermelon seeds in the cake?"

Mommy: "Gee, honey, I don't know. I sure hope so."

Queen of Puddings

I have much to write about this book Eat My Words by Janet Theophano but, for now, I'm just going to give you an appetizer.

As some of you might have guessed rightly, with the recent death of my father-in-law my menu plans fell into the potato bin last week. I was left with a fresh loaf of French bread on my countertop which quickly dried out and was of no use to anyone short of a bread sponge for soup.  Due to tons of food (including two more loaves of French bread) brought to the house during the days before and following the funeral, soup was no where on the menu.

Tonight I decided to recycle that French loaf into a bread pudding. And not just any bread pudding, but the Queen of Puddings that seems to have held its title since 1865. Despite having written about bread pudding before, I was sweetened and eager to try an alternative recipe. Was this one...could this one...be more Queenly than the recipe from my childhood?

In the book Eat My Words the author writes (page 44):

"Picture an afternoon tea party on a cool, crisp spring day. Laura Bigelow has served her latest culinary creation. She had gotten the recipe from her sister-in-law who said a woman in her fellowship group had served it the week before. Why not try it? Bigelow brings out the delicately browned pudding on a lovely porcelain plate.  The women exchange news while drinking tea and nibbling on dainty cakes and the delectable 'Queen of Puddings.' It is a success!

"I have found the identical recipe, or one with slight variations, in many nineteenth-century northeastern cookery manuscripts. Nearly all the recipes have the same ingredients and the same method of preparation. The "Queen of Puddings" was clearly a popular dish that circulated among middle-class women in, at least, the northeastern United States. Although the attributions in one woman's book do not illuminate the ways in which women's social circles overlapped, the widespread popularity of the dish indicates the breadth of women's net-works."

The recipe for the "Queen of Puddings" is found in Eat My Words and, as we are a bread-pudding-loving family, I was eager to try this old recipe. So I did.

* * * * *

Queen of Puddings

1 pint of bread crumbs, 1 quart of milk, 1 cup of sugar. Yolks of four eggs, beaten. Grated rind of one lemon. Piece of butter size of a small egg. Bake until done but not watery. Whip the whites of the eggs stiff and beat in a small teacup of sugar in which has been stirred the juice of the lemon. Spread over the pudding jelly or any sweet [--]. Pour the whites of the eggs over this and bake until it is a light brown.

April 27, 1865/ Maria Sherrill/ Maria Borton/ Witnesses to the merit of this pudding

* * * * *

Don't you just love it! This is the original way recipes were shared before Fannie Farmer whipped up her now-famous Boston Cooking-School Cookbook in 1896 which spoonfed us the exact measurements of recipes.

I don't know about you, but I love to tweak my recipes and make them my own. This made my venture that much more interesting. So I tied my culinery apron strings, pushed my 19th century curls behind my ears and got to work on decoding this little scrap of recipe tutelage.

• a "small teacup of sugar" tainted by the juice of one lemon
• "piece of butter size of one small egg"
• Let's see...I don't have a wood burning stove so let's try this cooking at 350 F

It was an interesting experiment and it connected me to the women of this social network who sipped tea and nibbled on dainty cakes while discussing the news of the day and exchanging this same recipe on scraps of paper.

I did fail to think through a couple of things when I made it though. It called for a quart of milk so I used a quart of regular 1% milk (that equals 4 cups, folks) in my frig. As I slid the pudding into my oven I had the gnawing anxiety that it was not going to turn out as good as Oma's. And I asked myself Why?. Off the top of my head, I already knew. One word answered my question "Richness".

A bread pudding devoid of rich ingredients is bland and tasteless.

1) I followed the recipe to a "T". I was already nervous because the recipe is dated 1865. I used my blanded, watered-down store-bought milk when unpasteurized, unskimmed cow's milk would have been used in Bigelow's kitchen.  I made a mental note that next time I need to use the evaporated milk Oma's recipe calls for versus plain milk. Evaporated milk is naturally much richer than the 1% we drink at home.

2) No where in this old-fashion recipe does it call for cinnamon, nutmeg, and other spices. I'm used to a bread pudding doctored and peppered with these sweet spices and couldn't imagine biting into one void of these pleasantries. Perhaps the grated lemon rind in the pudding and the sweetened lemon topping were the substitutes. But, at the last minute, I pulled the pudding from the oven, grabbed my cinnamon shaker and liberally shook the grated spice onto the surface of the pudding.

[The Verdict: The recipe for Queen of Puddings is truly Queenly. It's delicious and stands on its own. It does not need evaporated milk.  Regular milk (even 1%) is good enough.  I don't think the cinnamon I added post haste made any difference atall.  The lemon stands on its own merits. One tastes the faint hint of lemon in each and every bite.  It's creamy, more like a jelly, and very comforting to eat. Several versions are found online.  This one at deliaonline.com (and many others I found online) includes a topping of raspberry jam. Jam or not, this site is correct in saying: "This, with a cloud of meringue on top, is probably one of the lightest and most mouthwatering puddings ever invented." I agree. This is the ultimate comfort pudding.]

[ETA: This pudding is ten times better if allowed to sit overnight before eating. It firms up making the cutting and eating of it more pleasurable.]

Oma's Blackberry Cobbler Recipe

Take a walk to the briar patch and enjoy Oma's recipe for blackberry cobbler.

Life’s Dips, Trips and Bliss

"Annie was five but she remembers that summer walk well. The July heat baked the molted mimosa buds, the gravel country road crunched under our sneakers, and the yeasty smell of wild rye grass and fish from the lake blanketed the day. Annie loped along the roadside holding fast to her grandmother’s hand. And a good thing she was." (Read the rest here)

[ETA: The egg mentioned in the recipe needs to be included in the cobbler mix.  It should read: "Melt butter in baking dish. Make batter of milk, sugar, flour, and egg. Pour on top of melted butter."]

Reclaiming My Kitchen

After a week at the family camp...beautiful, relaxing, summery, cherishable...I am blissfully back in my own domain.  It's just my kitchen and me...as you can see...

I'm really a very private cook.  So much so that I don't like anyone looking over my shoulder while I cook. It's not my fault really.  It's everyone else's. As I chop onions or peel potatoes, my mother is apt to want to show me an easier, quicker way to do it.  As I stir and season a pot of stew, my husband is apt to want to take over the seasoning jar and the spoon. As I read over a new-found recipe, my brother is apt to want to take over the whole show with his ingenious creativity.

I say "want to" because they know better than to actually do it anymore; otherwise Cajun Cay-enne will toss it in their eye.  My mother always did call me a little spitfire...though I do cook with cinnamon more than with cayenne pepper.

MONDAY:

• B: Hearty Egg, Ham & Potato Scramble
• L: Baked Ziti & Poppin' Fresh Biscuits
• Tea Time: Fresh Veggies & Dip
• D: Farmhouse Stew & Miracle Rolls
• Dessert: Chocolate E'clair Cake

TUESDAY:

• B: Pan-Pardue (New Orleans-style French toast soaked in buttermilk, topped with powdered sugar & toppings)
• L: Leftovers
• Tea Time: French Loaf Pizza
• D: Mushroom Rice w/ chicken
• Dessert: Queen of Puddings

WEDNESDAY:

• B: Breakfast Casserole
• L: Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
• Tea Time: Fresh Fruit
• D: Swiss Steak in Mushroom Gravy
• Dessert: Honey Bun Cake

THURSDAY:

• B: Leftover Honey Bun Cake
• L: Peanut Butter & Canned Figs Preserve Sandwiches
• Tea Time: Ripe Figs & Leftover Desserts
• D: Unknown---Kayleigh cooks

FRIDAY:

• D: A Fish Dish