Reminiscing over old cookbooks.

I love old cookbooks, especially the ones that come from churches.  I was going through some that my mother in law have and thought I'd share with you why I love them so much.  This cookbook comes to us from Sacred Heart Parish Cassel in Marathon, Wisconsin in 1970.  

You may have to zoom in, check out the second hint.  If you can't read it, it says "teach your children to pick up their toys before going to bed."  I guess they decided to throw some parenting advice in there too!

I also like the last hint on the helpful hints page. It says "To keep honey soft, add 1/4 lb. of butter to 1 qt. of fresh honey.  Mix well.  Will stay soft and you won't have to butter bread separately."  Huh, what bread?!

Here's an example of a recipe a particularly enjoy:  

Where's the chicken under ingredients?  How much chicken?  

Homemade Crackers

I found this recipe here: Yes, I Want Cake.  I've wanted to make homemade crackers for awhile now but most recipes look so time intensive.  I do not like time intensive food.  So when I saw these, with only handful of ingredients, I knew I had to give it a whirl.  

These were super easy!  The hardest part was pulling out the food processor, and then cleaning it afterwards.  I played around with the seasoning on them.  I did a small batch of sea salt and black pepper, a small batch of garlic and a small batch of plain.  

Next time, I'll break the batch into two smaller ones, so that I can roll the dough out thinner.  The taste was good, but they weren't as crunchy as I like my crackers to be. 

I can't wait to make another batch.  I need to pick up some more oats before I can make anymore.  But I see a keeper!

Grandma Fox Turns Another Year Older

This actually happened in September, I'm just now getting around to posting the pictures from it though.  

It was my mom's birthday and I thought it would be neat to have Hannah create

and design her cake.  Hannah wanted to make her a Lemon cake with pink icing.  So I set out to figure out Grandma's cake.  I settled on a lemon pound cake recipe with 

lemon cream cheese frosting, dyed pink.  

Here's Hannah helping me make the cake.  

She even sifted the flour, her first time sifting. 

Here she is adding salt.  

She wanted to decorate with cookies, lollipops, jelly beans, m&m's and I think gum.  

I forgot the gum.  

Decorating with daddy, everyone had a hand in grandma's cake.  Good thing they were clean hands!

Grandma loved her cake!

Overall, I think it turned out very pretty.  The icing was fantastic and the cake 

tasted pretty good too.  It was my first attempt at any type of pound cake.  There was something a little off about the consistency of it, it was as light in texture as it should have been, but it sure tasted like pound cake.  

My helper

I like this stage, where Hannah just wants to help!  I have to remind myself to take advantage of this by letting her help whenever she can.  Even though it typically means that the task will take longer to complete when she does it.  So right now she feeds to dog, twice a day.  She has to clean her room and put her toys away.  She also gets herself ready for bed; brushing her teeth, putting her pj's on.  Plus whatever little things I can think of throughout the day.

The first one this day was a fun project: making cookies.  

This recipe is a new favorite in our house: Trail Mix Cookies.  When I make them, it's not vegan, but they are incredibly good.   

Adding the applesauce

Adding the butter

Adding vanilla

Mixing the dry ingredients

The final product

And later that day she helped my mopping.  In her high heels, of course.  

We have a magnetic responsibility chart that hangs in her room that we do daily.  It has a list of her responsibilities and the days of the week.  Everyday we go over her chart to see how's she done and she gets to put a magnet on the responsibilities she does.  The only one she has real trouble with is "no whining."  Matter of fact, last week she runs up to me and hands me a hook and nail.  I asked where it came from so she told me that her chart fell down.  When I inquired further, she told me that she had taken her "no whining" magnet down and replaced with something else.  In the process the nail had come out of the wall and her chart had fallen down.  When I checked her chart, I saw "no whining" had been replaced with terrific job!  I laughed.  Then I explained that just because she wasn't doing perfect on it doesn't mean we get to change it.  The magnet being there helps to remind us to work on not whining.  So we put "no whining" back on her chart and her chart back on the wall.  

Sadly, no photo's

David and I have always done non traditional Christmas meals. It's started in Italy, where we spent our very first Christmas without any family. That Christmas we had steamed shrimp and lobster and Seprino, Italian white wine, in our beautiful Italian flutes. We had lobster again, when Karen joined us for Christmas. We like lobster, and it's a splurge we don't do often! The past Christmas Eve, I wanted to do something different. Festa dei sette pesce came to mind, feast of the seven fishes. It is a traditional Christmas Eve celebration in Italy. It's pretty easy, seven courses that all involve some seafood. Most everything we had was a new venture in cooking for me. I was nervous, and excited. I planned it out so that the food would be ready at different times throughout the day. I tried to keep the meals versatile. I ended up with shrimp cocktail, crab soup, smoked oysters, herrings in white sauce, mussels in a red sauce, Sicilian salsa verde with sautéed cabbage, and for the main event, spaghetti misto mare (mixed seafood pasta) with tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil. My crab soup started out as crab bisque, I ended up missing a key "bisque" ingredient so I tweaked my recipe to be broth based, used with white wine, low sodium chicken broth and water. I was especially proud of my soup, it was so good, and light and simple. The Sicilian salsa verde was made with anchovies, and many other things, turned out excellent as well. It was my first taste of anchovies. I wish I had taken photo's. The end result was 9 adults feed and 2 kids, not one complaint and lots of compliments. It was such a success, I think I'll make this my routine for Christmas Eve. Next year, I'm going to do something completely different. I really wanted fried calamari, but couldn't find it before my meal. That will definitely be there next year!