Per Tara's Request: Selected Family Recipes

New blog, new subject. I’m starting this one in response to my daughter Tara, who wanted some of the old recipes she remembers from growing up, which are currently just available in a battered notebook in my kitchen. See, some of them are things I found in various odd places, like calendars or magazines, tried and then jotted down so I won’t forget about them. Some are old family recipes from my Mom, or Doug’s family, and some I just made up. Some I don’t cook much anymore, since I’ve gone to low carb eating.

When I was growing up, one of my favorite treats was German pancakes. My mom would make them for me for lunch oftentimes, on those occasions I was home. It was great! The only weird thing was that we never got them for breakfast, because she thought they were inappropriate for that meal, unlike every other American out there. It wasn’t until I was an adult and went back to Germany for a visit that I realized she was just like every other German, who really thought pancakes were inappropriate from breakfast and who were also very rigid in their views as to what it was proper to eat when. I can remember clearly sitting in a restaurant in Garmisch-Partenkirchen arguing with a waitress about whether I could get a piece of cake for dessert after supper. Absolutely could NOT due it! Never mind Garmisch was a tourist area that had lots of experience with foreigners and their weird food ideas, never mind the kitchen probably harbored some leftover cake from the 3pm Kaffee und Kuchen extravaganza Germans have every day. Nope. Wasn’t happening. For dessert you had Becher, and that was that. Since that time, I’ve warned everybody that I run across about to head to Germany to make SURE they don’t miss the Kaffee und Kuchen hour or two, or they’ll have no opportunity for cake the rest of the day. And that would be a tragedy.

Anyway, when I grew up, I took the opportunity to eat pancakes whenever I felt like it, usually at breakfast. I’ll confess, it took a couple of years of doing it before I stopped feeling like I was getting away with something. Over the time, I gradually changed the recipe, due to adjusting it more to my taste and to making it increasingly dead-easy to produce. The current version is thin and flexible, like crepes, and is very good with maple syrup, fruit syrup, applesauce and other fruit sauces. I generally make it in butter, now vegetable oil, like my mother used to do, because that’s how Doug like it. You could also season your non-stick pan and pretty much do it without fat if you want to. The current version uses a blender, but you could also do it with a whisk or a mixer if you have to.

Birgit’s Blender Pancakes

Put into the blender container:

4 eggs

Enough milk to combine with the eggs into 2 cups

1/3 cup sugar

½ tsp salt (optional)

Start blender.

While blending, add 1 cup flour and continue to blend until mixed, and free of lumps.

Heat frying pan on medium low, while your blending stuff. Melt butter in the pan, or add some oil or PAM, and pour in enough batter to make whatever size pancake you want. Cook until top looks less liquid and bottom is light brown, then flip and cook on other side. Serve.

Tara and Marc prefer little dinky pancakes, while Eric and I like them bigger. Eric like to put a bunch of applesauce all over the top and then fold them over and eat it like a thin pancake lasagna. Or is that a pancake quesadilla? Probably the quesadilla. Doug will eat whatever you put in front of him, though he’s been known to make them himself, since I’m not doing it any longer.

One of the recipes Tara wanted was for brownies, so I’ll add that one, too. This one I adapted from one of the big, general cookbooks. I think it was Fannie Farmer. I modified it by happy accident one day—didn’t have enough eggs—and the result was better than the original, so this is the one I go with. I’ve also simplified the production, so it’s not that much harder than mix brownies, and oh, so much better. The one problem with this version is that it hardens up pretty fast. That means you need to eat what you want fresh, then put the rest in Ziplocs and freeze immediately. They microwave reheat into chewy goodness whenever you want them after that. The dough is pretty good, too. I’m personally not a great fan of edges or corner pieces, since I prefer gooey or soft center pieces, but the edges of these are such a chewy delight, I will eat these right away—all for corners if I’m allowed to!

Not that I’m doing that anymore. Sigh.

Brownies

6 tbsp butter

3 oz unsweetened chocolate

1 ½ cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract (ok to be a bit liberal with this)

¾ cup flour

Preheat oven to 350 F

In microwave, melt butter and chocolate in a glass bowl. (2 min on high for my microwave). When thoroughly melted (and not burned), mix in sugar, then eggs. When thoroughly blended, add vanilla, and then flour. Mix well. Grease or PAM (or use silicone bakeware) an 8 or 9 inch square pan and then pour in batter. Bake for 30 minutes. Cool for 15 minutes of so, until they’re no longer volcanic, then cut into whatever size square you prefer.

These are a staple of Marc’s social life, or at least they were, until he discovered how to make pies. I think he still does this when he doesn’t have enough time to overwhelm people with the ooey, flakey goodness of apple or strawberry-rhubarb pie.

One final family recipe, also requested by Tara:

Chicken with Rice

Preheat oven to 350 F

1. Spray PAM onto rectangular pyrex pan
2. Add 1 cup rice, spread onto bottom (traditionally Uncle Ben’s converted, but you can splurge with Basmati or brown rice if you wish)
3. Sprinkle with 1 tbsp dried onion (minced) and Lawrie’s Seasoned Salt to taste.
4. Place 4-5 chicken breasts (kosher are the best, because kosher chicken is simply the best anyway) on top, skin side up and bone side down.
5. Pour 1 2/3 cup boiling water over the breasts and rice.
6. Sprinkle more Lawries onto the chicken.
7. Cover with tinfoil, or a glass cover, and bake 1 hour. OK to add more water after this if it appears a bit dry.
8. Remove tinfoil and bake ½ hour more.
9. Serve

This recipe is from Elaine, my mother-in-law, and is adored by my family. Doug really likes the top parts of the rice, and the edges, to be crispy, so we generally never add the extra water. Lawries is a favorite seasoning from his family, and finds its way into all sorts of things. For instance, if we grill hamburgers or steak, his always need a lot of Lawries on both sides. Eric’s version of mashed potatoes (and Tara’s too) generally end up vaguely orange from the amount of seasoning the dump in it. They view this similarly to how I view ginger—you can never have enough in food such that a little more wouldn’t make it even better.

I’m really serious about the kosher chicken, as well. Grandma Annie told me it was better than regular chicken and was even good cold, something I didn’t believe until I tried it. Until then, I always ran screaming from cold chicken because it got an added taste I really despised. I think it has to do with how the kosher ckicken is prepared. It’s against the rules of Leviticus, apparently, to eat bloody meat, so when you kosher something, it’s raised eating only certain things, then slaughtered and the blood carefully drained out, then packed in salt to draw out the rest. Then rinsed. I think it’s the residue of blood in some other kinds of chicken that causes the taste. It’s also never tough. I finally determined what made some boneless chicken so tough: The meat is ripped off the bone before rigor mortis has a chance to set in and then pass. Rigor mortis is when the muscles contract after death. It’s a temporary state. If there is no bone to keep the muscles stretched, they end up tight permanently, and thus tough. Now, isn’t that more than you ever wanted to know about chicken meat? Hmm. In any case, that’s one reason why some chefs prefer to bone their own. It’s usually past that stage before they get to it.

So, enough for now. I’ve still got to eventually post pie, spaghetti sauce, and a bunch of my cool new low carb recipes, along with some other high carb delights most of my family can still eat.

Sayonara for now.