That was the way my mother made Yorkshire Pudding. She claimed she could never write down the recipe, and I later came to believe (through my own pasta making) that's because the ratio of ingredients (flour/milk/eggs) is so particular that the flour & milk are driven by size of the eggs...it truly is a "feels right" thing. The only thing of hers I've ever made are the Christmas Spritz cookies (trees, camels, wreaths.) Her hand-written recipe is pretty much the standard Mirro recipe. This thread made me pull out her recipe box (no one else wanted it when she died.) Talk about a mish-mosh of scribbled stuff on random pieces of paper. I am reminded where I got my lack of organization skills and poor penmanship. Makes me think of all the great recipes lost to estate dust-bins. Permit a side-trip: I just found one recipe taken from a British rag that has an announcement on the back regarding Stirling Moss and his father starting a new British racing team. "The team will field three 1961 Lotus sports cars, three cars for Grand Prix races, and one Grand Tourismo car--a high-speed saloon." Exciting stuff.
Were your family of German or Italian descent, Al? "Speck" (cured meats) hails from those regions. And many great potato salad recipes hail from German immigrants. My father's parents were German.
E="John Brunner, post: 565836, member: 1730"]Were your family of German or Italian descent, Al? "Speck" (cured meats) hails from those regions. And many great potato salad recipes hail from German immigrants. My father's parents were German.[/QUOTE] Latvian, German, Russian
My mother’s pea soup. She soaked a big chunk of ham in it as it slow cooked which got tender as heck. It was heaven on a cold day with rye bread and even better the second day as a leftover.
My mother would take surplus pie crust, roll it out, dot it with butter, sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on it, then bake it. That was better than the pie.
I have no idea how my mother felt about it. She cooked for herself and my dad, then the first-born sister, then a 4th mouth, then a 5th, a 6th, a 7th and finally an 8th for a few years before the oldest began aging out of the system. When she and my father split up, she had to work and there were still 3 of us at home, so I gotta think that making meals lost any creative allure it may have had. But even before that, we were kids who would basically eat anything. Every day must have seemed like Thanksgiving...hours in the kitchen and *POOF* gone in minutes (or less.) I doubt that it was rewarding, any more than feeding livestock. I don't ever recall my father cooking, other than the occasional pressure cooker meal (ham hocks, beef ribs) he may have made when we (me & 3 brothers) visited for the occasional weekend. He managed a Murphy store that had a snack counter (with some pretty good food) and spent most of his waking hours working, so I don't think he ate at home much or anywhere else but there. Two of my brothers liked to cook as much as I do, and were both very good at it. One brother and one sister are not into it at all, and the other sister was married with 2 sons so did it out of necessity. The funny thing is the sisters usually pulled kitchen duty so they got experience, and the boys didn't touch a pot or a pan until we moved away from home and were on our own...we just "picked it up" somehow. I think we were raised with home cooking and learned how to do that for ourselves because the alternatives were not acceptable...at least, that's what drove me. Perhaps that's part of the topic...I bet many of us grew up with home cooking and did not want to "miss it." We were not interested in a steady diet of Stouffer's or restaurant food, so we just kind of "did it."
Ken Anderson has a thread declaring the same problem finding colby cheese and has to buy it online. I just looked at my local stores and could not find limburger. What the heck gives with stores not carrying "regular" cheeses? I shop at Kroeger's, who has Murray's Cheese kiosks in them, and that world-famous cheese maker doesn't make limburger. And the only colby I could find in the grocery stores when I last looked was Walmart's house brand (no national brand and no other house brand), other than buying a half-a-wheel from Murray's.
My mother was better than anyone I know at making fudge from scratch. Chocolate, vanilla, and peanut butter. It always came out perfect. Smooth, creamy and never too soft or too hard. She always added black walnuts to the chocolate and vanilla. She always made some for Christmas.
I now eat that which takes a minimum time to prepare. I loved the potato pancakes my mother made and those I bought so I got the recipe online and made up a batch. I thought they were delicious, but it took only a few minutes to devour them but a heck of a lot more time to make and to cleanup afterwards. It was the same with banana bread that I saw a recipe for. The time enjoying the creation is such a small fraction of the time and work it takes to make it that I’m reluctant to attempt anything else. I suppose I’m hopelessly spoiled at this time.
I take a lot more shortcuts in the kitchen these days. (Hint: a boxed banana bread mix is pretty tasty, or just pick up some ready made from the grocery bakery department. )
I made my weekly grocery run into the big city today, and asked the guy at the Murray's cheese kiosk in Kroeger's about limburger. Murray's does not make it, but they carry it by another company. It's in a foil-wrapped package...the same packaging I've seen online at independent grocery stores (likely to contains its aroma.) So it's still out there in pockets. Maybe you could check around the deli counter next time you're shopping and ask them about it.
Snagged it at a Shop Rite store after an all night web search and a young clerk and I had to dig hard and deep down into the cheese display bin to bring it up.
Limburger cheese is one of the things I don't miss. My grandfather got it from local grocery stores, who sourced the stuff from the 100s of places in Wisconsin that made it. Today, Chalet Cheese in Monroe Wisconsin operates the last Limburger cheese plant in the United States. Edit Note: I cannot think of any foods I miss, as most of it wasn't that good when I was growing up.