Chicken Pie

We ate a lot of what we called chicken pie when I was growing up, and I loved it, but it was not like the chicken pie I’ve eaten at other people's houses or in restaurants. Those usually have onions, peas, carrots or other vegetables in a sauce that is rather thick. At our house there were two ways of making chicken pie, baked or on the eye of the stove in a stew pot. I later learned that the stove top version would more often be called chicken and dumplings – in this case strip or rolled dumplings. This was my very favorite. Del isn't that crazy about any of it, but will eat either kind, and David would probably still just as soon have one of the cheap frozen kind he always preferred as a child.

Baked Chicken pie

Mother kept a bag of bony pieces of chicken such as backs in the freezer and added to it until she had enough to do something with. Then she would cut up a chicken and stew them together. Stewing meant simmering the chicken in water with salt and pepper until done. Mother would put resulting broth in a Pyrex dish and add the backs wings and short legs (thighs, or short jumpers as Mr. Williams called them). Then she would cover the dish with her homemade pie crust and bake until the crust was golden brown and the broth was bubbly. She would reserve the rest of the broth and chicken for chicken salad or some other dish.

Chicken Pie – stove top version

Recipe:

Stew a chicken in sufficient water to make a goodly amount of broth. Remove skin and bones and return to broth. Taste broth. If it tastes bland, add a bouillon cube or some chicken stock base and pepper.

Pastry

2 cups all purpose flour
½ t. salt
2 T Crisco
½ cup hot water

Mix flour and salt. Cut in the shortening with two knives until it resembles coarse meal. Stir in the hot water with a fork. Form into a ball and roll until 1/16” thick. Cut into strips approximately 1” by 3” and drop into simmering broth. Cook for 20 minutes, but do not allow to boil or they will break up.

Note: I prefer to keep the chicken out of the broth until after I cook and remove dumplings and most of broth into a heated serving dish. Then I quickly reheat the chicken in remaining broth and add to the dish.

Note: In a pinch, you can substitute strips from thinly rolled canned biscuits.

Butter - Easy Recipe for Children of All Ages

The computer is fixed, the wedding festivities for niece Sarah are over and both sets of friends who stayed with us here at Massanutten have left , so I thought It was time to get back to business. We have had almost two wonderful weeks with friends and family in Williamsburg, Suffolk, Newport News and here in the mountains of Virginia.
On to butter… As I have said before, we lived in the country on a family farm. We lived in the home place, and Ruby, a teacher, and sometimes Eunie, lived there too. Garland, Daddy’s younger brother, lived across and down the road on one side. He had seven children, Garland, Jr. who went away to school because there was no education in Emporia at that time for a child who was deaf, Jimmy, Marsha, Randy, Mike, Brenda and Eric. Big Bubba and Stella lived across and down the road in the other direction. Big Bubba was the oldest. We sort of went from one house to the other, depending on what was going on. Big Bubba worked shift work at Johns Manville, as my daddy did, and Jimmy, Marsha and I used to take turns staying with Stella on midnight to 7 shift because she did not like to stay alone.
We had a cow until after Bubba went off to college. He was chief milker, and I felt it was my responsibility to keep him company while he did it. Keeping him company probably consisted of asking one question after another, and may have occasionally plucked his last good nerve, as sister in law Daryl Lyn says, because he sometimes aimed at me instead of the bucket. He had really good control. I remember the farm cats and kittens used to show up at milking time and wait with open mouths for him to squirt them.
We churned our own butter in crockery churns with wooden dashers. You had to let the cream come to the top of the milk, spoon it off and put it into the churn. Then you pulled the dasher up and pushed it down until the butter formed, leaving butter milk in the bottom of the churn. Then you had to scoop the very soft butter out of the churn and into a crockery bowl so the remaining butter milk could be worked out with a wooden paddle. Once that was done, the butter could be shaped into a log or a ball or pushed firmly into a butter mold. Ours was wooden and consisted of a form with a plunger that had decorations on the surface. When the plunger was depressed to push out the butter, it left a pretty decoration. I was given a butter pat sized mold and loved to make individual servings of butter, but most of the time, we just used the big one.

The butter milk was saved for making biscuits or for drinking by those who were so inclined. Crumbling up cold biscuits in the milk and eating them with a spoon was considered a special treat by some, but not by me.
When we churned butter at Big Bubba and Stella’s, we sat on the front porch and sang “Come butter, come” as we worked. I think those were the only words to the so called song.

I also remember that when we needed rain so badly that the wells were in danger of running dry, Stella used to gather the cousins on the front porch, and we would sing “There Shall Be Showers of Blessing.” over and over and over again. But I digress…

When several of the cousins were around, we were sometimes given a Mason jar of cream which we shook until it turned to butter. I remember that we had races to see who could shake the fastest and get butter first.

Making butter was a favorite speech activity at Medina County Board of MRDD. We prepared picture communication boards so that non verbal students could request a turn or a taste of the butter and attached a food processor to a device so that children with limited hand mobility could use a switch to activate the processor.

Recipe

1 cup whipping cream
Pinch salt (optional)

Pour cold cream in bowl of food processor. Process until it is way past the whipped cream stage. A small amount of liquid will separate from the creamy butter. Don’t expect it to be yellow like the butter you get at the store. It will be quite soft, but will firm up in the refrigerator.
The children loved it on saltines or bread. Because of my own opinions of the matter, I always put the butter on the bottom or unsalted side of the cracker so the salt touched the tongue. Don’t laugh. I know you have some food rules.

Mrs. Williams' Shrimp Dip

Mrs. Williams loved to make what we now call appetizers at Christmas time. She probably didn't call them that, but they were always stored away in her Frigidaire side by side refrigerator with pies and cookies and fruit cake in tin boxes ready for company. I swear that fridge stretched. I have never been able to get as much in a refrigerator as she did.

The thing I liked best, I think, is her shrimp dip. She served it with crackers, but a spoon would have been fine with me, and she really could have left out the shrimp. While I like shrimp, I LOVE cocktail sauce.

Recipe:

6 oz. cream cheese - lower fat is fine
1 pt. sour cream - lower fat is fine
1 1/2 bottles Cross-Blackwell's cocktail sauce
3-5 drops hot pepper sauce
1 lb.cooked tiny shrimp

Mix together the cream cheese, sour cream, cocktail sauce and red pepper sauce. It is okay if there a few small lumps of cream cheese. Stir in shrimp. Refrigerate until time to serve. Serve with your favorite crackers.

Note: Try to use only Cross-Blackwell cocktail sauce. It really is better. I usually buy the 1 lb. package of precooked and shelled tiny little shrimp, but if you can only find larger shrimp, cut them into 2 or 3 pieces.

Pimiento Cheese

My father in law, Eugene Williams, loved pimiento cheese, but Mrs. Williams never made it. She frequently bought the already made kind at the commissary, but that was made with wimpy cheese and could not put a patch on Mother’s homemade. Mother used what Daddy called rat trap cheese. It was cut off a big wheel at Bradley’s store and was as sharp as any cheese I have had since.

The first year(s) Del and I were married the budget was tight, so when Mr. Williams’ birthday came around, I made a big batch of pimiento cheese, put a bow on the container and called it a present. He was so taken with it that he had me show him how to make it and made it every week of his life from then until he became too feeble. It is called Daddy’s pimiento cheese out in Colorado because he used to make it out there when he went to visit daughter Dianne. So far as I remember it was just about the only thing he cooked.
Del likes toasted pimiento cheese sandwiches. I prefer to spread it on Premium saltine crackers, but the cheese has to be on the unsalted side so the salty side touches my tongue when I eat it. That’s just one of my little food peculiarities, but I’m sure you’ll be won over if you try it. It’s also good stuffed into celery sticks

Recipe:

10 oz. cheddar, extra sharp is my choice, but use your favorite strength
4 oz. jar of diced or chopped pimientos
6 T mayonnaise, light’s fine
½ tsp. yellow mustard

Grate the cheese by hand or in food processor. You can use the kind that comes shredded, but it doesn’t mush together with the other ingredients as well. Drain the pimientos and add them, the mayonnaise and the mustard to the cheese. Mix well and refrigerate. It keeps several days

My Take on Buying Shrimp

There are certainly people who know a lot more about shrimp than I do, but over the years of living where shrimp don't I've tried to figure out ways to make the frozen taste as much like fresh as possible.

Buying shrimp:

Because we don’t live at the ocean, I usually buy frozen easy peel raw shrimp, thaw them according to package instructions and peel them, saving the shells. It may be foolish, but I just don’t like to buy the previously frozen ones in the fish case, and it’s not as easy to find the fresh ones except in a specialty market.

After peeling, sprinkle the shrimp heavily with kosher or other salt and let sit for about 10 minutes so they will taste more like fresh. Rinse the shrimp and proceed with recipe.

Making shrimp stock:

2 T. oil
Shells from 1 pound of shrimp
½ T. seafood seasoning
6 or more black peppercorns
2 garlic cloves, minced
¼ cup onion, chopped
½ cup white wine
1 quart water.

Heat oil in sauce pan. Add shells, seafood seasoning, garlic and onion. Cook, stirring until the shells turn pink. It happens quickly so don't walk away. Add wine and allow to boil gently until the sauce reduces and becomes syrupy. Add the water and simmer for 30 minutes or so.

Strain the stock and use or freeze for another meal.

Why "Miss Rosa"?

Del reminded me that some of you might not know why I called Mother Miss Rosa, and Daddy Mr. Willard (pronounced Wullad). I thought I had bored everybody I ever knew with that story, but maybe not. Growing up on a farm in the late '40's and on, as the much younger second child, I often played outside by myself. I could push the screen doors to get out, but was not tall enough to reach the handles to pull the doors open to get back in. If I wanted to get in the front door, I called "Mama", but if I wanted in the back door, I thought I had to call "Miss Rosa". Reason being that close neighbors and people who worked on the farm always came to the back door, knocked and called out Miss Rosa or Mr. Willard. I suppose I thought the back door required a special password to get in.

It is also true that then, as now, children in the South often called friends of their parents and their neighbors Mr. or Miss fill in a first name here. When we moved North the first time, I was surprised to discover that children often called adults by their first names. We were not in any way offended by that, but we continued in our old ways as far as David was concerned. (After all, we fully intended to get him back to the Promised Land as soon as possible, and we wanted him to be presentable, even if he didn't have the appropriate accent.) He once commented that the custom of "Mam" and "Sir" is really convenient, because if you forget someone's name, you can just substitute one of those.

When we moved to Akron, we had the privilege of meeting a lady of a certain age who had been secretary or administrative assistant to a former president of the University and who continued to be a generous and respected friend to the University after retirement. She was a member of the Friends of the Library board, and one night during refreshments at a meeting at our house, she said to me, "My Dear, don't you think you are old enough to call me Caroline?" Frankly, I didn't think I would ever get old enough for that, but she seemed okay with Miss Caroline. We also felt most comfortable calling Annetta Karam, who became one of our dearest friends, Miss Annetta. It seems more appropriate than Annetta for someone who still audits classes at 96 and who can eat 5 scoops of ice cream without batting an eye, and without gaining an ounce.