Do You Remember the First Valentine Your Dear One Sent You?

I received my first Valentine from Del 46 years ago when we were freshmen at Richmond, and I have never forgotten it. It was so sweet, so tender, so romantic. Unfortunately, it didn't survive our many moves, but who could forget the beautiful words? "Wax in my ears, lint in my belly button and you in my heart." It was accompanied by a huge lavender heart shaped box of candy with a huge fake orchid on it. He confessed some years later that he bought it because it offered the best value for the money. The man is a true romantic. What more can I say?

Actually, he and some of his family members have a warped sense of humor when it comes to choosing cards. They spend more time picking out the perfect insulting card than I do a pair of shoes. He always picked out David's Valentine card, but one year he was out of town, and I did it. David opened the sweet card I had bought and asked if his dad was mad with him. It seems he thought his dad hadn't cared enough to spend the time to look for the truly obnoxious.

We didn't have special Valentines Day plans tonight. Del had oral surgery yesterday to remove a tooth and the impacted wisdom tooth under it. They hadn't wanted to remove it back in the olden days, but the time had come. The wisdom tooth left a small hole in his sinuses, so he now is the only one in the family who has had a collegen (sp?) injection. The menu for this evening was mashed potatoes with gravy. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, and lunch was macaroni and cheese and yogurt.

He has done quite well, although when we were trying to wake him up he kept talking about Boy Scouts on bikes who were trying to help senior citizens cross the street and telling the nurse he was a cheap drunk. She assured him that on this particular occasion he was quite an expensive drunk.

I saw this recipe on the Hershey's site, but haven't tried it. I'm thinking it could not possibly be anything but wonderful.

Recipe:

28 hersheys milk chocolate kisses
10 caramel filled or other type filled kisses
2 T. plus 2 t. whipping cream
1 cup ground nuts or some other covering that goes well with the type filled kiss you are using

Put the 28 kisses in microwave safe bowl with cream and nuke for 1 minute. Stir and continue to heat in 15 second bursts as needed. Cover and refriderate for 4-6 hours, or until firm.

Use 1 T. chocolate mixture to completely cover filled kiss, gently rolling to form a ball without mashing the filled kiss out of shape.

Roll in ground nuts or whatever coating goes well with the filled kiss you chose.

Refrigerate until firm, but remove from frige 5 minutes before serving for better flavor.

Sounds yummy to me. If you make them, please let me know how they turned out.

The Wine of the South

I recently read or heard, I can't remember which, that sweet tea is the "wine of the south." Tea certainly flowed in our Southern Baptist home. When I say tea, I mean ice tea (without the /d/), because in our house, that really went without saying, 2 meals a day 12 months a year. Hot tea was, and except for Chinese tea, pretty much still is, associated in my mind with colds and sore throats.

The first time I recall being regularly offered a choice of coffee or hot tea was when Del was in the Army, and I had to attend the "ladies" events. We wives were even given a little etiquette book that among other things, spelled out who would pour the tea and coffee for the first five or so minutes of the party. It was considered an honor, believe it or not. The wife of the highest ranking officer was given the honor of pouring one, and the wife of the second highest ranking officer poured the other. I wish I still had the book, because it really was a hoot, and because I don't recall whether tea out ranks coffee or coffee out ranks tea. After the first few minutes, others at the party took turns pouring. I always crossed my fingers that I would not be chosen, being left handed as I am. The tea party habit continued to some extent while we were at Washington and Lee in Lexington, Va., but not much after that.

Until I started hanging around with the Williams family, I don't think I was aware that there are two strong schools of thought about what one means when one says "tea." In my family, it meant unsweetened tea, with sugar available for those who preferred it and lemon if we had company. Daddy put sugar in his, but neither Mother or I did. I can't remember about Bubba. I assumed that everybody made it that way, but have learned recently that some of my childhood friends in Emporia grew up with sweet tea.

Mrs. Williams made sweet tea. My memory is that she always used the same pitcher and had a special large spoon she used to measure 3 heaping spoons of sugar into the hot tea. The family had quite a shock one night when I made the tea with 3 of the big spoons of salt insead of sugar. Keeping salt in a canister that matched all the others was not something I had ever seen before, never mind that it was clearly labeled.

I thought her tea was pretty sweet until I met the Georgia relatives' tea. One aunt made it so sweet that I swear I could feel grains between my teeth.

I don't remember the preferences of other family members on either side at this point, but I make it plain, and David and I always drink unsweet - I with lemon and he without. Del drinks it unsweet with lemon at home, because "it isn't the same when you stir sugar into cold tea", and happily drinks sweet with lemon when we are out. Tracy doesn't drink tea, but her mother makes sweet tea most of the time, I think.

Del will drink tea anywhere, but I am an ice tea snob and firmly believe that with almost no exceptions, Chic-fila being one, restaurants above the Mason Dixon Line just can't make ice tea fit to drink. An excellent reason to stick to wine, if you ask me.

Ice Tea Recipe

6-8 tea bags (Mother usually used Luzianne or Lipton)
4 cups hot water
4 cups cold water

Bring 4 cups of water to boil, add tea bags, remove from heat
Let steep 10 minutes only, remove bags
Pour cold water into pitcher, so pitcher won't break
Pour in the hot tea solution
Serve over ice cubes

Sweet tea
(a guess, based on the size of Mrs. Williams' big spoon)

6-8 tea bags
4 cups hot water
4 cups cold water

Bring 4 cups water to boil.
Add tea bags, remove from heat
Let steep 10 minutes, remove bags
Add 3/4 to 1 cup sugar and stir until sugar dissolves.
Pour cold water into pitcher. AAdd hot mixture.
Serve over ice cubes.

Sun tea

It got to be quite the thing to make sun tea when I was a teenager. Mother used to put a covered pitcher out on the picnic table where the tea would steep to desired color. While none of us ever got sick from drinking it, the food people now tell us that sun tea is risky because tea leaves may carry bacteria that would not be killed by this method. It really is a wonder we all lived to grow up, don't you think?

Hot tea

I just dunk a bag into a cup of hot water. Friend Sandy, a tea drinker, has experienced my attempt to make a pot of hot tea. My heart was in the right place, but, bless my heart, that's all you could say about it.

Maybe I should read my own blog - Chicken Muddle Revisited

It seems that I did post the recipe for chicken muddle on this blog in September and promptly forgot. It is well worth making and since you end up with such a large quantity you can tuck it away in the freezer and enjoy the results of your work for a good while. I made it in my huge Oster Roaster this time and it was much less work. I just cranked it up as high as it would go and cooked it without the top so the liquid would evaporate. Got to be able to eat it with a fork, as Greensville Countians all know.

As we were filling the kitchen sinks with ice to cool the muddle, I remembered that when Mother and Daddy made the big iron pot of muddle, they used to buy ice to fill the thoroughly scrubbed bath tub and stick the little containers of muddle down in it so they would cool quickly and safely before putting into the big chest freezer.

That's pretty much all I know about chicken muddle, and I will try to keep better track of what I already posted, from now on.

Welcome 2012!

Del and I had a fun time ringing in the New Year at our favorite hangout in Carrollton, listening to Bluegrass and drinking from Mason jars - not the new fangled "upscale" pseudo redneck wine glasses made of jars glued to candle sticks that my niece and nephew gave me as a joke, I think. These were plain pint Mason jars as used by real rednecks. They don't fill them with wine, of course, but the pour is rather substantial. Note to self: One is enough for me, even when I'm a passenger.

David, Tracy and Rosa came for lunch after church on Sunday. We were always traveling back to Ohio on New Year's, so this was the first time Tracy and Rosa were subjected to Robinson Rules for Jan. 1. It's the only time I can think of when I consider it appropriate to invite friends and family to dinner, serve them foods I know they don't care for and bully them into eating them.

Our New Year's Day must haves are hog jaw, collards or turnip salad and black eyed peas. Because I knew those might be received with bounded enthusiasm, I also made a pork loin and fried okra and offered some of the chicken muddle I made on Saturday. David, Del and I enjoyed the peas, and I enjoyed the greens. Tracy and Rosa each ate one pea and one piece of greens. Everyone ate a piece of hog jaw, probably because I called it bacon. Rose dissected hers to remove every scrap of fat, and David asked me later what it really was. He probably thought bacon was too simple to be a superstition. Plus, he probably remembers that I told him liver was cowboy steak. It worked until Del came home unexpectedly and spilled the beans.

Fortunately, the okra and the chicken muddle saved us from breaking out the peanut butter. Nobody loves okra or chicken muddle like our Rosa.

The recipe for chicken muddle can be found at

http://bettyslithuanianadventure.blogspot.com/

My fried okra, made with frozen grocery store okra, is not as good as the home grown made by my mother and Tracy's mother, but it is pretty good.

Fried Okra Recipe

1 bag frozen, cut up unbreaded okra, semi thawed
1/2 cup white, plain stone ground corn meal
salt and pepper
oil to just cover bottom of large heavy frying pan (iron is best)

Open okra bag and pour in the meal, salt and pepper. Hold bag closed and shake, shake shake. Let sit while heating the oil until it sizzles when a piece of okra is dropped into pan. Give the bag of okra a good shake and pour in enough to cover the bottom of the pan with a single layer of okra. It's fine to crowd the pan and to pour in the loose meal. Let cook on medium heat until the bottom is brown. Then turn the okra and allow to brown on the other side. Once that happens, start to stir so that the okra will cook evenly all over without burning. Some of the browned meal will separate from the okra, but it will be delicious. We like it really brown and crunchy.

Note: Okra cooked this way will not look at all like the deep fried okra served in some restaurants, but it really allows the flavor of the okra to come through.

Where was I before I Lost my Blogging Spirit?

Happy New Year, family and friends. I can't really say what happened to blogger me between Nov. 5 and now. We were out of town for a bit, including time with friends Tom and Sharon and Anita and Dave and a wonderful week with our friends Mark and Sandy in Vieques, but for some reason, or actually no reason, I just felt sort of "blah." My thoughts really didn't interest me, and I felt pretty sure they wouldn't interest anyone else. I would welcome ideas on why a person who has such a blessed life sometimes feels just "blah."

Anyhow, I will think back over the last couple of months of the year, dig out things and recipes of interest, and catch up over the next few weeks.

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.