Meatball-Mushroom Pie: or, Some things are too good to care how they look

I can't argue with a single thing that goes in this recipe.

Meatball-Mushroom Pie 1 pound ground beef (as lean as possible) ½ teaspoon salt Black pepper to taste 2-4 tbsp cooking oil 1 medium onion, diced 6 tablespoons flour 1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced up to 3 cups cold water Salt and pepper Biscuit dough (recipe follows) Heat oven to 325°. Make the biscuit dough. Cover it to prevent it drying out (setting a dinner plate on top of the mixing bowl will be good enough), and set it aside. Mix beef with salt and pepper. Form it into small balls. Heat oil in a frying pan (or ovenproof skillet) over medium-high heat. Add the meatballs and toss around in the frying pan until lightly browned and partially cooked. You may need to brown the meatballs into multiple batches. Remove the meatballs from the pan. Add the mushrooms and onion. Season with salt and pepper to taste and cook until done, about ten minutes. Stir in the flour, quickly beating out any lumps. Then gradually add the water until you have a thick gravy (you may not use it all). Taste it, and add more salt and pepper if needed. Remove most of the gravy to a small saucepan, leaving enough to generously coat the mushrooms and onions. This is easier if you pour it by the ladle-full through a strainer or slotted spoon, and then tip whatever it catches back into the frying pan. Return the meatballs to the frying pan and stir well. Add more gravy if needed. If your frying pan is not oven-safe, pour its contents into a baking dish which you have coated with cooking spray. Roll the biscuit dough out to fit the pan. Lay it over the pie. Cut some holes for venting. Bake about 40 minutes, or until golden on top.     Biscuits 1½ cups flour 1 tbsp sugar 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¼ cup shortening (or beef fat) ⅓ cup milk 1 egg Mix the dry ingredients together. Cut in the beef fat (or shortening) like a pie crust. Add the milk and egg. Knead 12 times. Set aside until the pie is ready for it. To make biscuits (instead of using the dough as the top crust for this pie), heat oven to 425°. Roll the dough out until it's a half-inch thick. Cut into circles of desired size, and lay on a greased baking sheet. Brush the tops with milk. Bake 10-15 minutes, or until golden. Mrs. J M Donahue; 7049 Greenwood Avenue, Stonehurst Hills, Delaware County, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11 Biscuit dough adapted from Pillsbury's Meat Cook Book, 1970 via Mid-Century Menu on the Wayback Machine

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11

It's hardly news that nowadays, beef is a priced like a premeditated splurge instead of something you toss into the grocery cart next to the frozen spinach and the Windex. When I flip through older cookbooks (which I sometimes read instead of novels), I am amazed at how much beef people used to put into their food every day.

With that in mind, I saw these magazines at an antique store recently.

I am tempted to say that the magazine cover proves prove that some things never change. But I did some research (by which I mean I talked to my parents) and learned that apparently beef was very cheap until the prices shot up in the 1970s. (Note that the magazine is dated April 1972, just in time for the beginning of grilling season.) My mother said that before then, they used to grill T-bone steaks as casually as I grill pork chops.

So if we were making today's recipe when it was first printed, it would have been a lot more economical than it is now. And so, let's get to our starring ingredient!

This is the reason I haven't made this recipe before.

The recipe says to form the meat "into small balls." With that in mind, I decided to scoop out the meat by the tablespoon. In short order, we had a plate of salted and peppered balls of extravagance.

Because we at A Book of Cookrye are always economizing, I did not put our meatballs into a pan coated with cooking oil. Instead, I cooked them in beef fat. As I have mentioned, the rising price of beef has led me to obsessively save everything I drain from the frying pan. The beef fat in today's recipe represented 20% of the purchase price, and I refuse to send grocery money to the city dump. (Also, it turns out we're nearly out of oil.)

Cheapskatery aside, beef fat seems more period-correct than oil. Yes, cooking oil existed back then. But based on the recipes I've seen, people didn't start their dinners with a splash of oil in a hot frying pan until well after the Depression was over. Maybe people in those days also obsessively saved every cent of grocery money that they drained out of various meat-laden skillets.

Having melted the fat, Mrs. Donahue tells us to "lightly brown" the meatballs. Here I should note that I never make meatballs on the stovetop, instead favoring the more foolproof method of putting them in the oven to mind their own business. This picture shows why.

Pushing meatballs around a frying pan is a skill, and I do not have it. Fortunately, I didn't have to completely cook them at this stage. (I'm assuming "lightly browned" means halfway cooked.) 

Having made an embarrassment of the beef, it was time to remove it from the pan and fail to convince myself that things would get better before the end of the recipe.

 

The plate of half-cooked, malformed meatballs would prove the aesthetic low point of this endeavor. But although things got better from here onward, the pie never turned into a visual masterpiece. 

In case you forgot there was a Depression on when this recipe came out, Mrs. Donahue uses a mountain of mushrooms and onions to stretch a single pound of beef into dinner for five. Granted, her recipe calls for canned mushrooms instead of fresh. But I added about the same amount of mushrooms by weight.

I thought the skillet might prove inadequate, but the mushrooms shrank as they cooked. After a few minutes, I dared to hope that the meatballs might actually fit in the pan. 

At this point, Mrs. Donahue's directions got a bit confusing. The part where we add flour and then water to make a gravy was straightforward enough. But one sentence after telling us to make a gravy with the mushrooms in the pan, she seems to tell us to skim off the excess gravy and then return the mushrooms to the pan. 

I had to reread the recipe several times before I realized I'm supposed to transfer everything from the frying pan to a baking dish. In theory, I'd scoop everything out with a slotted spoon, and then add just enough of the gravy to hold all together. The remaining gravy should stay in the frying pan until serving time, at which point everyone gets to spoon it over their pie.

However, we at A Book of Cookrye really like a single-pan recipe, so Mrs. Donahue's instructions got tactfully ignored.

After adding the flour to everything in the pan, our mushrooms and onions got a lot less photogenic. I'm not very good at flour-lump prevention. But even a perfectly smooth gravy wouldn't have prevented this from looking like dog food.

Mrs. Donahue has us adding three cups of water (that's 7-ish deciliters for our metric friends), which seemed a bit excessive to me. I was almost certain that adding nearly a quart of water would turn our gravy into a runny failure. Therefore, I went with the well-used method of gradually adding water until everything looked right. As expected, we used a lot less than Mrs. Donahue ordered.

And so, it was finally time for our meatballs to get back into the pool.

I had to look up Mrs. Donahue's address. Did she live in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country? Because this seemed perfect for feeding hungry miners. 

Well, you probably aren't surprised to find out that a town with a well-heeled name like "Stonehurst Hills" isn't near any mines. There isn't even a local steel mill. Instead, it's only a short streetcar ride away from Philadelphia.

Don't you hate when dinner looks like someone already vomited it back up?

Mrs. Donahue says to cover the pie with a "rich biscuit dough," but doesn't give a recipe for that. To be fair, this pie came from the newspaper. Printing a biscuit recipe under the main instructions would have used up precious column-inches and crowded other people out of the Recipe Exchange. Also, anyone who hadn't skipped home economics class probably didn't need directions to make biscuits.

I used the biscuit recipe that came from the disastrous cherry-ham cobbler. In keeping with the bovine theme of the recipe, I made the biscuit dough with beef fat. We have already learned that beef fat makes better biscuits than shortening. I then tried to tell myself that the mushrooms under the beefy bread count as a serving of vegetables.

As I laid the dough over the simmering mess in the pan, I thought to myself that canned biscuits might have been an ideal way to reduce the time and bowls that this recipe demands. I then considered that perhaps twenty years after Mrs. Donahue's recipe got printed in the newspaper, she might have modernized it by using canned cream of mushroom soup and canned bread dough.

Setting aside canned foods and returning to the pie at hand, I tried to make a decorative design with the excess dough trimmings. I don't think I succeeded.

Mrs. Donahue has us baking this pie at 425° for "about 40" minutes. I didn't know whether to believe her or not. On the one hand, that seemed like we'd burn the pie. On the other hand, we had a lot of raw beef under the rich biscuit dough. 

I cautiously trusted Mrs. Donahue's baking instructions, but I set the timer to go off ten minutes early anyway. I should have returned to the kitchen earlier still. Fifteen minutes after going into the oven, the pie was offensively well-done.

I should have seen this coming. A lot of our recipes from the Recipe Exchange never quite work as written. Indeed, this isn't even the first time the Recipe Exchange gave us a ruinously high baking temperature. 

Fortunately, only the top of the pie was overcooked. The biscuit dough underneath the half-burnt crust had turned into perfect bread. And the oven didn't harm the meatballs underneath.

I rarely write about the leftovers, but I have to note that while this pie could at best be called "homely" when fresh from the oven, it looked like pig slop when transferred to a storage container.

But the pie was too delicious to care how unsightly it looked. There are some leftovers that you only eat because you know how much grocery money went into making them. This pie was so good that I put the leftovers on the bottom refrigerator shelf and pushed them all the way back so no one thought to look for them.

Because I liked the pie so much, I made it again as soon as the grocery budget permitted. This time, I did a much better job of mixing in the flour without any lumps. Practice may not make perfect, but it makes a successful mushroom mud.

Emboldened by our improvement, I decided to dump the all three cups of water that the recipe demands into the pot all at once. After all, the flour was completely and thoroughly mixed in, which meant it would theoretically have better thickening powers than it did last time. And while that may have been true, we ended up with mushrooms floating in cloudy water. Our "gravy" tasted as diluted as it looked.

On the bright side, we had enough gravy to pour on top of the pie as well as bake in it. Things were going as the recipe intended. 

Incidentally, you can tell that this recipe comes from a time when money was tight. Instead of using up more grocery money making sauce to pour on top of the pie, we are directed to take it out of the pie itself.

I added more seasonings to the, um, "gravy" to make it taste less like water with mushrooms that fell in by accident. Then I added more flour because it was barely thicker than tap water. If this isn't how the recipe's supposed to look, it's got to be pretty darn close.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever poured gravy onto biscuits.

This recipe is unapologetically from before the social media era. While more adept hands could have made a prettier pie than I did, Mrs. Donahue clearly didn't care if this pie was good enough for Instagram. I actually like when recipes don't care about being good enough for a Tiktok video. 

Anyway, because I hate posting recipe directions that don't work (and also because I really like this pie), I made it a few weeks later. This time, I gradually added enough water to our befloured mushrooms to make a gravy without ruining it. Since I didn't over-dilute it, the resulting gravy tasted wonderfully of all the mushrooms, beef, and onions that were in it.

I then found a near-instantaneous way of separating out the gravy that is supposed to go on top.

Despite getting the recipe right, the actual pie looks like a dog's dinner before we put a crust on top. But it smelled amazing.

As baking time arrived, I decided to try another possible recipe error. The original directions call for baking the pie at 425° for forty minutes. (For our metric friends, 425°F is a searing 220°C, and forty minutes is 24 hectoseconds.) As previously mentioned, I thought the pie needed such a long and extra-hot baking time to cook the raw beef within. But every time we made it, the pie would be nearly burnt long before forty minutes had elapsed. 

After multiple nearly-burnt pies, I thought that perhaps someone in the Philadelphia Inquirer's typesetting department had accidentally grabbed the wrong number from the type drawer when they got to the baking temperature. (It has happened before.) And so, I reduced the temperature to a more moderate 325° (160° for our Celsius friends).

Our resulting pie was golden and perfect right on schedule. And because it was in the oven for 40 minutes, we knew that the meat was completely cooked by the time it was done.

In closing, this tastes so good. It's hard to argue with beef, onions, and mushrooms, but Mrs. Donahue took a promising group of ingredients and made them even better than expected. This pie is the dinner you want to come home to. I had feared it would be underseasoned and bland, but it came out far better than it needed to. I think that putting the meatballs into the pan while half-raw allowed the mushroom juices to penetrate them as they finished cooking.

However, today's pie involved a lot more mixing bowls most single-pan meals. As another cleanup note, I baked this in a cast-iron skillet so I could do it all in one pan. Unfortunately, the errant splatters of gravy (of which there were many) welded themselves to the iron. Even though I cleaned the pan before it had time to get cold, it was as hard to wash as if I'd let it dry on the countertop for several days. So, you may want to do the stovetop part of this recipe in an ordinary, dishwasher-safe frying pan. You can then transfer the hot mushrooms and meat into a casserole dish that can soak overnight in the sink without rusting.

Italian Delight (featuring canned corn)

I was going to talk about how there's no way this could possibly be Italian. But the last time I did that, someone in the comments pointed out that the recipe in question was actually a pretty faithful copy of an actual recipe from Italy.

Italian Delight 8 oz shell macaroni 1 pound ground beef ¼ cup olive oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, pressed or finely chopped 1 green bell pepper, finely chopped 1 12-oz can tomato paste 1 16-oz can of corn, drained 1 can mushrooms (or 16 oz fresh sliced mushrooms) 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ½ cup grated cheese (use a cheese that melts well) Cook the beef in a large frying pan. Then remove it from the pan, drain it, and set aside. Add the onion, garlic, bell pepper, mushrooms, and olive oil to the hot pan. Cook until the mushrooms are done. Then stir in the tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the meat, cover, and simmer. While the sauce is simmering, heat oven to 350° and cook the pasta in salted water. Drain the pasta and mix it with the sauce. Pour into a large casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with cheese and bake about 20 minutes. Mrs. Anna D. Wendt; 233 North Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 16 August 1935; page 8

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 16 August 1935, page 8

I'm fond of recipes from before people started worrying about "authenticity." Italian food crossed the Atlantic, got filtered through the grocery stores that didn't have half the ingredients, made its way to areas where no Italian-American person ever trod, and gave us recipes like this. It starts out with an all-American mound of beef.

So many older recipes with browning beef. If you had no idea what to cook on any given night, you only needed to put hamburger in a frying pan and then see where the contents of your refrigerator took you.

Mrs. Anna D. Wendt directs us to use a half-cup of olive oil-- which is a lot of oil for a single pan of food. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange printed the submitter's address under each recipe. (This will be relevant to the cooking oil very soon.) I'm always curious to see what sort of house begat any given recipe.  And so, as I can never resist doing, I looked up Mrs. Wendt's house on Google Street View. Mrs. Wendt's neighborhood is near the river that runs through town. Ignoring the appalling real estate prices of today, it looks like it was initially home to people who worked in the various warehouses and commercial docks on the water. 

This brings us to the excessive amount of oil that starts the recipe. Since I don't need to come up with enough calories to sustain a family working laborious jobs, I cut the oil in half. It still made a respectable slick in the pan.

Because I love modern conveniences as much as anyone else, I used frozen bell peppers and frozen onions. I could have properly weighed them out, but instead I eyeballed what looked like one onion and one bell pepper's worth of frozen vegetable confetti.

Our next ingredient caused problems: canned mushrooms. I usually like to follow recipes as written. After all, why bother with someone else's instructions if you intend to ignore them and cook as you always do? Also, as I have often said, following a recipe as written means I can blame someone else when things go bad. But I refused to ruin beef with canned mushrooms. They are bitter, slimy, and revolting. I try to keep an open mind and try things before I don't like them, but I refuse to touch canned mushrooms.

Things were looking good so far. The vegetables had exuded a lot of flavorful juices as they cooked- almost enough to turn this into a vegetable soup. It may look like I added water, but everything in the pan came from the vegetables cooked in it. 

I forgot to purchase fresh garlic, so I had to cheat a bit and use powdered garlic instead. When I stirred it in, the skillet exhaled the scent of the best garlic bread I can imagine.

And now we get to the tomatoes. You may think that spaghetti sauce made with canned tomato paste sounds (to put it delicately) inauthentic. But is canned paste really any worse than the pasty-pink out-of-season tomatoes you can purchase these days?

The taste of the sauce reminded me of the lasagna an ex-roommate's mom dropped off when we were in college. You could tell upon the first taste that it had been lovingly assembled from canned tomatoes with cheddar cheese on top. And while it was as "inauthentic" as you can expect such a creation to be, it really hit the spot after getting all our posessions up three flights of stairs.

 

At this point, we were ready to get out the most expensive part of this recipe: the beef. It was surprisingly hard to see after stirring it into the rest of our Mediterranean fantasy.

We were now one ingredient short of completing our Italian delight. Mrs. Wendt calls for a can of corn or peas. I choose to pretend she never mentioned canned peas. As the can of corn hovered over the pan of beef and tomatoes, I faltered. I tried to tell myself that corned spaghetti would be perfectly fine, if less than ideal. I told myself that this recipe, corn and all, got printed in the newspaper and won a $2 basket of groceries. I told myself that polenta is really commonplace in Italy, so corn is not an alien vegetable to them,and therefore this recipe is more plausible than it seems. I also told myself that this Italian delight came from someone's house, and not some corporate test kitchen trying to shove their products into as many recipes as possible.

Ultimately, I couldn't tip out the corn. It definitely didn't help that most stories about "my awful mother-in-law sabotaged my cooking" seem to involve somebody sneaking into the host's kitchen and ruining the homemade spaghetti sauce (it's almost always spaghetti sauce) with something from a can. 

I didn't think Mrs. Wendt was maliciously sabotaging everyone clipping dinner ideas from this week's Recipe Exchange, but I couldn't ignore the similarity. Maybe she actually liked canned corn on her spaghetti. Or, she may have simply added corn to nearly everything she made, and subjected her Italian delight to the same treatment. Or, maybe she was using canned corn to "volumize" the recipe (as my mother puts it). After all, there was a Depression on and she probably had a lot of kids and a husband to feed.

 

Even though I couldn't bring myself to add a can of corn to a massive vat of spaghetti sauce, I wanted to know if it was any good. And so, I removed some of the pan's contents and added the unbelievable ingredient. The corn kernels, with their bright yellow color, looked horribly out of place. It was like the Italian delight had suddenly sprouted yellow warning lights.

If Mrs. Wendt was "volumizing" the spaghetti with canned corn, she must have had a very large family at home. The Italian delight nearly overflowed the skillet. And keep in mind that I have removed about a quarter of the delight so that I could put corn in a test sample of it.

I thought that Mrs. Wendt had skimped on the cheese, but then again there was a Depression on.

As the cheese melted, it dripped into the pits and crevices all over the the top of the Italian delight, unveiling the corn that it had halfheartedly hidden before baking. I think the corn made it look like a sort of beef-noodle casserole instead of a pasta bake. To Mrs. Wendt's credit, she never said this was a pasta bake but an "Italian delight."

The Italian delight with, um, "corned beef" was surprisingly good. You just had to reframe your mind. It isn't the baked pasta we would make today. It's more like more like a beef-tomato casserole with macaroni in it. Honestly, I would have gone ahead and added chopped celery with the canned corn.

It's easy to forget that even simple things like baked pasta can change a lot in 90 years. I was really thrown off because this was similar to something we'd make today. When I make something so old it's archaic (such as mincemeat with raisins and kidneys), it's easy to act like I'm trying foods from a country I've never been to. But I wasn't prepared for the food to be so similar to modern-day dishes, yet unignorably different. 

But for those who can't countenance corn in spaghetti, here is a plate of the corn-free Italian delight.

The corned spaghetti was good enough that I would have kept the leftovers even if they didn't contain a lot of beef. Like a lot of things we've made from the Recipe Exchange, it's not fancy but it's something you'd love to come home to. In a weird way, the remaining pan of "normal" corn-free Italian delight tasted like something was missing. Or maybe I'm daft-- or both. Either way, after nixing the canned mushrooms, this recipe was a delight.

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Today, February 18th, marks six(!) years of writing about what we hath wrought in the kitchen. I first started writing this sitting on my dorm room bed, and didn't even know what to name it. So I named it after the cookbook that happened to be nearest to me on the bed: a 1591 book I had found transcribed online that I printed at work and sewed together using an old folder for the cover. Ever since, I've thought that I should have used English spelling from this millennium.
But, as a special anniversary treat, I thought I'd share some fondly-remembered culinary delights that I never quite got around to writing about.

We Attempted Extremely Rapid Tea
A while ago, some British company devised a tea machine that could supposedly make tea within seconds of adding boiling water. In the promotional video, even they seem unconvinced in their own adorably awkward way. If you didn't watch the full thing, this should tell you everything you need to know:

We took offense at the thought of paying Sur La Table prices for a tea whirligig when we could do it with things already handy in our own kitchen.

Yes, this is a teabag lashed by its own string to my mixer.

If you try this at home, use a narrow cup rather than a bowl. In just three very intense seconds, we burned ourselves and send boiling-hot water all over the kitchen. Also, you're going to need something a lot sturdier than a paper tea bag. Witness the paper shards and tea dregs sitting in what tea remained in the bowl.

Fortunately for us, it turns out that if boiling water is atomized into little flying drops, it will (barely) cool enough to not burn your skin on contact. The idea of motorized tea does have premise, though. The remaining water had in fact turned into a decent puddle of tea.

Ranch Meatloaf
Remember when we swiped food from the wee children? By which I mean we helped ourselves to the surplus lunches they had from kiddie engineering summer camps? To the engineering department's credit, they didn't throw away the extra food, but left it out on tables for who might soever need it. However, they had thought that a bunch of kids stuck in math class all summer would be happy with low-salt pretzel sticks, miserable puny baby carrots with ranch dip, and dried cranberries. The last one is particularly galling in retrospect as I have since learned that since the cranberries are cooked in syrup before drying them, all the vitamins and other nutrients are mostly leached out and replaced with sugar. Rather than give the wee ones candy disguised as healthy snacks, why couldn't they just give them chocolate?

When you're nine years old, this is not an acceptable substitute for caramel sauce.

We at A Book of Cookrye, ever short of funds, did not throw any of this bounty away. We had scored some extremely discounted ground beef and decided to try an old church-lady cooking legend: dump ranch into your hitherto unexciting main dish for a zippy, peppy supper!

Yes. That is ground beef and ranch dressing. Since ranch is mostly mayonnaise (or some synthetic mayonnaise-style product), the meat technically has egg in there to bind it together. Or some petroleum-derived equivalent. This is something I only realize in retrospect. At the time, I just dumped salad dressing onto beef and made meatloaf because after eating mostly vegetables due to funds, I wanted a big log of dead cow.

No, I did not buy the ketchup squirted on it, though I did think that diamond pattern was oddly adorable. Someone left it in the refrigerator with no name on it. And as we repeatedly mentioned, if you left something in the fridge with no name, it was community property.

The pan was also abandoned in the kitchen cabinets by some previous student. I still use it as the tray for my tea-making alarm clock.

I do not like ranch most of the time because it totally obliterates the taste of whatever you put it on. This would explain why it's been used by generations of people to get vegetables into their children (and sometimes themselves- some of us never learn to like lettuce). However, mixing the ranch into the meat and baking it toned down into a nice mellow seasoning mix. If you're doing meatloaf, hamburger patties, meatballs, or anything that involves molding ground meat into shapes and cooking it, try adding a generous squirt of ranch dressing into it.

This turned up in the dorm microwave

Colleges should require students to pass a microwave proficiency test before being allowed to have one in their rooms. It would prevent having to march down the stairs at least once a week for yet another fire drill.

Lemongrass Tea
We at A Book of Cookrye have rarely featured drink recipes. This was something we made when we visited back home over one summer.

When we joined Our Mom of Cookrye earlier in the springtime on the annual pilgrimage to the plant nurseries to choose what would grace the flowerpots that year, we got a few lemongrass plants. We had thought they would add vertical interest and look really nice when surrounded by creeping low flowers. The lemongrass promptly spread like grass and took over every flowerpot it was in. Upon hearing how we had an unexpected and undeserved bumper crop, our grandfather said when he was growing up in Mexico, lemongrass tea sweetened with honey was very popular in the summer.

The first batch was watery and sad. So, as you can see above, we made it again with a lot more grass in the pot this time. The result? Something so refreshing you really should make it by the pitcher instead of by the cup. Just be sure to use a lot of lemongrass when you're making it. You need to really crowd and cram it into the water.

Lemon-Makgeolli Beef Slabs
Much to our delight, the grocery store near our school often had big hunks of beef on clearance. Having made meat loaf of one, meat balls of another, and senior-citizen potluck sandwiches of a third, we one day decided to slice one into steaks.

We never cooked with expensive beef because of money. But we had read in Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery that laying frozen meat in water was "the only way to extract the frost without injuring the meat." And so, having absolutely no other advice to go to, that's what we did. I'm sure that modern food safety inspectors would have absolutely no objection to leaving beef all day in a bowl of water on top of the refrigerator.

In retrospect, we could have just bought a bottle of lemon juice and saved time. But we didn't, and when the lemons failed to give enough juice to immerse the beef, we dumped in the last of a bottle of makgealli. That's this stuff right here:

We often got our vegetables, tea, and rice from the Vietnamese supermarket nearby, which made things like this cheap rather than priced like rare foreign delicacies. I'm still not quite sure what makgealli is. But I do know that while I didn't like it when I tried just drinking a little, it made a really tasty meat marinade.

On the bright side, since we weren't using the marinade after taking the steaks back out, we didn't need to bother taking out the lemon seeds.

And so, having soaked the meat all day in water to extract the frost, we soaked it all night in this boozy lemon stuff. We even threw the peels back in with the beef in case they had any flavor to add.

All I did to cook them was put the clay pot they'd been marinating in over the stove and come back in a few hours. I didn't get any tempting pictures after I cooked them. But, this marinade turned some sliced chuck into some outrageously tender steaks. Before the rare-meat-is-the-only-meat crowd comes in here a-grousing, I was not about to eat rare beef that had sat out in room-temperature water all day, singing its siren song to all our microscopic friends.
I never eat steaks these days because whenever people cook them, they dogmatically leave them raw in the middle which I don't like. So, rather than being burned at the stake for blasphemy whenever I tell people I want the entire steak cooked rather than just the outside of it, I just say I don't like steaks.
Anyway, these were actually tender all the way through despite being fully-cooked. I'd do them again, but I still don't go around buying steaks.

Our First Cake We Decorated After Taking A Class

They said we could write whatever we wanted on top. Everyone else got to take their cakes home. Ours was requisitioned by the teacher for a faculty prank.

Impossible Coconut Pie
Impossible pies are one of those corporate recipe inventions that became popular enough that they still show up in fundraiser cookbooks thirty or forty years later. The batter supposedly separates into multiple layers as it bakes. In theory, the magic of kitchen science gives you both a crispy top crust and a delightful filling from a single mixture. This didn't work, but it was a decent if somewhat eggy coconut cake.
When we gave the recipe a go, we were so impatient to see if the self-layering gimmick worked that we we made the cake cool off faster than the people in the General Mills test kitchens probably intended.

Would you believe someone tried to throw that amazing fan away?

Apple Skillet

It's apple pie in cast iron. I don't know why I felt that the pie needed to be in a skillet, but it seemed adorable and homey at the time. Unfortunately, I made it as a present for someone and thus needed to bother an unsuspecting recipient to give me the pan back.

Chickpea and Spinach Salad with Pumpkin Chips

You know how we cut two whole pumpkins into tiny slivers and candied them? Well, we ran out of friends we could dump the jars of sugary lemon-flavored pumpkin on, and had to get really creative when using them up. This was actually really delicious. The hypersweet, lemony pumpkin, when cut into little bits, made a nice counterpoint to the bitterness in the fresh spinach. Spoon on a little extra syrup from the jar, add a shake of garlic salt, and it's absolutely exquisite.
We found that cut-up pumpkin chips go really well on any bitter salad greens. The concentrated tartness and sweetness are a perfect flavor counterpoint.

Banana Frozen Custard
Remember when we tried the Depression-era banana mousse, which ended up being far too runny to call a mousse?

We ended up freezing the goop so we could just claim it was supposed to be ice cream the whole time, and it was in fact quite lovely.

We thought to ourselves, what would happen if we just froze it in the first place instead of pretending it was supposed to be a mousse? Or perhaps Mrs. George Thurn intended for that recipe to be frozen, and we would have known that had we attended any of her music-hall cooking classes.
Anyway, we further decided to make it extra-smooth by putting the custard and the bananas into a blender.

After we boiled and cooled the custard, we just dumped everything into an ice cream freezer.
When it was ready, it was so rich and smooth that I'm still not sure why I haven't made it again and often. We would not encounter a better frozen custard until we got a brief string of jobs in Wisconsin- they're pretty big on dairy there, you know.

Sometimes Recipes Come Back Around Again
Remember when we cracked open our 1920's cookbook and made apples-and-meatballs? We were surprised to find a near-identical recipe in one of those foofy, ultra-trendy food magazines.

The only real difference is that they didn't bother making meatballs, instead taking the easier route of just cooking it in a frying pan.

There may be a way to make a pretty picture of cooked ground beef, but we haven't found it.

This tastes astonishingly like sausage. If you added a few spices (maybe nutmeg, mustard powder, and a little sage) it would be near-indistinguishable. We were surprised at how good it was, and we've already made the recipe before.

We Found Flatbread That Fit Our Waffle Iron Perfectly

We then had to forbid ourselves from buying it because we got fat on novelty grilled cheese. This is not the first time we have needed to restrain ourselves from buying flatbread that exactly fit our pans...

This skillet is about the size of a pizza.

Sandwich Recipes Found in Random Comments Sections

It was indeed delicious, and that's without bothering to butter the outside.

Speaking of ham sandwiches...

We Made The Oldest Written Recipe for Sandwiches

Miss Leslie, Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, 1837

It was after Easter. There were leftovers.

Consoling a laid-off friend with cake

Like many people looking to help others in their bad times, we default to bringing unsolicited desserts.

Fortifying Cornbread in our Blender
You know how we had to replace our wedding blender with a 1970s survivor? Well, we decided to add calcium to a batch of cornbread the modern way with modern appliances.

Yes, that is a whole egg in there. The eggshell would in theory be pulverized to powder, which apparently is a good source of calcium.

Dumping in the remaining ingredients, we had what almost passed for normal cornbread batter.

Looks nice and innocent, doesn't it?

To the surprise of no one, it turns out that blenderizing eggshells into your bread gives you the same result as dumping in sand. Take our advice and find better ways to be sanctimoniously healthy. Speaking of using our blender for bad ideas...

Sauerkraut Casserole
These are the things I make when no one else is home to whine about the kitchen fumes. We start with this kale no one has eaten...

Add a lot of sauerkraut and all its vinegary juice...

I really like both sauerkraut and garlic, so much so that I use things like this to test potential dating partners.

And then we decide to add this bell pepper that has reached the end of its shelf life.

We could have cut it up, but we were too lazy. We were planning to use eggs (without their shells) in this baked mess anyway.

The blender also contains like 5 garlic cloves.

And so, we start filling the pan with these frozen chicken hunks.

That's what's reassuring about a lot of these questionable casseroles. You at least know there's meat in the middle and cheese on top. This is what you remind yourself as you cover the chicken with this mess.

And so, with the help of some cheese nearing its expiration date, we have a casserole ready to bake!

It looks like cafeteria slop and tastes like concentrated kraut. I regret nothing.

And so, here's to a wonderful future of cooking adventures! We've gathered over recipes with friends, and discovered horrors and delights. And remember, as we said to a music-major friend who needed post-ordeal brownies on jury day...