Strawberry Whip: or, Spring is turning into summer

We overestimated how much we wanted strawberries.

Strawberry Whip 2 tbsp gelatin, or 1 (¼-oz) envelope 1 tbsp water About 8 oz fresh strawberries A little lemon juice, if desired 1 tsp vanilla Red food coloring, if desired 1 cup cream ½ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and water in a small microwave-safe bowl. Set aside to soak about 5 minutes. Puree the strawberries, then pour through a strainer to remove the seeds and stringy bits. Microwave the gelatin until melted and watery, about 5 seconds or so. Add the gelatin, lemon juice, and vanilla to the strawberries. If desired, add a few drops of red food coloring. Whip the cream and sugar in a large bowl. Then fold in the strawberries. Transfer to the container of your choice, and place in the coldest part of your refrigerator. Chill and serve. Adapted from a handwritten manuscript, 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah Dannehy O'Neil

Strawberries have been astonishingly cheap these past few weeks. I don't know if it's a bizarre confluence of economic coincidences, if we live near a lot of strawberry farms and didn't know it, or if it's some combination of the two. Furthermore, the berries are actually in season (ish), so they taste like strawberries instead of like nothing. We got one small box last week, and they were so good that we bought a lot of them the next time we went grocery shopping. They soon started to get pruny and squishy, and I didn't want to lose them.

I could have suspended the berries in red Jello. As many have noted before me, gelatin is surprisingly good at extending the lifespan of fresh produce. But today, I wanted to adapt my great-grandmother's apricot whip. Instead of stewing apricots, we're blenderizing strawberries.

After a good pulverization, I ran the strawberries through a sieve. This was the only tedious(ish) part of this whole recipe, but would you want all these seeds and stringy bits in your pink fluff?

As soon as I realized I was making "pink fluff," I had horrible visions of the ballistic-grade pink pie we made a while ago. 

Also, pink fluff is one of the more infamous midcentury desserts. It's almost a symbol of the insipid "cooking" that involves creatively dumping three cans into one bowl, which truly came into its own in the 1950s. But then I figured this particular pink fluff is literally strawberries and cream (with some gelatin for stability, of course).

Speaking of strawberries, I decided they needed a bit of artificial assistance to look their best after getting blenderized. Fruit is rarely fruit-colored enough.

This reminds me a lot of the cream of strawberry pie we made a while ago. Both of them are basically strawberries and whipped cream. And both of them looked so pretty at this stage.

This recipe was agreeably fast since we didn't have to wait on a pot of simmering dried fruit. Only ten minutes after sprinkling the gelatin over the water, we were ready to, as the recipe says, "Chill and serve." And then, of course, we discovered that the bowl-scrapings were delicious.

 

This wasn't as magical as I fantasized it would be, but it was still very good indeed. It did get a bit bland in the refrigerator, though- which surprised me. I know strawberry is perhaps the most inoffensive of artificial flavors, but the actual fruits tend to actually have a taste. So while this isn't necesessarily the best way to appreciate fresh strawberries, it's pretty good if they've slipped just a bit past it. 

 

Second-Stab Saturday: Mushrooms will never be fish

We got shiitake mushrooms with the most beautiful emblem on top!

Isn't that 50% off sticker a work of art? I've never had shiitake mushrooms before. I always got the impression that shiitakes were, like, designer mushrooms. Or at least, they're like designer mushrooms if most of the cars in your supermarket parking lot were purchased used.

When I got the shiitakes out of the box, they felt limper and spongier than the ones I usually get. They also looked stringier. I don't know if shiitakes are supposed to be like that, or if this is why they were half price. Either way, I decided to cook them before they had a chance to expire and then let them wait until I figured out what to make of them.

Obviously, I couldn't help tasting them right out of the frying pan to see if they're as magically special as their non-discount price suggests. And... they're more intense and savory than the cheaper mushrooms I've always gotten heretofore. They almost tasted like I'd added soy sauce. They didn't taste dramatically different, but they somehow were mushroomier.

This brings us to the recipe I used them in: Mrs. Mary Martensen's fish pie. Remember how I said "Imagine this with mushrooms"?

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

First, we had to make our lovely potato nest. 

I don't use the pressure cooker as much as I thought I would, but it's great for steaming potatoes-- especially when your recipe won't forgive them getting a little bit dried out as the microwave tends to do. This time, our rack tipped off its little improvised stand (an empty tomato paste can with both ends removed). Nevertheless, our spuds remained safely above the danger of getting sogged.

I know I said this last time, but I have to once again note that Mrs. Mary Martensen uses a lot of parsley in the gravy. And yes, today we're using premade gravy. It came on the side of some recent drive-thru chicken.

The pie nearly spilled out of the pan, but we got it into the oven with no sloshing whatsoever.

I wanted to write that despite the original recipe's high baking temperature, you can bake this at 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C) if you want to slide it next to something else in the oven-- or if you're trying not to abuse the air conditioning in the summer. Unlike tater tots or a frozen pizza, nothing about this seems like it needs to bake in an extra-hot oven. But I was unable to test that because the oven got commandeered for one of those frozen dinner-tray things that bakes at 450°. That's gas mark 8 or 230°C--- substantially hotter than the recipe's original oven by any measuring system. The pie didn't seem to mind.

I didn't think a pan of cheese and gravy could be so precisely calibrated for a specific ingredient, but this really tasted like it should contain fish. And while the scant pint gravy was right for the original recipe, it was far too much for the mushrooms.

I don't mind that it was a sloppy mess on the plate (some of the best foods are), but it's more of a casserole than a pie. The potatoes, in addition to making this better simply by being potatoes, did make our pan a lot easier to clean. None of the gravy or mushrooms made contact long enough to get burnt and stuck on. 

The mushrooms weren't bad in this, but it wasn't the best way to appreciate them. If I make this again (and I have a feeling I will), I will cut the gravy in half and omit the parsley. We already know that mushrooms and gravy go together like cranberry sauce and celery.

Second-Stab Saturday: It turns out rice pudding doesn't like the stovetop

Today, we're trying and failing to make rice pudding without an oven.

Rice Pudding 3 cups milk 1 tablespoon corn starch 2 eggs, separated 1 pinch salt ⅓ cup sugar 1 cup cooked rice 1 teaspoon vanilla ¼ cup sugar (for meringue) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a medium-sized baking dish. Place it in a larger, empty pan. Have the egg yolks ready in a medium bowl, set aside. Cook milk and cornstarch ten minutes in double boiler, or over low heat if you're really good at preventing anything from sticking to the bottom of the pot. (You may want to mix the cornstarch with a little bit of the milk before putting it all in the pot-- it prevents having to chase lumps with a spoon.) After the time is up, start whisking the egg yolks, then slowly pour in about half the milk, beating very hard the whole time. Return to the pot. Add the salt, sugar, rice, and vanilla. Pour into the baking dish. Set on the oven rack and pour boiling water into the bigger pan around it. Bake in hot water until thickened (mine took 45 minutes). When it's ready, beat the egg whites until frothy. Gradually add the sugar, beating as you go. Continue beating until stiff peaks form. Carefully spread onto the pudding (no need to let the pudding cool first). Bake until golden on top, about 15 minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature, then refrigerate. I thought this was better the second day (even if the meringue didn't look nearly as nice). Note: If desired, skip the meringue and just put whipped cream on top. Undated Chicago newspaper clipping, (probably 1930s-1940s), recipe credited to "Mrs. B. E. B."

When last we made rice pudding my great-grandmother literally cut-and-pasted from the newspaper, we asked if it really has to be baked. It seemed like it would come out just as well in a saucepan without heating the oven. And I really wanted it to come out just as good in a saucepan because this is the first rice pudding I've actually liked and summer is coming.  

The easiest way seemed the best: get it all in the pot and heat it up. Unfortunately, the easiest way gave us a lot of little egg globules that refused to mix with everything else.

After whisking everything together very hard and adding the rice, we were ready to take this to the stove.

We cooked this until it passed the finger-swipe test. (That's where you swipe your finger across a custard-coated spoon and see if it leaves a line.) It was runnier than I wanted, but I put it in the refrigerator to hope it thickened more as it cooled.

The next day, it was hopelessly drippy. You'd never know I cooked it.

Instead of throwing out the pudding, I waited until the next time I was baking something. (Since the eggs were cooked, this could afford to wait a week in the fridge.) Then I slid the rice pudding into the oven next to dinner. It didn't really set, but it firmed enough to actually serve. (I skipped the meringue because it looked terrible and tasted pointless last time.) Since you already have to scoop it into bowls instead of slicing to serve, I was able to stir in the good vanilla after baking it without cooking any of it away.

Before I risk closing with too happy an ending, I have to note that the leftover pudding got extremely runny after a few days in the refrigerator. There's probably some deep-level chemistry going on here because this didn't like getting cooked twice. So even though we're reaching the end of baking season (on this side of the equator at least), you should probably put this in the oven like the original directions say. 

However, I still think it's better without a meringue on top.

Second-Stab Saturday: Uncracked Chicago Cheesecake!

I hadn't yet gotten groped at airport security and I was already cooking for strangers.

Chicago-style Cheesecake        Crust: 6 oz (about 1⅔ cups) graham cracker crumbs* 2 tbsp butter 2 tbsp sugar Pinch of salt (if butter is unsalted)        Filling: 1 cup sugar 1 pound cream cheese 2 tbsp flour Pinch of salt 1 tsp vanilla 4 eggs, separated 1 cup cream        To make the crust: Cream the butter and sugar. Mix in the crumbs. This is easiest with your hands or with an electric mixer, instead of with a spoon. Press the crumbs into the bottom of a deep springform pan. If you don't have one, you can use a 9" square pan or a very large cast-iron skillet.        To make the filling: Beat the sugar and cream cheese until well creamed. Add flour and salt, beat in thoroughly. Add the vanilla and egg yolks, mix well. Then mix in the cream. Beat the egg whites until almost-but-not-quite stiff peaks form. Then fold them into the batter. Pour the batter into the pan and bake at least one hour. It is done when the center springs back when lightly pressed with the finger, and when the cheesecake jiggles instead of sloshing. When it is done and the oven turned off, crack the oven door open and let the cheesecake stay there until it cools completely. Then refrigerate overnight. *The original recipe calls for crushed zwieback crackers, but those are surprisingly hard to find these days. Unless you really want to be period-correct, graham crackers will be just fine. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Note: If you want to lift the whole cheesecake out of the pan before serving it (and don't have a springform pan), cut a piece of cardboard to fit the bottom of the pan you're using. Make sure there aren't any big gaps when you press it into the pan, but it shouldn't fit snugly either. You're going to want to easily lift it out after baking. Wrap the cardboard in foil. Next, cut two wide strips of parchment paper (say, 2 or so inches), that are long enough to lay across the pan and stick out a little over each side. Grease the pan. Then lay the paper strips crosswise across it so they cross in the center. You want both ends of each strip to stick out over the edge of the pan. Then put the cardboard into the pan on top of the paper. You now have a pan with four paper tabs poking up from the cardboard you put on the bottom. Put the crust mixture on top of the cardboard, and proceed with the recipe. After you have the batter on top of the crust, you should have four paper tabs sticking up from the edges of the pan. After baking the cheesecake and then refrigerating it until it's completely chilled, cut around the edge of the pan to free the cake, being sure to cut between the paper and the cheesecake. Then lift the cheesecake by the paper tabs. You can now set it on whatever serving platter you like. You could use just one paper strip instead of two. But I recommend using two paper strips, which gives you a backup in case the first one rips.

Greetings from semiremote Pennsylvania! I forget how persistent snow is in places that actually have winters. The temperature has hovered in the fifties (that's, like, 10° or 12° for our Celsius friends), but the snow still lines the roads. It feels unexpectedly disorienting- when the temperature says to wear a light jacket but the ground says to get out your boots.

 

This town happens to use a pole-mounted municipal siren to summon the volunteer fire department. I've been in Texas long enough to associate these things with tornadoes. The siren went off on my first night in Pennsylvania and terrified me.  I was like "OH SHIT IT'S BLOWING IN!" The calm weather outside only scared me more. I thought this would be one of those horrible storms that comes out of nowhere and takes off the roof. But no, it was just a siren on a utility pole summoning the volunteer firefighters.

While we were making plans in the week before I took flight, I offhandedly suggested making a cheesecake. A few days later, my friend said "I told everyone at work that I'd bring a cheesecake." He and his coworkers are lucky that he already said he'd do all the kitchen cleanup if we cooked anything.

This brings us to our recipe. When last we saw a Chicago-style cheesecake, it was delicious but it also cracked. I don't know why that bothered me, but it did. So this time, we left the oven door slightly cracked open until the cheesecake got cold. The result: a perfect, crack-free cheesecake. Either leaving it in the oven fixed our problems, or things are just better in Pennsylvania.

You may notice that we're using an actual springform pan. I stopped bothering with springforms a long time ago. I only ever seem to use them once before abandoning them in the cabinets. And once again, I'm only going to use this one once before abandoning it in someone else's kitchen and flying out of the state. (He insisted on buying it. I was fully prepared to repurpose a casserole dish.)

Getting to our happy results, I could say that sag in the middle is perfect for piling in fresh fruit or whatever. But this cheesecake really doesn't need the help. Like, I could barely get the ring off the pan without someone cutting into it.

My poor unsuspecting friend was not prepared for how good this was. While he did in fact give some away at work, it was a much smaller chunk of cake than I think he planned. Just like the last time I made it, I was told "This is the best cheesecake I've ever had!" 

So if you like cheesecake, you owe this recipe to yourself. But don't promise anyone else a slice. 

Second-Stab Saturday: Cabbage au Gratin-- better the second time, but not as good as I wished

We have a lot of surplus cabbage in the fridge. (We've been cooking a lot of it ever since we learned it's delicious when you don't boil it gray.)

Cabbage au Gratin 1-2 pounds shredded cabbage (one small or medium head) ¼ cup butter or cooking oil 1 pint white sauce 5 ounces (about 1½ cups) shredded cheese 1 egg ¾ cup bread crumbs About ½ cup shredded cheese for the top Heat oven to 350°. Grease a medium-sized casserole dish. Saute the cabbage the butter or oil until tender. Be careful not to overcook it since you'll also bake it. While the cabbage is cooking, make the white sauce (or heat it to simmering if you got it pre-made). Add the shredded cheese, turn off the heat, and then stir until the cheese is melted. This should cool it enough to beat in the egg without curdling it. If not, place the pot on a cold surface or in a larger pan full of cold water and stir it for a minute or so. Then beat in the egg. Place about half the cabbage in the pan. Sprinkle with half the breadcrumbs, then pour about half the cheese sauce over them. Repeat with remaining ingredients. Sprinkle with cheese. Bake until the cheese is browned, about 45-60 minutes. Adapted from Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Every time I've made a cabbage recipe recently, I've shredded whatever part of the head I didn't use and then put it in a container. But this cannot go on. For one thing, I've got so many containers of partial vegetables that I can't put away any leftovers! For another, we're running out of refrigerator space. Our sour cream and eggs are hidden under various chopped quarter-onions and eighth-cabbages.

With that in mind, our recent cold weather took me out of the mood for anything too healthy. As Freezy sometimes says it's in the comments, sometimes it's to cold for vitamins. When I realized I had run out of egg noodles and therefore couldn't make haluski, this seemed like a good time to revisit the failed cabbage au gratin. For those who don't recall, the recipe tasted amazing but was a sad, drippy mess.

I decided to use a cheesy white sauce instead of attempting the sorta-quiche that the original recipe tries and fails to be. In a further attempt to clean out the fridge, I added the leftover gravy from a meatball-mushroom pie. I only note this because when I added the cheese, the sauce tasted an awful lot like a cheeseburger.

From here, the way forward seemed simple: layer of cabbage, layer of crumbs, layer of cheese, repeat until everything is used up. 

We want to make sure the cabbage is properly buried under hot cheese.

I was reasonably confident this would go right. It looked like nearly every other casserole I've ever made. (Don't things always look reassuring with cheese on top?)

Just like the original recipe, I beat an egg into this to theoretically set it-- which it didn't. I wasn't too mad, though. Everything tasted good, and (unlike the first time) it wasn't a weepy, drippy mess. It was still a mess, though.

The breadcrumbs in the middle all but vanished, which tells me they absorbed the water that would have otherwise turned our casserole into a big drip. But the crumbs on top became extra-dry. They also turned the top cheese into a separate, crispy cracker that wanted nothing to do with our vegetables. I guess if you want to get multiple dishes out of a single pan (you know, when putting five things in same oven isn't efficient enough), you could make cheese tuiles and a casserole at the same time.

In case you think I am exaggerating, the cheese slid off of the casserole as soon as I tried to cut into it. 

I guess this could be perfect for those couples where one person discreetly picks the toppings off of the casserole in the name of weight control, and the other slides their plate over to receive. (Of course, the weight-watching person in this couple would have to ignore all the cheese and gravy that lurks beneath the cheese they just lifted off.)

In closing, cabbage and cheese are great together. However, this is not a good way to unite them. I'm not mad I made it, and I didn't throw out the leftovers, but the method needs further redrafting. 

 

Second-Stab Saturday: Candied Sweet Potatoes without all the fuss

My great-grandmother didn't have to make these the long way.

Candied Sweet Potatoes 3 pounds sweet potatoes (just round to the nearest potato) ¼ cup water ½ cup sugar (brown, white, or maple) 3 tbsp butter ¼ tsp salt (only add this if butter is unsalted) Cinnamon to taste Boil or microwave the potatoes until done. Then pick off the skins and cut them into pieces a little larger than bite-size. Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a large frying pan. Reduce heat to medium and boil until thick and syrupy. Turn off the heat, add the butter, salt, (and cinnamon, if desired), and stir until all is melted and mixed. Add the potatoes to the pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly and scooping the syrup off of the pan and pouring it on top of the potatoes. (A large serving spoon is better than a flat wooden spoon for this. Continue cooking until all of the syrup sticks to the potatoes. They are done when the syrup no longer forms puddles in the pan when you stop stirring. If desired, you can use orange juice instead of all or part of the water when making the syrup.  Source: Handwritten recipe, probably 1920s-1930s Notebook of Hanora Frances "Hannah" Dannehy O'Neil

As I said the last time we made my great-grandmother's candied sweet potatoes, I don't like them but everyone else does. (I think everyone who cooks a lot ends up with at least a few recipes like that.) Well, when you don't like something, you rarely want to spend too long make it, even if you're cooking it to be nice. This brings us to the new (to me) shortcut: doing these over the stove.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I first saw a recipe for candied sweet potatoes in Mrs. Wilson's newspaper column. Instead of parboiling the potatoes and baking them, she told her readers to fully cook the potatoes and then put them in syrup over a stove burner. 

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger; April 23, 1919; p. 12

I probably should have done this in a bigger frying pan, but the potatoes came out all right (even if I had to keep putting escapees back).

I'm not sure that I'm making these right. An image search for "candied sweet potatoes" yields pictures of neatly sliced sweet potatoes with a perfectly even glaze. Mine always come out smushed, no matter how gentle I am with my basting. But I've had no complaints.

I hate to say my great-grandmother wasted a lot of effort on her candied sweet potatoes, but these were ready after about two minutes on the stove. I wouldn't mind the longer baking time if I could forget the potatoes until the timer went off. But her way involves constantly coming back to baste. I thought that perhaps the long baking time allows the syrup to really penetrate the potatoes. But you couldn't tell the difference. 

With the printed-and-pasted recipes in my great-grandmother's book, it's easy for me to imagine that she skipped over the unnecessary fusswork. But she wrote this one out by hand, so I guess she actually kept coming back and bending over the oven with a basting spoon.  

As I said last time, these taste like a sweet potato casserole if you didn't get out a potato masher. Since I don't like sweet potato casserole, I can't say that I love these. But everyone else seems to like them, so this must be a good recipe. You can't argue against a well-scraped plate. 

Hot Macaroni Salad Revisited: Not perfect, but we haven't seen the last of it

When last we tried the hot macaroni salad from my great-grandmother's book, it was really good except for the meat. The original recipe called for a pound of balogna meat, which made me feel icky. We therefore replaced it with summer sausage, which seemed nice in theory but wasn't very good. The rest of the salad was all right, so we decided come back and try it again.

Hot Pasta Salad ½ cup water 1 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt ½ tsp dry mustard 1 egg ¼ cup vinegar 1 pound sliced mushrooms 3 tbsp finely chopped onion ¼ cup oil or bacon drippings 8 oz elbow or shell macaroni, cooked in salted water Whisk together the water, flour, salt, mustard, egg, and vinegar; set aside. In a large frying pan, cook the mushrooms and onion in the bacon drippings. Turn off heat, and stir in the flour mixture. Heat to a slow simmer, stirring constantly, and cook 5 minutes. Add the pasta, mix well, and serve. Adapted from an unidentified magazine or pamphlet clipping, probably 1952-1953 Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Today, we are replacing the meat with... these!

I reduced the water in the sauce to make up for the juice that came out of the mushrooms. (If I'm being honest about how much I overthink things, I cooked a batch of mushrooms for unrelated purposes, then got out a measuring cup and a strainer.)

Since I didn't have to fuss with a sandwich press full of meat this time, I only needed to dump the noodles into everything else and stir for a few seconds.

This recipe's flavor almost works, but it doesn't. You would have to take out the mustard from the original recipe and put in something else. Aside from the seasonings, this is simply noodles and mushrooms, so the mustard is the only thing that doesn't quite fit.

Before reheating the leftovers, I tried a few of the noodles and they were really good cold. The mustard coating was unexpectedly perfect. (The cold mushrooms were terrible, but we'll set that aside.) So I'm going to say this is like the hot potato salad: better if you cross the word "hot" off the recipe title. The refrigerator improves it. It's probably really nice with some chopped bell peppers and fresh onions in it.

In general, this recipe tasted outdated in a very midcentury-specific kind of way. It's tempting to simply say that our foods have changed over the decades. And while that is true, I think this has a more specific cause: we don't smoke nearly as much as we used to. 

I don't have official stats on this so I could be wrong, but it seems like we hit peak smoking in the middle of the 20th century. Then everyone gradually got fed up with smelling like a fermented bowling alley, leading to a lot of indoor smoking bans in the 1990s. I think that in our current happy era of restaurants where we can breathe the free air, we forget just how awful and omnipresent the smell used to be. Indoor stadiums used to have a literal tobacco fog during games.

As for how cigarettes explain this recipe: we all know that smoking dulls your taste. But I think that in addition to that, foods taste different when pre-seasoned with airborne tar.* And I feel that this is an underestimated part of why midcentury food tastes so bizarre now that we have cleaner lungs. The flavors are incomplete without an ashtray at the table. This salad's hot mustard noodles and crispy balogna slices probably made more sense under those cough-inducing conditions. But since I'm not about to take up smoking that I may fully appreciate the flavors of yore, I'll just serve this pasta chilled instead. 

 

 

 

*When I said this in a recent post, Lace Maker commented that mayonnaise is apparently very good for cleaning away cigarette tar. Which leads me to a new theory: are all those midcentury mayonnaise-heavy recipes an attempt to de-tar ones taste buds enough to taste the salad? Maybe people didn't think of it that way, but they might have noticed that foods were more flavorful under gobs of mayonnaise.   ↪

Second-Stab Saturday: Spinach-Bacon Pie without all the fuss

Sometimes, recipes are a lot more work than they need to be.

Spinach-Bacon Pie 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell 6 strips bacon, cooked crisp, then crumbled or chopped* 1 (12-oz) package frozen chopped spinach, defrosted 3 eggs 2 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt 2 tsp onion powder (more if desired) 1 tsp black pepper ½ tsp cayenne pepper (if desired) 1 cup evaporated milk 1 cup (or 4 oz) shredded cheddar cheese (or any other type of cheese that melts well) Heat oven to 400°. In a large bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs, flour, and seasonings. Then mix in the bacon and spinach. Don't drain the spinach before adding it-- mix all the juices in with everything else. Pour this into the pie shell. If needed, gently spread out the spinach if it landed in a sort of pile. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then bake about 20-25 minutes, until it puffs up on top. *Naturally, you can just cut up 6 pieces of pre-cooked bacon if you have that on hand. Adapted from 100 Prize-Winning Recipes from the Pillsbury's Best 9th Grand National Bakeoff, 1957--- via Mid-Century Menu. Recipe by Linda Lee Bauman (Whitehouse, Ohio), Junior Winner

The spinach-bacon pie has made its way into regular rotation in this house. But all that business of juicing frozen spinach, measuring fluids, heating canned milk, and everything else got more irksome every time I made it again. So I decided to cross out the directions and just stir everything together.

At first I was worried. This pie won a Pillsbury Bakeoff prize with all its fussy instructions, so surely every step was there for a reason... right? Also, the ingredient list specifically calls for hot milk. I didn't know whether that had some crucial effect on how all the ingredients interacted in the mixing bowl. Then I decided that at worst, this would turn into spinach soup with a soggy pie crust under it.

This time, the raw filling looked more like leaves with a little bit of white mixture around them. When I squeezed and wrung the bejaysus out of the spinach as the recipe directed, we had little green shreds floating in white-ish fluid. At first I thought this might seem more like a panful of leaves than a decent pie. Then I decided that even if I never took the shortcut again, this pie couldn't possibly be bad enough to throw out.

Well, now I feel silly for posting this recipe with a long list of directions. In my defense, I was following what was originally in the book. But now we know that you can just stir this pie together.  

I really like this pie (which is why I make it so often). It's like a low-effort quiche. And for something that has such a hefty serving of vegetables, it doesn't taste like "you have to eat your vegetables." It's just plain good.

Second-Stab Saturday: Sorry I didn't like these pizzelles as much as someone else apparently did

I couldn't let go of the pizzelle recipe that covered an entire box. As a reminder:

Est! Est!! Est!!! Pizzelles 6 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1 tbsp anise extract, or ¼ tsp anise oil 1 tsp orange or lemon extract 1 cup sugar 1 cup butter or oil Pinch of salt 2¼-2½ cups flour 2 tsp baking powder If using butter, melt it and set it aside to cool. Combine flour and baking powder in a sifter, set aside. Beat eggs and flavorings with an electric mixer until very light. Gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Beat until very thick. Gradually pour in the butter or oil, beating on high speed the whole time. Then set aside the mixer. Sift in the flour and stir it in by hand. Cook on a hot pizzelle iron until crisp and golden. If desired, take out about a third of the batter. Mix in ¼ cup cocoa powder. Cut this into the rest of the batter for a marbled effect. (Note: Apparently lots of people can make chocolate pizzelles, but the cocoa powder makes them stick horribly to the iron every time I try. So beware!) Source: handwritten recipe on a pizzelle iron box

Whoever wrote this recipe gave it the entire side of a pizzelle iron box, like they were declaring that this was the one and only. You don't do that with a dud. I decided to bring the recipe back to its native iron.

As I mentioned last time, I happen to have the same iron that this recipe came with. This isn't as much a coincidence as you may think. This seems to be one of the most common stovetop pizzelle iron designs, and I can see why. First, it looks really pretty. Second, it lets go of waffles ever-so-easily. With other irons, I often need to get out a fork and gently ease the pizzelles out of the grooves. But they fall right out of this one.

I wanted to give this recipe a fair shake, mostly because apparently someone really liked it. So on a lovely chilly night, I fired up the record player, cleared off the counters, and made pizzelles.

As much as I hate to admit it, it seems like the best pizzelle irons come from Ohio.* Our Pennsylvania iron turned this recipe into bendy wafers, but they were a lot thinner and crisper when cooked on a Cleveland native. But they were still oddly flexible and their texture just wasn't the best. I won't make these again, but I didn't throw the rest out.

They did photograph very well, though.

*Ohio has a large Italian community-- particularly in the greater Cleveland area, which may be why pizzelles are more common among Italian-Americans than still-in-Italy Italians. It is speculated that Cleveland's metalworking industry made it a lot easier to produce specialized waffle irons.
As for why I would have problems with Ohio and the cookware made in that state, it's for (admittedly shallow) personal reasons. For those who missed it, I got into making pizzelles after a bad breakup with someone whose family is from Ohio, which has left me salty about the entire state.↪