Food Basics

Gordon and the Big, Mean, Turkey

Does your family always have a turkey for Thanksgiving, or do you have a pre-holiday discussion, turkey vs. ham like we do?

I grew up in a family with a ham tradition. Every holiday, my mother would trot out a five or ten-pound (depending on the number of people) canned Rath ham. My husband’s family always had turkey, even on Easter.

We never had turkey or chicken, even on regular days. That’s because my parents and grandparents, with my aunt and uncle had a poultry farm in the Depression era, and so for many years, that was what there was to eat. “Chicken and green beans,” my dad used to say. “If you didn’t want that, you could have green beans and chicken.”

They did experiment with turkeys for a while at the Purlingbrook Poultry Farm. Turkeys however, are a different bag of feathers. While you’ve probably heard the story that they’re so stupid they can drown in the rain by looking up to see what’s coming out of the sky, they’re big critters when they still have all their parts, and territorial. They can be big trouble, especially when you’ve got an inquisitive toddler loose in the yard.

Turkeys aren’t like chickens, which pretty much eat and make a mess, and not much else. They’re not big enough to cause any serious trouble.

One summer afternoon, my grandmother looked up from her work in the house and realized little Gordon had wandered off again. He’s my second-eldest brother. Grandma kept an eye on the kids while my mother was either out back in the garden or tending the chickens. At that time, there were only the two boys, Larry and Gordon. After a brief survey of the house, Grandma went outside in search of the missing little boy, when she heard shrieks coming from the turkey pen.

She ran to investigate, and there was Gordon, in his diaper, cowering against a corner of the fence. Two or three turkeys, as tall or even taller, were approaching him, beaks at the ready, to dispatch this intruder. Grandma called to my aunt who happened by, and leapt into the fray, to save the terrified kid from a certain assault. Auntie Teen soon followed, to run interference. Despite some pecking and plenty of un-Grandma-like language, the two women managed to save my brother, who was retrieved unharmed.

It wasn’t long after that, the dinner menu changed to turkey for a while, and the Purlingbrook Poultry Farm returned to dedicated chicken-and-egg production. In later years, when I was old enough to start asking questions, like why we always had ham, my mother would say it was because Dad preferred ham, and Dad would mutter something about “big, mean birds.” Eventually I did get the whole story, and I could figure out why Dad wouldn’t want one of those things on his table.

Gordon, however, gleefully digs in to his roast turkey on Thanksgiving, as his wife comes from a turkey family, and he probably feels a bit of sweet revenge in any case.

Ain't it funny how time slips away...

Here it is Thursday already and I haven’t done jack here at Food Basics. I’m hoping things will slack off a bit after October is over. I’ve been working on a domestic violence activism project over at my other blog, the DesertLight Journal, and it’s taking an amazing amount of time.

For example, it’s almost 2pm local time, and I’ve just now finished what would normally be the morning’s work on the DLJ. I’ve been at it since 5:30am! Yikes! I think all the major and minor media are scrambling to get their DV stories published before the end of the month.

Thank God for crock pots and microwaves. I nuked myself a cheese sandwich for breakfast awhile back, and I’ve got some corned beef in the crock pot for dinner. So lives the gourmet cook when she’s engaged in other things. ;>)

This is about the only way you’re going to get a decent Reuben sandwich in this part of Arizona. You have to make it yourself! Same goes for bagels, and they’ve never heard of latkes around here.

In AZ’s favor, I do have to say we have great ground beef. Even the cheapest, and theoretically the greasiest variety is nearly as good as the best available in Michigan. And of course, there’s the Mexican food. Every year I promise myself I’m going to take a tamale class, and every year I forget.

Once, shortly after we moved out here, I got cocky and figured I could cook anything as long as I had a recipe. Not!! I tried tamales, and they were a mess. Just awful. Not only did they not taste like anything, I had globs of corn meal stuff everywhere – on the floor, stuck to the stove, etc. I found dried-out bits months later, when we moved the fridge out to make way for a new one.

I think it might be a matter of lack of courage. If I screw up another time, the dread of cleaning up the mess outweighs the possibility that they might come out OK. ;>)

Cherry Crap

Through all the 1950s and most of the 1960s, my mother went to her Pinochle Club twice a month. Each lady took a turn hosting, and the dessert during a break in card playing was an important element of the evening. Everybody would exclaim how lovely that night's dessert was, and later on in the car, my mother and my aunt would say what they really thought. (One of the reasons they called it "Cat Club," no doubt.

A lot of the recipes in that era were based on convenience foods and Jello, and it wasn't too often Ma came home with a recipe. She was great at pies and cakes made from scratch, but every once in a while there would be one of the "Cat Club" desserts showing up at our house.

The following recipe for Cherry Crap is one of those, and nobody remembered how it got its name. I can only imagine the scene the first time Ma presented this, circa 1955:

Ma: (setting a glass cake pan on the dining room table) I got this recipe from Leona at Cat Club.

Dad: (viewing the dish with suspicion) What is it?

Ma: It's a Quick Cherry Pie!

Dad: Looks more like Cherry Crap to me.

Anyway, no matter what Dad thought of the looks, we all liked it, and I still make it today. Here's the recipe:

11 graham crackers, crushed, or pre-crushed graham cracker crumbs for two crusts (found in the baking aisle of the store)
1/3 cup sugar
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter or margarine
1 can cherry pie filling
Cool-Whip or spray whipped creme

Melt butter in microwave in microwave-safe mixing bowl. Add crumbs and sugar; mix well.
Layer half the crumb mixture in the bottom of a 9x9 square cake pan, spread pie filling over crumbs. Top with the rest of the crumbs. Refrigerate for at least three hours or overnight.

Serve with your choice of topping.

Note: I tried making this once with fresh cherries from our tree, and real whipped creme but it just wasn't the same. You really want that chemical-y goodness for this one!

The Triple-Threat Chocolate Cookie Disaster

I’m a frequent watcher of TV cooking shows. I found out the hard way that sometimes details get lost in the translation; for instance the amount of something you end up with when a making a recipe in the real world.

I had a recipe for Triple Chocolate Cookies. They were chocolate cookies using both baking chocolate and cocoa with chocolate chips. I watched Marcel DeSaulnier on TV make them, and thought they were perfect to send to some friends, with enough left over for us, too.

To be on the safe side, I doubled the recipe.

I can’t tell you why I didn’t notice that this recipe would contain well over two pounds of chocolate when I was done. I was too busy checking the dollar store and my grocery store for the best deal. Early Saturday afternoon, I started mixing. I realized the bowl I was using wasn’t going to be quite big enough, so I transferred the batter to the biggest bowl I had. The hand mixer I was using started to smoke, because the heavy batter was too much for it – and I hadn’t even added the chips yet!

I got out a big, two-foot-long, metal spoon left over from my days as a banquet chef, and holding my forearm over the edge of the bowl to keep the batter from dripping out, folded in the two big bags of chocolate chips. Although I had chocolate cookie batter all over both arms, and I was trying frantically to wipe up the drips on the floor before the dogs could get to them, my problems had just begun.

I started out making individual cookies, but I soon realized I’d be in the kitchen all night at that rate. I filled up every baking pan I had with batter, and by the time I was done, every surface in the kitchen and living room in my small house was full of cooling, giant cookies in a variety of shapes. We’d just been grocery shopping, so the freezer was full, and there was no place to keep them. The box of cookies I usually mailed to my friends would hardly make a dent in the sheer mass of baked goods.

The aroma of chocolate permeated every room of the house and wafted outside. It was, in fact, the first thing my husband noticed when he came home from work that day.

What to do with all those cookies?

Well, we did what any other patriotic American couple would do – we called in the Marines.

I forget now how we packed them up, but pack them up we did. Paul turned right around and went back to work at MCAS_Yuma, where he teaches Marines to fix their cars. I’m sure many of our boys and girls in uniform had Triple-Threat chocolate cookies that night. ;>)

We’ve re-named the recipe, by the way. In the military style of describing things, they are now Cookies, Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate. In the Battalion Batch and Platoon Batch.

The moral of the story is that even the most experienced cook can be dense sometimes.