Cream Puffs (Alice T.)

I was so pleased with this recipe. I'd never made cream puffs before. Just look how pretty these are!

I was surprised that they were fairly simple to prepare, and then they turned out so nice! When I sliced them open, they were hollow with no uncooked dough in the center.

Since there's no sugar in the recipe, I played around with both sweet and savory fillings. I made the vanilla custard filling ("pastry cream") from The Joy of Cooking, then, since I don't have the fancy thing to inject cream into pastries (I don't even know what they're called), I sliced open the cream puffs, put a dollop in the hollow top, and put it back together with the bottom. They were a big hit with the family and friends.

I also prepared some chicken salad (from Cleora's Kitchen - best ever) and that went great with the cream puffs as well. I could easily see those being served at a nice little buffet luncheon.

I have a second recipe that I want to try, just for comparison, but for taste, quality, and simplicity, these might be hard to beat.
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Cream Puffs
from Alice T.

½ cup butter
1 cup boiling water
1 cup flour
4 eggs
½ tsp salt

Bring water and butter to a boil.
Add flour all at once.
Stirring vigorously, cook until thick and smooth, with no lumps, and do not let it stick to pan.
Cool slightly.
Add eggs one at a time, beating each time until absorbed into batter.
Drop by spoonfuls on greased baking sheet - allow space for expansion.
Bake in 400° oven for 35 minutes.
If they start getting too brown, turn down the temperature for 10 minutes.
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Carol Ann's Frozen Pickles

This is the recipe that most caught my attention when I first went through the yellow box, and inspired me to prepare and share the recipes with others. I actually made this recipe before any of the others, so I'm a little delayed in typing up this description.

I had never heard of Frozen Pickles before, though I recently saw a news segment on the growing popularity of frozen pickle juice pops. But this is entirely different.

I love the simplicity of the ingredients (one of my favorite characteristics of a good recipe). If you don't mind spending a little time at the cutting board, this is a super easy and very unique savory treat.

The quantities I used may have been a little off, because I wasn't sure how many cucumbers would make two quarts, but I think it came out nicely. I bought three plump, medium-sized cucumbers at the farmer's market one Saturday. I would encourage using organic cucumbers to get the best flavor. I used a sweet Vidalia onion, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I have since done a little poking around on the internet and read that it's better not to use sweet onions for frozen pickles. I'll use a regular yellow onion next time. I also used Heinz white vinegar. I don't know how much taste difference there would be between Heinz and generic, but I figured I'd spluge on the extra few pennies.

What I think I like most about this recipe is how pretty it turns out!

I love the bright green of the fresh cucumbers, as opposed to the unappetizing color of regular jarred pickles.

What I'm not so sure about is how I'm supposed to serve them. I took them frozen to a family gathering at Steve's sister's house. I set them out on the counter, still frozen, but that meant that everyone had to hack away at the icy block in order to get any pickles. It was really counter-productive as a party food. Even after an hour, it was still frozen fairly solid. However, everyone thought they were good - especially Steve's sister, who ended up sitting by the bowl with a fork and scraping out the pickles to eat long after the rest of us had given up our efforts.

So the good part is that they're delicious. The problem is how best to serve them. I think the whole point is for them to be, if not completely frozen, at least icy-cold. I took the leftovers home with me and later moved the bowl to thaw out in the refrigerator, but within a few days the cucumbers had turned drab pickle-green, and I threw them out.

I'll try to figure this out next time I make them, and report back later.
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2 quarts cucumbers, sliced very thin
3 medium onions, sliced very thin
2 teaspoons salt

Mix well and let stand in refrigerator for two hours. Drain well but do not rinse. Heat 1-1/2 cups sugar and 1/2 cup vinegar until sugar is dissolved. Cool. Pour over drained cucumbers. Juice should cover. Freeze in freezer bags or freezer containers.
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Pattie Wheeler's Night Before Coffee Cake

This is exactly how I love my coffee cake!

Cinnamony-sweet and just moist enough not to gunk up in the roof of your mouth, with an awesome crumbly topping.

I don't care for coffee cakes that are bland in the cake part and only sweet in the topping, nor do I like them so dry that you practically need a sip of coffee just to get it down your throat. I mean, really, this coffee cake is just right.

My alterations for this recipe: I used butter instead of margarine, and I substituted for the buttermilk with a tablespoon of white vinegar plus enough milk to make 1 cup (let it sit 5 minutes before using).

Of the three filling options, I used 1/2 cup of nuts (fresh shelled pecans - the best!). I am not a big fan of raisins, though I would consider trying it with dates.

SIDE NOTE: Dates are listed as an ingredient in so many of these recipes! Maybe this blog will bring them back in style. I just wish my grandmother didn't have a wheat allergy so she could taste more of these treats. She says she's always known about the allergy, but only in the last ten years or so has she made a point of avoiding wheat, so I'm sure she was gobbling these up at the potluck parties of yore.

In any case, the one deviation I won't repeat was baking it in a bundt pan, though it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I bought myself this pan two years ago, and only used it once, when I baked Steve a birthday sour cream pound cake, of which he thoroughly enjoyed one slice for breakfast, and the rest of which my lab Gracie ate while we were gone to work. The pan disappeared into the back of the cabinet, and then into a storage box which I only recently unpacked, so I've been wanting to do another bundt cake lately. But this coffee cake recipe was not the answer. I couldn't get it loose from the pan to turn it out, so I had to leave it in and cut out slices to serve. Next time I'll stick with the regular cake pan.

Do give this a try - it is simple to make and extremely delicious!

Bar-B-Q Sauce for Pork Chops or Chicken (Aleen - 8/3/55)

Much gratitude to Aleen for this recipe dated 8/3/55!

All kinds of good stuff goes into this recipe, and it smells wonderful once it gets cooking.

I had both pork chops and chicken, so I split the sauce up and used it on both (two chops and five boneless, skinless chicken breasts). I marinated the meat in the sauce for about an hour before baking both dishes covered for an hour-and-a-half.

It was really, really, really delicious. I'm not all that experienced with culinary descriptions beyond "yum!" but I can say that this has all the flavors I like in a barbecue sauce: a little sweet but mostly spicy, and just the right zing on the spiciness. The sauce was also great on the mashed potatoes I made to go along with the meat.

Oh, woops! I forgot to take a photo. Well, it looks like any other barbecue sauce -- it's the flavor that counts here. You'll just have to try it for yourself.

Butterscotch Bars or Brownies (Win Carter)

Sarah picked out this recipe to try next, but I made the classic mistake of beginning preparations without making sure I had all the ingredients.

My first discovery was that I had no shortening, but a) I'm kind of grossed out by shortening, and b) Sarah pointed out that using butter to make "butterscotch bars" makes more sense than using shortening. So I used butter.

As the butter melted in the saucepan, I found that I only had a half-cup of brown sugar left in the bag. At the back of the cupboard was an old box of brown sugar, but it had long ago dried to a solid rock. Jabbing at it with a knife was futile. There was no way I could soften it enough to get it into the measuring cup, so I decided to just dissolve it into the melted butter. The sugar was so rock-hard that I had to tear and peel the packaging off the golden-brown brick. Since I couldn't accurately measure it, I had to estimate how much there was, and I was probably off by at least a quarter-cup. Also, it took forever to dissolve.

The next deficiency was that my usually reliable pecan stash was depleted. Happily, I had a bag of unshelled pecans sitting on top of the fridge, so I put Sarah and Kate to work cracking and shelling enough to make 1/2 cup, which was rather tedious work, but they did it with minimal grumbling.

I happened to have exactly two eggs left - close call there.

Last, but definitely not least, I only had about a cup of all-purpose flour. Arrrrrgh! But then I remembered a box of cake flour in the cabinet, and so supplemented with that to make 1-3/4 cups.

So, altogether, I altered the recipe with butter instead of shortening, either too much or too little brown sugar, and partial cake flour for all-purpose flour.

But everyone loved it.

When I first took the pan out of the oven, it looked like a cake, so I cut warm cake-sized squares and served them with forks on plates. Sarah suggested topping it with some of my homemade caramel sauce, and it was all soft and rich and yummy.

On second look the following morning, I realized that they really are more like brownies in texture and density, so I cut them into smaller squares.

Flavor-wise, I have mixed opinions - basically, my opinion vs. everyone else's. I think they are okay - definitely not bad at all, but they're not knocking my socks off. Steve loves them. Other people say they're delicious. But I'm a huge fan of butterscotch, and I'm not getting a big kick out of these the way I'd hoped.

I have since replenished my pantry with all the missing ingredients, and am determined to have another go at this really simple recipe. My only hangup is with the shortening. Would shortening really produce a better Butterscotch Bar than butter? Sarah pointed out that the majority of the recipes in the box seem to call for shortening, margarine, or oleo; I understand that it was more standard for mid-century recipes, so maybe, really, butter is better. Which means I'll have to make the recipe two more times to find out.

But not today. We are currently buried in snow by the Blizzard of 2011, and I don't want all that dessert sitting around a house inhabited by only three people.

More on this later....