Family recipe Monday: comfort foods

Small quilt in honor of a big anniversary

It's been an odd couple of weeks, with days of high activity interspersed with a few quiet moments. I really am not ready for the holidays to be upon us, but, like everyone else, I am ready for the end of the semester. Just wish that we could have a couple of months of paid leave before the next semester starts. Since no one asked me, however, I'll make do with a couple of weeks off. I have a pile of quilting and sewing projects, some of which are badly overdue, to work on.

Next month is an important anniversary for a group that is very dear to me, and that I miss out here in Dakota Territory. Quilts for Comfort is celebrating its 10th year of providing quilts for those in need in the Delaware area. Its founder, Edna Kotrola, organized hundreds of bees (with potluck lunches) and thousands of volunteer workers in the effort. They claim that 7284 quilts have been delivered to at-risk children in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland, as well as to adults receiving dialysis and cancer care in Delaware. I helped with about 50 of these, starting literally the day before I had major surgery myself and needed something calming to do with my mother, who was up to help. We went to a bee in Newark, DE, and I was hooked. And calmed. And the surgery went very well.

Edna gave me the last quilt I worked on with her when I moved out here, as a surprise gift. It was and is indeed a comfort. I miss the bees and am looking for a local equivalent, but it won't be quite the same. I decided to do some quilting for the anniversary.

So I dragged out the fabric stash (which needed reorganizing anyway) and my grandmother's Singer Featherweight (which I only use for quilt piecing, because it is the best machine ever) and took a square from each of 48 different fabrics. I wanted it to be colorful and cheerful for the person who receives it, and reasonably well-made so that Edna does not think she wasted her time on me. If you are looking for a cause to support, you couldn't do better than hers.

It's the right time of year for thinking about warmth and comfort. Here are a couple of classics which I would take to a quilting bee potluck.

Meatloaf

1 ½ lb. ground beef
1 ½ tsp salt
1 cup fresh bread crumbs or oats
¼ tsp pepper
1 beaten egg
½ can tomato sauce
1 medium sized onion, chopped

Lightly mix ingredients and form a loaf. Place in shallow pan in moderate (350* F) oven. While it is starting to bake, combine the following to make a tart-sweet sauce:

½ can tomato sauce
2 T brown sugar or molasses
2 T vinegar
1 cup water
2 T prepared mustard

Pour over meatloaf in oven. Continue baking for 1 ½ hours, basting occasionally.
--Vada Brooks Johnson

Note: Shirley never uses the fresh breadcrumbs, but always uses the oats and adds bell pepper.

For this next one, I would only use corn tortillas. It could also be made with chicken instead of ground beef. I would use a good white cheese instead of Velveeta, personally. This recipe can be adapted easily and enlarged to make enough for a whole roomful of busy, hungry quilters. It can be prepared in advance and reheated beautifully--that is, if you didn't use Velveeta.

Green chili enchiladas

Brown 1 lb. meat with small chopped onion--add 8 oz grated longhorn cheese and simmer. In double boiler, heat 1 can cream of chicken soup, 1 can chopped green chilis, 1 small jar chopped pimientos, 1 small can evaporated milk, and 8 oz Velveeta cheese. Heat until cheese is melted. Roll meat mixture in tortillas. Place in pan and pour green chili mixture over enchiladas. Cover with foil and cook at 400* F until mixture is bubbly.
--Vada Brooks Johnson


Happy Monday. Go make someone happy today.

Family recipe Monday: cookies

Cookies were almost as important a test of one's kitchen skills as pies and cakes for my grandmother's generation. They were always kept on hand for visitors, hungry children and social events. During the Depression and WWII, cookies stretched a rationed pantry's contents farther than more elaborate desserts could do. They were also a handy way to send a little sweetness back out to the field after dinner, which was of course at noon, the main meal of the day. Here are a few older classics from the files.

Lacy cookies

½ cup oleo
1 cup quick oats
½ tsp. salt
1 cup sugar
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. vanilla
4 T flour
1 egg

Melt oleo. Add other ingredients and stir well. Use 1/2 tsp. for each cookie. Bake on foil for 7 to 8 minutes. Let cool and they will peel off.
--Opal Winstead, Vada Brooks Johnson

Forgotten Cookies are essentially little meringues that are allowed to set slowly in a cooling oven. The result is a very crisp, light cookie. The egg whites need to be beaten to the stiff-peak stage for this to work.

Forgotten cookies

To 3 beaten egg whites, add 1 cup sugar gradually. Add 1 cup each chocolate chips and nuts, folding into egg mixture. Drop by teaspoons on cookie sheet that has been lined with brown paper {or cooking parchment}. Heat oven to 350* F and turn off. Put cookies in oven and leave overnight.
--Gladys Brooks Strickland

Francis cookies are bar cookies, good for taking to socials and quilting bees. "Francis" was Mrs. D. M. Davis, a friend of our grandmother's. One of us, no names mentioned, but a major hater of coconut, loved and ate these for years without realizing that there was coconut in it, according to Shirley. These are best baked in a 9x13" baking pan.

Francis cookies

½ cup shortening
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
½ cup white Karo syrup
½ cup sour milk
1 tsp. baking soda
2 ½ cups flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. allspice
¼ tsp. ground cloves
½ cup raisins
1 cup nuts
¼ cup coconut

Grease and flour pan. Bake 20 minutes at 340* F. Glaze while hot with 1/2 box powdered sugar and canned milk.
 --Vada Brooks Johnson

No one in my grandmother's generation ever referred to a refrigerator as anything but an ice box, long after the iceman had gone the way of the Edison wax cylinder and the horse-drawn carriage. What's strange is that I occasionally hear myself calling it an ice box, too. I have no explanation for this. Chilling this dough before baking allows the cookies to keep their shape in spite of their high butter-shortening content. This does go back to actual ice box days.

  Ice box cookies

4 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. soda
½ cup shortening other than butter
½ cup butter
2 cups dark brown sugar
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup nuts

Sift flour, measure and sift with baking powder and soda. Cream shortening and butter, add sugar gradually, blend well. Add eggs, mix well. Stir in flour and nut meats.

Work into 2 rolls, wrap in waxed paper, and place in refrigerator for several hours or overnight. Slice about ¼” thick and bake on ungreased cookie sheet about 8 minutes at 400*F. Makes 9 dozen.
--Vada Brooks Johnson

Don't let them burn and be sure to share them. Happy Monday.

Quilt Thursday: bees and quilts, or synchronicity strikes again

The Honey Bee quilt block from the Kansas City Star collection, originally published in 1929.

Our family genealogy work, as I mentioned before, started in earnest with my need to document an 1881 quilt. That led to the discovery of our connections to the Honnoll family. And that led to the discovery (thank you again, Bill!) of the unsuspected beekeepers in the family. Which in turn explained some of the older family recipes made with generous amounts of honey instead of sugar. Everything is connected; not for nothing is this blog called Threads and Traces.

So imagine my astonishment and delight to see today's Kansas City Star blog post entitled "Bees and Their Quilts." This is not just about quilting bees...it seems that quilts are actually part of the construction of some beehives. No matter which angle you take, you cannot separate bees and quilts.

Publisher Doug Weaver elaborates:
"A friend...is exploring the world of beekeeping. She recently shared some photos of her and her friends building beehives. And she mentioned that the Warre Hive style of beehive includes a quilt frame that sits toward the top of the hive, under the roof. ...The frame, with fabric attached at the bottom, is eventually filled with insulation – straw, sawdust, peat, wood shavings, etc. The quilt 'absorbs the hive's moisture more easily and communicates to the hive the heat outside,' wrote Emile Warre, the Frenchman who developed the hive design in the early 1900s.

"Warre called the design the 'People’s Hive' because of its simplicity. (All of his thinking is detailed in his book, 'Beekeeping for All.' I like Warre … clearly a man of the people and, like the bee itself, a lover of community, it appears.)

"Granted, this beehive quilt isn’t the kind of quilt you and I know and love. It’s basically a piece of plain cloth, attached to the frame....Still, there’s something comforting in knowing that, as we put honey on a biscuit, quilts might have contributed to that sweet combination."

A Warre hive with the "quilt" layer labelled, from http://thebeespace.net/warre-hive/.  

Weaver goes on to provide a link to an entertaining history of quilting bees and to compare quilting bee and beehive dynamics. There are many points in common; quilting bees were social microcosms of the larger community.

This line especially resonated with me:
"In isolated regions gathering women in the area together helped overcome the loneliness that so many pioneer women experienced. Often these women often didn't have a big house with a parlor for hand quilting."

So true. Every hand-stitched quilt is a collection of memories, often of friends and family coming together on rare and cherished occasions. I wish I knew more of the story of the 1881 quilt, but I can't imagine that it was anything other than a mother and daughter project, and that made the quilt so precious to my great-grandmother that she kept it close by her for her entire life. If you'll excuse me, I need to go touch it now and wonder.

Happy Thursday.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

--Emily Dickinson (1830–86)