Kitchen Comfort: OATMEAL SPICE PECAN COOKIES
The original recipe for Oatmeal Cookies in my grandmother’s recipe box was clipped from a 1950s issue of Parade magazine. The page has browned with age and has worn tissue-thin from years of handling; I was almost afraid to pull it from the tightly packed recipe box for fear of damaging it. A solid recipe, […]
QUICK HOMEMADE RANCH DRESSING
Developed in the 1950s, Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing eclipsed other dressings — French, Green Goddess, and Thousand Island — to become the ubiquitous condiment for salads and for dipping raw veggies and even French fries. The bottled variety holds too many fake flavors for my taste, so I make my own — and it’s so […]
Kitchen Comfort: CHICKEN SPAGHETTI
First up is an update of a 1928 recipe from my dad’s mother’s The Woman’s Club of Fort Worth Cook Book. I used fresh mushrooms instead of canned, added red bell pepper and green peas for color, and included garlic and herbs for to enliven the works. A little cream sauce goes in place of […]
Kitchen Comfort: TAMALE PIE
A dig through many worn newspaper clippings found in my grandmother June’s recipe box, jammed tight with yellowed recipe cards and fragile newsprint pieces, revealed a recipe for Hamburger Corn Pone Pie. It’s one she snipped out of The Dallas Morning News food section many decades ago, before we started calling this Tamale Pie. The […]
Kitchen Comfort: MEATLOAF WITH GREEN CHILES
In my grandmother’s recipe box — brimming with her handwritten recipes and The Dallas Morning News food section clippings from the 1930s through most of the 1950s — I found a meatloaf recipe that came from a 4-H Club. It calls for oatmeal as a filler, but I’ve always been partial to crushed Saltines — […]
Kitchen Comfort: BANANA PUDDING FROM SCRATCH
In my grandmother’s 1928 cookbook from the Fort Worth Woman’s Club, the Banana Pudding recipe consisted of just three sentences: “Arrange alternate layers of sliced bananas and vanilla wafers in baking dish. Cover with thick boiled custard. Put meringue on top and brown in oven.” That’s it. No ingredient amounts and no clues as to […]
SWISS STEAK
My two grandmothers loved cooking, and the gifts they left me were some of their favorite recipes. My grandmother Pauline Naylor (my dad’s mom) left behind her Woman’s Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, a 1928 treasure, while my grandmother June Granger (Mom’s mom) kept a tidy recipe box, which she began as a young […]
Kitchen Comfort: BEEF A LA STROGANOFF
Here’s an update of my grandmother June Granger’s Beef à la Stroganoff recipe. She must have used it frequently, based on the well-worn edges of the yellowed paper with her handwriting on a prescription pad (she worked for a doctor just off of Oak Lawn Avenue in Dallas). I added fresh mushrooms — I like […]
Kitchen Comfort: BANANA NUT LOAF
One of my mother’s cookbooks is called The Pride of Texas: A Collection of Recipes from TFWC Clubs (Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs); published in 1983, it’s one I group into “church lady” cookbooks. You can tell these from the inclusion of ingredients like Crisco and oleo, which was another term for margarine, as well […]
Kitchen Comfort: Cooking Inspired by the Greatest Generation.
As soon as the coronavirus pandemic had us sheltering at home, I began thinking how people in our country have endured terrible difficulties before — and survived the hardships imposed. Throughout the last century, our parents and grandparents (and their parents) survived world wars, the Great Depression, rationing, and the polio epidemic. Times were scary and […]