For 13 months, I’ve been participating in the Burwell General Store Vintage Recipe Swap, yet this month is simply bursting with firsts.
I’ll start with the obvious: it’s my first time posting a vintage recipe remake on a Wednesday. For those of you who are familiar with the swap, you might be used to them coming on Sundays. Well, our group of 30 or so, has split into two groups of 15 with half of us posting on the first Sunday and half of us posting on the third Wednesday.
The second first (that sounds funny) is this. Of all the vintage recipes Christianna has given us, this is the first that has ever actually repulsed me. From hot slaw to jelly cake, grandma’s chicken pie and drop biscuits to company time lemon cake, I have always found something to love in the recipe we’ve started with. This Orange Snowflake Salad may be my bête noir, the thought of it is completely horrifying. he recipe contains two packets of orange jello, pineapple juice, pineapple, cottage cheese, onion, cottage cheese, and celery- oh and just to be elegant, one should serve it on a lettuce leaf- with mayonnaise.
With morbid fascination, I some researched Orange Snowflake Salad. While I was unable to find it’s exact match, I found an abundance of Jello-salad related delights. My favorite little chestnut gleaned from said research? By the 1950’s Jello salads were so wildly popular that Jello launched a whole line of flavors … get the recipe
When I was a little girl, our local grocery store was Petrini’s. Frank Petrini was the owner of the chain of stores that opened in San Francisco in the 30’s, and I wonder if people like Sam Mogannam of Bi-Rite know just how much Frank paved the way. I remember being able to get a several kinds of pâté at the deli and oh, the salumi! There were fresh baguettes, and the butchers cut your steaks. Frank is said to have selected the cows for all of his beef, himself.
One of the things I remember most about Petrini’s is the zabaglione ice cream. My parents absolutely loved the stuff, and I really wanted to like it because it was ice cream AND it started with a Z, but I could only get a bite or two down. Usually, when my parents would get it, I would beg for the spumoni ice cream, which sat right next to it in the freezer.
Petrini’s was owned as a family market until 1996. Now, Mollie Stones a generically upscale market sits in it’s place in my home town. I can’t remember the last time I had zabaglione ice cream, and I the last time I ate actual zabaglione was years ago at an Italian American joint by the ubiquitous name of Big Joe’s on an awesomely cheesy date with my hubby.
Needless to say, I was thrilled to see that Christianna of Burwell General Store had selected zabaglione the recipe for … get the recipe
It’s that time again, when we turn to our vintage cookbook and create something new, and hopefully spectacular. This month, after a year of working our way through the old one, Christianna has selected a new book.
We have moved on to The Second Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes From Famous Eating Place. How’s that for a mouthful? And, we’re remaking a total classic, the Toll House Cookie. Of course, my mind went wickedly wild at first. I have pushed the envelope on some of these vintage recipe swaps- making donut vodka during the potato donuts, sopapillas with drunken berries during the taffy apple swap and a bacon and escarole custard to revamp hot slaw.
This time, I thought about doing frozen cookie dough truffles, but then I remembered last year when I made candy cane truffles. I was cursing my friends, my kitchen, my chocolate, and the world. NO TRUFFLES! Then I thought about a bacon, bourbon, and chocolate chip cake. While I still might keep that cake in my back pocket, I remembered that this is cookie season. If we’re remaking the classing Toll House cookie, I’m sticking with a cookie.
The question is, how do you improve upon a chocolate chip cookie? Bacon? Yes, and I almost went there. But then, my brain went to brown butter- the best liquid aside from vintage champagne FACT- not opinion. Of course brown butter alone does not a cookie make- fleur de sel? A quick search showed that theses … get the recipe
As I come to the close of an amazing weekend surrounded with food bloggers at Food Buzz Fest, I think about how much things have changed in the last year. At the end of my first Food Buzz festival, I had been blogging for only five weeks. I had met hundreds of food bloggers over the weekend, some of whom would become great friends. Some of them will be at my house in just a couple of hours for a food blogger cooking party.
Shortly after that conference, I met another food blogger, this time on Twitter. She invited me to join a vintage recipe swap. That blogger was the amazing Christianna from Burwell General Store. Though I didn’t have time or gumption to hop on board for the fritter challenge, I joined for the second, “Company Time Lemon Cake”.
The recipe swap is now one year old and it is so very cool. If you’re not familiar with the concept, we put creative and often very modern spins on old recipes from a depression-era cookbook/hymnal that Christianna found in a junkstore. It’s called “All Day Singin’ and a Cookin’ on The Ground”. This time we’re doing maple cake.
Since I’ve already done a butternut squash cake with maple cream cheese frosting, I thought, maybe I’d do a savory play on this. And, you know how I feel about pastry crust…
Check this out…
- INGREDIENTS SAVORY MAPLE SWEET POTATO PIE
- 4 sweet potatoes, baked
… get the recipe
I don’t know whether to call this experiment a success or a monumental failure. Certainly, if you look at the cost, I have failed and in a rather grand fashion. If you factor in taste, put a tick back in the success column. Looks, hmm… if you like your vodka to look rather like orange juice, SCORE!, but I am guessing you do not, so, fail again. Does learning count? Is no experiment a failed experiment?
I’ll back up a bit. Christianna, my lovely friend from Burwell General Store leads 20+ food bloggers in this really cool project every month. We remake vintage recipes from a little book called All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground. This is the fourth swap, I’ve participated in. My past recipes involved turning an old school cake into this lemon cake with rosemary caramael, Ozarkian Taffy Apples into these sopapillas, and Grandma’s chicken stew with drop biscuits into this Thai curry.
Finding The Inspiration:
I had a bit of a hard time deciding what to do this time. I thought of doing desert gnocchi, but someone jumped on that pretty quickly, then I thought of making some sort of pan-fried breaded croquette with a sweet oozy filling, but I found myself feeling uninspired by any of those things. I thought I had settled on a homemade shake and French fries for dipping (yum). I was discussing this plan with my husband over a plate of fries and a soy gelato shake when … get the recipe
