The Joy of Sandwiches

 
Sandwiches were not a special treat when I was growing up. I remember bologna, white bread, and yellow mustard, but only for lunch. Sometimes we had hamburgers. There must have been an occasional grilled cheese but even that was a quick fix instead of a REAL supper. So, I felt somewhat dismayed when my husband started requesting sandwiches for supper.

He came from a sandwich family. I learned from him to make a  trip to the deli for baked ham, turkey, rare roast beef, corned beef, and provolone cheese. We had to have onion rolls, rye bread, coleslaw, grainy mustard, and horseradish sauce.

For a quick trip to the beach, don't make a fuss. Just stack some sliced lunch meat on plain bread with a little mustard. And when you stop for beer, sodas, and ice, grab some Pringles potato chips. It is amazing how appetizing those plain old sandwiches taste after a day on the water.

For a family celebration, such as Easter, spread all the deli meat, bread, and cheeses on a picnic table with condiments, lettuce, tomato, deviled eggs, pickles, homemade potato salad, some sliced watermelon and a beautiful cake.

For a late night snack or for breakfast the next day, try an onion bagel with spicy mustard, deli meat, and cheese, heated up in a toaster oven. .

Sometimes I crave sandwiches -- from plain old bologna or tuna salad on white bread to a homemade Reuben on toasted rye with sauerkraut, hot mustard, corned beef, and melted cheese. I had that craving this weekend and my husband and I have had a series of sandwiches all weekend long. It's ham for him with provolone, spicy mustard, and tomato on rye. For me, it is rare roast beef on an onion roll with tomato, cheese and horseradish sauce. I have some sliced watermelon in the fridge.

I am thinking of all the sandwiches I love. Meat loaf with ketchup on white bread, French dip roast beef with au jus, Shrimp salad on croissants, hot dogs over a camp fire in a soft hot dog bun, Philly Cheese Steak with onions and peppers, home grilled hamburgers piled high with lettuce, pickles, and tomato. Oh, don't forget BLT's or just a tomato sandwich with toasted bread and lots of mayonnaise. (No Miracle Whip for me!) Just wanted to share my sandwich craving with whoever is reading this. Happy Summer!

Mom's Cooking

photo from mylifetime.com

I love the show Mom's Cooking on Lifetime TV. It is so quirky. It is interesting to see the traditions that different families come up with and the family relationships. The host, Joe Corsano, is funny and respectful to the moms. Sometimes I see a recipe that I want to remember and make again and again. Sometimes I want to say, "No! That is not the right way to do it!" 

Here is a recipe I am anxious to try. I have always seen these Oregon Blackberries in the store and wanted to do something with them. My grandmother used to put up blackberries back in Oklahoma. This is an easy and delicious sounding recipe and the perfect way to use the new cast iron skillet that I got for myself at Christmas.

Blackberry Cobbler

• 1 stick butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 cup self-rising flour
• 1 1/2 cans blackberries
• 2 cans blackberry juice
• Note: I need to watch the video again, but I think she just used 2 cans of blackberries and the juice from the berries. That is what I plan to use.

1. Mix flour and sugar until well-blended. Pour in 1 cup cold milk and mix to make batter.
2. Heat skillet on medium high, then melt butter.
3. Pour batter into cast-iron skillet.
4. Pour blackberries and juice into middle of pan; do not stir.
5. Bake for 40 minutes at 425 degrees.

I'll let you know how it comes out!

Crockpot Bean Soup

I walked into my daughter's house to see my grandson's new aquarium and smelled something delicious. The house was neat and clean. My daughter and her fiance were attending an afternoon wine tasting and concert at a nearby winery. My grandson had stayed home to play video games. In a crock pot on the counter, bean soup with ham was bubbling away.

I believe it was the first time my daughter ever made bean soup. She had seen me cooking it a few weeks earlier and asked me how to do it. I had sent home a big bowl of pinto bean soup but I wondered if her picky family would actually eat it. Apparently, they liked it and now she was making her own soup with great northern beans. It is so nice to come home from an outing to a hot meal cooking in the crock pot.

My mother always made bean soup with navy, great northern, or pinto beans. I loved it. She lived in Washington D.C. for a while and told me about the famous Senate Bean Soup. When I married, my mother-in-law also made bean soup. She had a big family and it fed a lot of people. My mother served her soup with corn bread muffins. My mother-in-law always had homemade yeast biscuits. She also served her bean soup with fried potatoes and onions. I thought that seemed too starchy, but the flavors go together beautifully. Fried potatoes are another way to feed a lot of people inexpensively. When I was raising my children, I often made bean soup, rice and cornbread. It was a healthy, filling meal. My husband loved it and I guess the children ate it, though I don't remember it being their favorite.

I always made bean soup in a big pot on the top of the stove like my mother did. I have accidentally burned the soup many times when too much water cooked away. Anyone who has smelled burned beans will remember that smell. I learned to transfer the soup to a different pot without scraping the bottom and could usually save the soup.

One New Year's day, I visited my brother and sister-in-law for traditional black-eyed peas. (Good Luck!) She was cooking her soup in the crock pot! For some reason, I had never thought of that. Water doesn't cook away in a crock pot. I learned that lesson the hard way in the beginning by adding too much water to other dishes and ending up with watery, tasteless roasts and stews. That property of the crock pot works great for beans, though. No more burnt beans!

Anyway, my picky daughter, who describes herself as a carnivore, has added bean soup to her repertoire. That makes me happy.

One-of-a-Kind Flavor

The route home from my new job takes me right by a Dairy Queen. I confess that a combination of nostalgia and relief sometimes causes me to turn into the drivethru. The relief comes from getting through another day at a new job. After being out of work for a few years and working for a friend and taking over a job from my daughter, which she did very well, I am finding this new job a little nerve wracking. Fun and exciting, but also a little difficult. There are lots of new things to learn and a new relationship to forge with an old friend, now my boss. I want so much for her business to do well both for her sake and my own. It is getting easier and orders are coming in. I only work for a few hours, two days a week. So I stop at the Dairy Queen. I usually order a chili dog. A messy choice, but I manage to polish it off at stop lights before I get home. The other day, though, I ordered the chicken strip basket. I had the idea I would share it with my husband when I got home but that didn't happen. I didn't even tell him what I did. I was too embarrassed.

The Dairy Queen nostalgia comes from my teenage years. My father died when I was fifteen. My mother had come home from work every day for many years and immediately started making supper. After my father died, she went on strike for about a year. On the days when she got her hair done after work, she would bring home burgers and fries from the Wide Awake Cafe. Since my father was the only driver in the family and I was a few months short of getting my driver's license, my mother would send a taxi to the nearby Dairy Queen for supper sometimes. Back before KFC and Pizza Hut, we got the chicken strip baskets for the whole family. I am sure the cab fare cost more than the food. It was blazingly hot when it arrived. Four big strips of crispy chicken fingers, thick Texas toast, and fries with a cup of white gravy. Ymmm!

After all these years and in a different part of the country, the flavor was still the same except for the toast which was just regular sliced bread. That got me thinking about how a dish can have a unique taste and texture when a certain restaurant (or person) makes it. A combination of specific ingredients and cooking techniques sometimes creates a one-of-a-kind flavor. That is what makes a special dish special I guess. Good cooks are often accused of holding out a secret ingredient in their special dishes, but I think it is more subconscious than that. Little habits and techniques that are so natural they are not spoken are what make the difference.

Take my mother's country style steak, for instance. I watched her pound flour and salt and pepper into a round steak with the edge of a saucer and then brown it and simmer it with water and onions until it fell apart and produced a rich brown gravy. I have never gotten the same results. My aunt Nellie's pineapple upside down cake was baked in a cast iron skillet and had crispy, sweet, caramelized edges. Mine is always a little soggy. My ex-mother-in-law's yeast biscuits, which I watched her whip together so many times, were baked on a blackened baking sheet coated with bacon grease. She would drag each biscuit briefly through the bacon grease and then flip it over to produce a crispy topped, chewy, but tender biscuit. I have never come close to creating those biscuits. The southern fast food chain of Bo Jangles had biscuits that resembled hers, but they closed the only one near me.

I ate the whole chicken strip basket on the way home. It tasted so good. I even tasted the hopeful excitement of a 15-year-old girl with all of life's possibilities ahead of her and a hot, tasty supper arriving in a paper bag delivered by a taxi driver. My mother eventually started cooking again when my brother and I begged her to. Mom, I miss you.

New Year's Eve

Happy New Year with a little steak and a big baked potato. Merlot with dinner. Sparkling wine at midnight.

Christmas Magic

Coca Cola Santa copied from Google Images

I like the Santa of my imagination the best. I think Santa suffers from over exposure sometimes. Just give me a "Ho Ho Ho" and the sound of jingle bells in the air. A glimpse of Santa on his throne in the mall is fun, but the closer you get, the more jarring imperfections are apparent. Even the most realistic Santa is not the same as the magical elf who appears when you are sleeping, and fills the tree with magical, sparkly packages. Norman Rockwell and Coca Cola images will always define Santa for me.

As a child, the most magical time was the middle of the night when I got up for a drink of water and found the dark room transformed. Once I found a beautiful little dressing table with a frilly skirt. Another time,  I swear I heard jingle bells in the air and the sounds of hoofs on the roof, but when I looked into the dark night, I saw nothing. I don't want weather forecasters telling where Santa is, or phone calls or letters from Santa.

A neighbor decorates his whole house with amazing lights every year. We walk across the dark golf course for a yearly visit with Santa. But wise little Mia told me that is not really him. She thought his voice sounded a little like her Dad. She said, "I don't know why he pretends to be HIM."

My son, Cory, was 9 when we moved for a year to Pennsylvania. He didn't believe in Santa Claus that year until he looked under the tree and there was a toy truck just like his stepfather's big rig. It had little mirrors and all the parts and pieces. He tells me he thought that Santa must be real to leave such a perfect little truck that looked as if it had been shrunk. Unfortunately, he also tells me that he later found the box in the trash. I am so sorry for that. I know my mother would never have made that mistake!

My mother and her sister were raised in a children's home in North Carolina. She says they always had a big tree and lots of presents. I don't really know about her Christmas, but I know she made Christmas truly magical for me and my brother and her grandchildren. Jaime once asked me, as Jill has recently, if I would tell her the truth if she asked me a question. I feared a question about the source of babies, but Jaime said, "Grandma is really Santa Claus, right?"

For me, anticipation is everything. That is why I have always loved Christmas Eve more than Christmas morning. After that, Christmas becomes all about the people, the old traditions, the music, the food, and finding a way to make Christmas magical for someone else. Merry Christmas to all!

I Hate the Crazy Target Lady

Copied from Google images

The crazy Target lady on TV makes my nerves jangle. She represents everything I hate about a grab-it-first, get-something-cheap attitude. A bargain is a low price for something you really want or need, but I also believe it should include convenience and a pleasant shopping experience. I don't mind if the stores open early. Shopping at unconventional times used to be a way to avoid the crowds.

I went once to an annual sale at a posh little boutique my friend and I loved. Unlike our usual delightful experience of browsing and finding unique and beautiful things, eveyone waited behind a ribbon and ran when it was cut. My friend advised me to grab everything I saw and decide later what to keep. That kind of "shopping" tends to encourage people to buy things they don't even want. I hated it.

I have heard that people need to spend in order to boost the economy, but I like the idea of buying only what we really need and can afford, maybe even using layaway as I used to do when my kids were small. My wish is that we can all get what we really want and need this year - at a great price.