Category Archives: Family Recipe Friday

Family Recipe Friday – It’s Peach Season in the Texas Hill Country

Posted on by
Reply

Easy Peach Cobbler

Oops! We got into the cobbler before I decided to take a picture and share the recipe. Christina and I have no willpower.

I bought a half box of amazingly delicious Fredericksburg peaches from an Optimist group fundraising for scholarships the weekend before the 4th. They were so good! I ate at least one a day until we went out of town. (Also made a peach pie for July 4th – yum!) I stuck the rest in the fridge, hoping they would still be edible when we returned. They were not as pretty for eating in the raw as when we left, but still tasty and great for cobbler.

I got this recipe from the Austin American Statesman years ago. It was a “children’s” recipe – so it has lots of instruction included. Not an “old” family recipe, but one of mine.

Here are the bare bones:

Easy Peach Cobber

1/2 cup margarine (I don’t use the stuff any more – I use real butter)
1 cup flour
1 2/3 cups sugar (separated)
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup milk
3-4 cups fresh peaches, peeled and sliced
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place stick of butter in a 12-by-8-inch baking dish and place in the oven to melt. While the butter is melting, measure flour, 1 cup sugar, salt, and baking powder into a sifter. Sift into a medium-size mixing bowl.  Set aside. Check butter; if melted, remove from oven.

Blend milk with dry ingredients, mixing well. Pour batter over melted butter in baking dish. Stir lightly with a fork or spoon – it does not have to be completely blended in. Spread peach slices over batter. Stir cinnamon into remaining sugar (I usually use 1/3 c. instead of 2/3 c. of sugar – just a tiny bit healthier!). Sprinkle over peaches.

Bake for 45-60 minutes until crust is golden brown.

I think this makes a delicious cobbler. Let me know what you think.

 

 

Family Recipe Friday – Apple Butter (after a Texas drought)

Posted on by
2

We had an extreme drought in Texas last year.  The summer was long and extraordinarily hot, marked by a record 90 days of 100+ temperatures in central Texas.

Squirrel in a Hole

Every evening when we went out to check on our plants, we would find a newly dug hole in our flowerbed. We would fill it in and the next day there would be another one – or two. I finally caught the culprit in action – a squirrel trying to stay cool during the heat of the day – belly in a hole. I spent a lot of the summer entertaining myself by trying to sneak a picture of him (and sometimes her) and posting “squirrel in a hole” pictures as my Facebook status.

Loquats

We have two loquat trees in our back yard. They rarely bear much fruit, but this spring was the exception. Loquat trees all over town were laden with fruit. The local paper said we had the drought to thank. After a time of severe stress, a tree may produce an overabundance of fruit to increase the likelihood of survival. We ate our first loquats this year and I made a cobbler which was quite good. The squirrels were really happy too!

Our Apple Tree

Which brings me to our little apple tree. Just like the loquat tree, it has produced an abundance of fruit this year. Plenty for the squirrels to share with us. It is so heavy with fruit that my husband has propped up a branch with a bungee cord so it won’t break.

Our supply of apples reminded me of Grandmother Eveline’s Apple Butter. I sure loved it when she made apple butter – especially if there was homemade bread to go with it! My mom once told me that she remembers her mother (Eveline) cooking apple butter in a large pot on the back of their coal stove.

Sometimes Grandma’s recipes are a bit lean on directions. This is one of those times. Eveline probably didn’t use a recipe and wrote this down when her kids asked her for one.

Eveline (Coates) Hoskins’ Apple Butter

4 quarts apples, peeled and quartered
2-3 cups sugar
2-3 teaspoons cinnamon
1  teaspoon cloves

Cook until apples are thoroughly done. Use a potato masher, if necessary. Turn temperature to low. Add sugar and spices. Cook until thick. Seal while hot. Makes about 2 quarts.

So let’s think this through. Eveline assumes that we know to cook the apples with some water. When they are soft, mash them if necessary, add the sugar and spice to make everything nice, and cook on low for a good long time…. as in hours…. and we should probably stir occasionally. And she is certain that we know how to can, so no need to go into specifics.

As for me, I’ll freeze mine.

Off to the kitchen now to get started. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

********
5/26/2012 Update

I made apple butter as promised. Yummy!  Had some with my breakfast this morning.

I had a hard time finding the conversion for quarts of whole apples to pounds, but finally came up with this equation (can’t verify the accuracy, but it’s what I used):
4 quarts = 8 pounds
My biggest pan only held 6 lb. of quartered apples, so I adjusted the rest of the recipe based on that.
Here’s what I did:

Cooked 6 lb. apples with 3 cups water for about 30 minutes. Added more water as needed. Added 1 3/4 c. sugar, 1 3/4 t. cinnamon, and 3/4 t. cloves. (I just went with the mid-range of the measurements.) The low setting on my electric stove top isn’t low enough to be able to walk away from the stove without the threat of scorching, so I transferred the mashed apples mixed with sugar and spices to my crockpot. Cooked on low in crockpot for about 5 1/2 hours. I read online to test for doneness by putting a spoonful on a saucer. If no liquid spreads out onto the saucer, it’s done. 

Food on Friday: Breakfast of Champions

Posted on by
Reply

The first time I visited my new Hockensmith (step)grandparents (Glenn and Viola), breakfast delivered a bit of a shock and a delight. Sure, I’d been allowed sugar at breakfast in the form of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes or Post Alphabits cereal or just plain old sugar on the unsweetened stuff, but never before had I witnessed what passed as breakfast on the Hockensmith farm.

There sat Grandpa and his sons, with serving-dish-size bowls and tablespoons at their places. The first thing that went into the bowl wasn’t unusual – just some bran flakes or Post Toasties. It was the next item that drew my attention – a slice of chocolate layer cake with chocolate frosting. A BIG piece of chocolate layer cake with chocolate frosting. A little milk and they were set. Breakfast was on.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to ruin a good piece of chocolate cake by mixng it up with milk and bran flakes. And I was pretty sure Mom wouldn’t go for a breakfast of chocolate cake solo. So I opted for cereal the usual way and hoped I’d get some of that chocolate cake later.
***

I remember a time when Mom made it her mission to find the best chocolate cake recipe. In my mind, I have associated this memory with Viola’s chocolate cakes – that mom went on this quest to find a cake that dad(Jim) liked as well as his mother’s – but that may just be a figment of my imagination. What I feel certain I remember is this:

Mom baked a chocolate cake nearly every week, trying out recipe after recipe. We had red velvet, devil’s food, cake made with buttermilk, cake made with mayonnaise, and cake made with pickle juice. I’m not kidding. I remember a cake made with pickle juice.  It had a little tangy taste to it. In the end, it didn’t make the cut as THE chocolate cake recipe. In fact, I don’t know what cake recipe did earn that distinction. At some point, clothes were getting tight and the numbers on the scale were getting higher and mom was forced to abandon the weekly search for the perfect chocolate cake.

I’ve done a little internet search and cannot find a recipe for chocolate cake that uses pickle juice. I wonder why?

Instead, I offer you this recipe for chocolate cake made with mayonnaise from Best Recipes of the Great Food Companies. The story behind the cake as told in the cookbook: “In 1937 the Hellmann’s Company managers learned that Mrs. Paul Price, wife of a sales distributor, had created an astonishingly rich cake. The deep, dark chocolate flavor and moist texture were attributed to the addition of an unconventional ingredient: mayonnaise.”

Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake
Makes one 9-inch layer cake

2 cups unsifted flour                                                   1 2/3 cups sugar
or 2 1/4 cups unsifted cake flour                                1 teaspoon vanilla
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa                                       1 cup mayonnaise
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda                                      1 1/3 cups water
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
3 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour bottoms of two 9-by-1 1/2-inch round cake pans. In medium bowl, stir flour, cocoa, baking soda, and baking powder; set aside. In large bowl with mixer at high speed, beat eggs, sugar, and vanilla, scraping bowl occasionally, 3 minutes or until light and fluffy. Reduce speed to low; beat in mayonnaise until blended. Add flour mixture in 4 additions alternately with water, beginning and ending with flour. Pour into prepared pans. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until cake tester inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks 10 minutes. Remove; cool completely on racks. Frost as desired.

*****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****

* Does anyone have Viola’s chocolate cake recipe? Any of her other recipes?
* Please share a breakfast story!