Stuffing or Dressing?

Did you know that dressing is only suppose to be called stuffing if you actually put it in a bird of some sort? So if you bake it in a pan or another way, it is called dressing. (Another bit of trivia I have picked up in my years!)
I will be making the stuffing/dressing (well dressing because it won't be cooked in a bird) for Thanksgiving for both my family and Jim's family this year.
Both my mom and Jim's mom made dressing differently, and when I hear others talk about their dressing, everyone does it a little differently.
My mom's had raisons, apples and onions along with the bread and hamburger. She put the hamburger in raw. The fruit definitely made it sweeter.
Jim's mom didn't put the fruit in and she fried her hambugar before she cooked it.
Both are good but I prefer my mom's and Jim prefer's his mother's.
Go figure.
So however you make your stuffing/dressing have a great Thanksgiving. Enjoy your family and friends. This is what it's all about.

Time to make the doughnuts!

My mom's recipe book had recipe's for six kinds of doughnuts. I didn't want to make all of them, so I picked three, the plain doughnut, the chocolate donut (her recipe called for one square of chocolate but a substitution you can use is three tablespoons of cocoa and one tablespoon of oil) and a spice doughnut. I also didn't want hundreds of doughnuts so I split the recipe in half for each of them. I don't really remember her making doughnuts so I was a little surprised to find six recipe's for them in her book. What I do remember her making was cinnamon rolls, bread from scratch and when she made bread dough, lunch was always what we called flap jacks. She took the bread dough and basically fried the dough like a doughnut and sprinkled it with sugar. Maybe not a healthy lunch, but we didn't complain. What kid didn't want doughnuts for lunch?
I couldn't find my doughnut cutter, and I knew I had one, but because I haven't ever made doughnuts from scratch, I am sure I either gave it away or packed it away somewhere and can remember where I put it. (Did I register for this as a wedding present? I don't remember it being a kitchen essential, something no home should be without!) I did have a bisquit cutter which I used to cut out the doughnuts. I have a set of mini cookie cutters and I used one of those to make the "holes". This worked well.
My next challenge was to figure out how hot the oil was without a thermometer. My meat thermometer only goes up to 220, after that I was on my own. I started frying the chocolate donuts first and I probably should have started with the plain or the spice because of the dark color. Jim thought I had burned the first batch becuase they were so dark, but they weren't. I have fried doughnuts before. My brother Jerry used to own a little shop and food wagon that he used to take to the Benton County fair. In there was a doughnut maker, to make those mini-doughnuts that are at every fair. I know if the oil is too hot the doughnuts will darken and not get the inside done before the outside was burnt. So amazingly, without an offical thermometer, all the doughnuts turned out. I put powdered sugar on the doughnut holes and frosted some of the other doughnuts. I will freeze some and see how they stand up to freezing. Even making only half a batch, I have way too many doughnuts for just Jim and I. Of the three, I liked the chocolate one's the best. Warm doughnuts just out of the oil and rolled in powdered sugar. It was lunch!

Hard Tack Cookies

These cookies were one of the Christmas cookies we made every year. Because the dough had to be made 6 weeks before rolling out and baking, it was the "start" of the Christmas season in our house. This happened in early November. My mother used to make tons of cookies and candy for the holiday season. I have searched from where this recipe came but have been unsuccessful in finding an exact match. It must have been German (My mother's family is from the Trier/Rittersdorf area in Germany). It is similar to Lebkuchen and Pffernuesse, but not exact. Neither of those cookies need to set for 6 weeks. After being mixed up together, the dough was put in a crock and covered and set at room temperature for six weeks. At six weeks, the dough is very hard and takes a lot of muscle to roll and cut out cookies. The finished product is also a very hard cookie. It is frosted with powdered sugar frosting, just like regular sugar cookies are. We used to eat them dunked in coffee which helps soften them. I am the only one in my family who continues to makes these cookies, but I share with my siblings. The original recipe calls for a gallon of dark syrup, one pound of butter and lard and seasonings and flour. This makes a HUGE batch of cookies. I usually quarter the recipe and this makes plenty for my family. Also, the recipe calls for enough flour until the dough isn't sticky. Because of wanting to put this recipe in the book, I finally measured how much flour I was using. For the quarter recipe, I used 8 cups of flour
Recipe:
1 gallon dark Karo syrup
1 pound butter
1 pound lard
2 teaspoons ginger
2 teaspoons cloves
4 tablespoons anise seed
2 teaspoons baking soda
Flour
Mix syrup, lard and butter together in a pot and heat until butter and lard is melted. Add the seasonings and slowly add in the flour until the dough is just unsticky. Let stand for 6 weeks before rolling out and baking.
These cookies are not for those with weak teeth. Unless you dunk them in coffee which softens them.

Sweet milk and Oven temperatures

Some of my mom's recipes has the term sweet milk. I wasn't sure if that meant sweetened condensed milk or something else. After some research I discovered that sweet milk is acutally just whole milk. After milking the cow and before processing the milk in anyway, this was what was called sweet milk. After they separated the cream from the whole milk you are left with buttermilk (which my dad loved). And before our wonderful refrigeration ability, the farmer often had lots of sour milk. Many of my mother's recipe's call for sour milk. It was probably a way to use the sour milk instead of just throwing it out.

Another issue as I have been typing her recipe's is they often don't say what the temperature of the oven should be. She frequently states either hot oven or moderate oven. Well not having a clue about what moderate oven temperature means sent me on another research trek. Cool ovens are 250-300 degrees, Moderate ovens are 350-375 degrees and Hot ovens are 425-450 degrees. So now I know. I did not get any baking done today, so just doing some research and typing of recipes. I do need to start the Christmas Hard Tack Cookies, and I hope to do that tomorrow.

Raison Drop Cookies

DISASTER! I was intrigued by this recipe because of the ingredient Mace, which I blogged about earlier. Mace is the red coating over the nutmeg nut. I purchased some to make this recipe. Also this was one of the mystery fat recipes. So I mixed a batch of dough, using butter for this first try. Using the ingredients exactly as they were written, I thought the dough seemed a little runny. The recipe did say to refrigerate until the dough was cold which I thought would help the consistancy. After about four hours I took the dough out and dropped them by teaspoonfulls onto a cookie sheet. The recipe also states to flatten them slightly with a fork dipped in flour. You definitely needed the flour as the dough was quite sticky. I put the cookies into the oven to bake and when the timer went off I went to take the cookies out. They were so flat, they had run together and looked like one big cookie. I tried taking them off, but were so soft they just mushed together, so I just ended up with this "pile" of one big lump of cookie. The second pan looked the same, but I thought maybe I should let them cool before I took them off the cookie sheet. That turned out to be a big mistake also and they had now adhered to the pan. I could barely scrape them off the cookie sheet. Needless to say this batch of cookies hit garbage can almost immediately. There's always next weekend!

Chocolate Angel Food Cake

I made this for two reasons today. One, my mother's recipe book had an angel food recipe with ingredients and no directions; two it is Jim's birthday today and his mother used to make him a chocolate angel food cake with peanut butter frosting for his birthday every year. So it's a tradition. Both my sons love this cake also and we generally only have it for Jim's birthday. I was a little nervous to do this from scratch because I have usually done if with a box cake mix, but decided to try. I first had to find my angel food cake pan, using it only once a year it gets put away and I usually have to figure out where I stashed it from the year before. While I was looking for the cake pan, I put the dozen eggs on the counter to start warming them to room temperature. Egg whites beat up quicker when warm than if they are cold. I wasn't sure of the purpose of the Cream of Tartar in the recipe was for, but after some research it is to help the egg whites beat up better and give them more stability. I than had to search for another recipe because my mother's didn't have any directions and although she knew how to do this, I did not. The other recipe's called for superfine sugar or regular sugar put through a food processor to make it superfine. My mother's recipe said to sift the sugar five times. I was thinking of putting the sugar through the food processor, but decided to go the sifting route. It did seem to work a little. The sifted sugar was a little finer than the regular sugar. I than measured out all of the other ingredients before I started separating and mixing the eggs. My mother's recipe, as well as the other recipe's called for cake flour. I did purchase some because I know that cake flour works better for baking, although I usually don't purchase this extra for my regular baking. I did pretty well at separating the eggs with just the egg shell and moving the yolk back and forth. I only had a few shell pieces in the egg whites which I was able to retrieve. No crunchy angel food cake for Jim! The other recipe's stated to beat the eggs to medium peak. Now, I know what soft peak is (the peak bends over when the beater is lifted out of the egg white) and I know what hard peak is (the peak keeps standing up when the beater is lifted out of the egg white), but didn't know what medium peak was. Even googling it did not help and couldn't find a suitable example or definition, so I winged it. After the egg whites were ready I folded in the extra sugar, flour and cocoa and put it in the pan to bake. It came out of the oven looking beautiful and I put it upside down to cool-on a full beer bottle of course-which is what my mother used to do. The cake is a little denser than what I've tasted from the store, but still very good. Especially with the peanut butter frosting. I was thinking this was going to be more difficult to make, but it was more putzy than difficult and I would do it again. Although you end up with 12 egg yolks to pitch unless you save them for breakfast and a really cholesterol filled breakfast. I fried mine up and fed them to our dog. He needs the extra calories going into winter.

German Crepes?

We called them pancakes and used to frequently have them for supper instead of breakfast. They were flat, not fluffy, as big as your plate and slightly chewy. The recipe is very simple, but I called my sister Sandy to be sure. Two cups flour, two cups milk, one egg and 1/2 teaspoon salt. How simple is that? If you look at crepe recipes, it is basically the same, except crepes are usually smaller. After we got them on our plates, we put butter and syrup on them and rolled them up, and sliced them. I made them this morning for breakfast and were as good as I remembered.