I don’t know about you, but my grandma is not much of a baker. Or a cook. In fact, if it can’t be cooked in a microwave, she’s really not that interested. However, someone at Simply Delicious must have had a grandma who liked to bake, since they included 17-36: Grandma’s Spice Cake.
I suppose they called it Grandma’s Spice Cake because it’s “old-fashioned”. Regardless of if an actual grandma baked/created this, it’s actually pretty good.
While I was cooking 4-12: Cheesy Sliced Baked Potatoes, I also was working on this recipe–however be careful with this one: it takes a WHILE to make. 🕰
This recipe takes 2+ hours–most of which is just it baking in the oven. Just an FYI. 🙂
5-23: Cheese Pie with Tomatoes comes with a bit of a story. About 10 years ago, I spent a week in Chattanooga, Tennessee with my college friend/roommate and his family. His aunt (who was hosting us) attempted to teach me some of her Southern-style recipes while we were there, and one of them was something called “tomato pie”.
Her tomato pie involved a pie crust, tomatoes, a JAR of Hellmann’s (it was the South), and a whole bag of shredded cheese. This one is slightly less heart-attack-inducing.
Here’s a yummy take on baked potatoes. These have been done before, but I’ve seen them referred to as hasselback potatoes.
Most of the hasselback potato recipes you’ll find don’t have cheese on top, so props to Simply Delicious for thinking outside the potato box. Or bag, as it were.
I grew up with turkey meatloaf. You probably grew up with some version of a loaf of meat. 9-28: Stuffed Meatloaf doesn’t stray too far from the traditional mold.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too thrilled if the planned dinner for a party was a meatloaf. Don’t get me wrong, I’d appreciate the gesture. However, it’s tough to get excited about…meatloaf.
7-28: Pork Chops with Rosemary is a pretty simple pork chop recipe that’s good for a quick dinner. We buy the big packs of chops from Costco, so we always have to come up with different ways to prepare them.
Along with the abundance of pork, we’ve been growing and drying our own rosemary–it’s WAY more potent and flavorful than the packaged stuff from the market. If you have to choose, go with the fresh over the dried–it’ll taste so much better.
Here’s one I’ve made in the past–there’s even my Sharpie notations to prove it. I remember making 6-40: Peppercorn Chicken Breasts for my mom, since she’s not a red meat eater and I was making another recipe from this book for everyone else that was heavy on meat. I’ll cover that one eventually, and update this to reflect that. 😉
My notations claim that it’s easy. It is, when you use the right ingredients. If you don’t, it gets a bit tougher…
The other recipe I cooked before I took an extended break (the first being 3-2: New England Clam Chowder) would be these Cheese Sticks. I think this was one of those “burn off leftover ingredients” recipes.
Think of these Cheese Sticks as kind of like big Cheetos. This recipe is Card #15 in Subgroup #5 (Eggs & Cheese), found in Book 1.
3-2: New England Clam Chowder is one of two recipes that I cooked and photographed before I took an extended break from cooking for this project. Therefore, my memories of the process of this dish may be a little fuzzy, but I think I’ll make some sense of it.
Clam chowder is something that I’ve loved since I was a kid. My husband is from New England and when we go back to visit, it’s always an anticipated treat. We made a pretty decent clam chowder in the restaurant I worked at, too, and this recipe comes pretty close.
Of course, it’s mandatory that it be referred to as chowdah–say it right!
Um, hi.
It’s been a while. A LONG WHILE. Anyone still left reading probably thought I gave up/got bored a long time ago. And truth be told, I did. I’ve spent the last year moving 400+ miles, leaving an old career, starting a new one, working as a line cook in a busy full-service restaurant, meeting new people, and learning my way around a new city. With all of this upheaval, it was tough to keep this thing going, and I’ve let it fall by the wayside.
There’s been a lot of tears, a lot of laughs, and a lot of changes. But one thing has remained constant: I still love to cook. So much so, that I’ve made it my new career. However, I’m no Top Chef, and I’ve learned that there are parts of the life I like, and some I don’t. One of those things I’m not a huge fan of is the hours–it’s really tough to work different hours from everyone else in your life. It’s also difficult to want to cook when you’ve spent hours in the back of a restaurant kitchen keeping up with its intense demands.
Where I’m going with this long rambling uninteresting mess is that I’m about a month into a new culinary job that has much better hours/pay and doesn’t leave me wanting to run away from all things cooking when I get home. And I realize that even though I’ve spent 25+ years cooking in some capacity, I definitely still have a lot to learn and practice. So I’m kicking the tires, dusting off this old project, and restarting it again. I WILL finish cooking my way through this book, even if it takes me the rest of my life. So there.
Sorry it took me so long to come back. If you’re still there, thank you. If you’re finding this days, weeks, months, years from now, thank you too.
Let’s get this thing going again. Stay tuned. 😉