I must have mom on my mind today. I woke up craving some of those older recipes she used to make. I raided her recipe box and decided to make her recipe for her dilly bread and also made the recipe for Coy's Steakhouse's salad dressing. Coy's is a Hot Springs icon. The best thing in the world was to eat some saltine crackers with their dressing while you were waiting on your meal to arrive. Then I came across a quiche recipe and I remembered that I have a recipe from the Stonehorse Cafe in Tulsa. Stonehorse has the best quiche I've ever had. The only thing I really changed was I decided to make a crustless quiche. It was a decision based on justifying the amount of carbs we'll be consuming. If I'm going to consume carbs I'd rather have mom's dilly bread than a crust underneath the quiche.
Don't you love recipes that have items on the ingredient list that you don't ever hear of anymore? Things like oleo make me smile. Mom's recipes are full of ingredients that leave me scratching my head. The Coy's salad dressing recipe called for... a cup of salad dressing. what the heck? I assume it was meant to be something like Miracle Whip. Because what I'm MAKING is salad dressing how can I ADD salad dressing. It also called for a tsp. of Monosodium Glutamate (MSG). That's not really anything I keep in my spice cabinet so I had to alter that recipe a little bit.
Don't ask me why... but I am NOT a baker. It never fails that I hurry through a recipe and either omit or over add an ingredient. In the case of bread my problem is I always kill the yeast. And I'm aware of it. I try but it's almost made the problem worse. I try too hard. Water not warm enough, water too hot.. I can't win. But after a long hiatus from bread baking I'm going to try again. As I type this I have the bowl covered with a kitchen towel sitting on the table so it can rise. I feel like I need to say tee towel like mom would. Is it T towel? tea towel, tee towel? hmmm... anyway!
It's sittin' over there hopefully growing. We shall see. I love the smell of yeast and of dough. It is the smell of my childhood. All of you who've ever been in mom's kitchen know it smelled like bread baking. I mean ALL the time. It was wonderful.
While I was strolling down memory lane I decided to make some sun tea. My before dinner chore when I was really little was to run out and get mint leaves for our tea. Mom would say "get six leaves" and I'd go out and very carefully choose and count SIX leaves (or however many we needed that day.) We didn't have fresh lemons very often but we always had mint growing like crazy. She always sent me on simple errands like that and I loved doing them.
Stayed tuned for recipes tomorrow! :)
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