Johnny's Cookies

These are a big hit around my family at Christmas and originally came from my grandmother Gertrude Kielty.

1 cup shortening (I use butter)
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 3/4 cup sifted flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon soda
1/4 cup thick sour milk (I use sour cream)
3/4 cup pecan haves broken into pieces
1 cup candied cherries (a small container) cut into pieces.
1 pecan half for the top of each cookie

Mix all the ingredients together reserving the pecan halves for the cookie tops. Drop small teaspoonfuls of dough onto a greased cookie sheet. Place a pecan halve on top of each cookie. Bake @ 400 degrees for about 10-11 minutes.

Makes 3 dozen cookies or so.

HO HO HO!

This is a clipping from my grandmother's recipe book, which, according to my mother, came from the Jamestown, ND newspaper sometime before 1934, when my grandfather died of pneumonia. This recipe is interesting, because one, it assume the reader can cook and bake, and two, it assumes you'll find some business for 10 egg whites (like containerizing them and freezing them for the rest of eternity -- that's what I'm planning), and three, that you'll know what sort of flavoring might be good.

Any way, this was a staple christmas favorite in my family from the 1920's until well before my grandmother passed in 1993 (at 97). It's a bit of a simple dough deep fried and coated with sugar. I don't think my grandmother used lard (my mother says peanut oil, but I am thinking crisco), but I did. The recipe was lost in a pile of stuff at my mother's, but after a fairly long search today, I found this little scrap of paper.

And it says:

Fattigmand (sic, Fattigmann is more common)

10 egg yolks
2 eggs, whole
10 teaspoons sugar
10 teaspoons cream
Any flavoring can be used

Beat yolks and whole eggs; add sugar and beat. Add cream, and enough flour to roll like cookies. Roll very thin; cut in diamond shapes, punch holes with end of knife, and fry in deep (very hot) lard.

So I made them. It wasn't until I took a stab at poke holes in the dough with tip of knife and heard the scrape of the knife against the board that I began to hear my grandmother talking in my head ... "Keep the board clean, with a thin dust of flour, roll this really thin. Make sure the oil is hot, you can tell by the way the water boils off as soon as it hits the oil". I could all of the sudden smell the smeels of her kitchen -- the mysterious starting to roll back, exposing themselves.

Now if I could just find the recipe for the sticky buns ...

Note: It turns out my memory of events was a bit off, my ex-wife claims that she's never seen these, which means my grandmother had stopped making them before 1983-ish.

Miso Soup

Here is Fritz's contribution to the soup cookbook. Except for adding tofu -- This is his recipe as posted.

Miso soup
By Fritz

Shawn asked for soup recipes from around the world . I'm happy to oblige.Miso is basic, simple to make, and yummy to me. Here's how I do it.

Start water to boil.
Mix in a spoonful or four of miso paste. I like the strong-flavored aka or 'red' miso paste.
Add chopped scallions, mushrooms, soft tofu (added by me) and/or kombu seaweed.
When the miso paste is completely dissolved, remove from heat and dissolve in about a teaspoon of instant dashi powder.

My grandmother would sometimes boil up a big pot of clams and then make miso soup using the clam stock. She also didn't use instant hondashi -- she kept dried, moldy fish hanging on the kitchen wall, and she'd scrape the moldy fish flesh straight into the soup pot. Good stuff before and after a bike ride.Because of the dead-fish flavor, Japanese miso soup typically is not vegetarian. Link to his post.

I look Interesting in Korean

I was looking at the referrals to my blog and I found someone using the Korean version of Google to find my Korean Soup post. The google page offered to translate me into Korean. I of course had to see it. One thing I noticed is that none of the Korean words are translated, which I found quite funny.