May Breakfasts are a Rhode Island tradition. Churches, fire stations and community groups hold them each year all over the state.
Our local one in town is held at the "red church" either right on May 1st or as close to that date as possible.
It was cold and wet this morning but the food and coffee warmed us right up:
scrambled eggs
bacon and sausage
pancakes
hash browns
blueberry coffee cake
fruit and juice
coffee
I spent last July in Waterside, New Brunswick, Canada, at my parents' summer place bought back in 1966. Waterside is right on the Bay of Fundy and has a population of 100.
If you are living or staying in Waterside one of your nearby go-to villages is Hillsborough, population 1,962. The bank is there. You can go to great auctions at the Hillsborough Kiwanis Club, you've got several restaurants to choose from and there's even a museum. It's a happening place.
Last year the New Brunswick Women's Institute was celebrating its 100th Anniversary and in honor of this milestone the Hillsborough branch published a cookbook. Of course I bought one. Besides some winning recipes, I noticed that sprinkled throughout the cookbook were tidbits of New Brunswick wisdom on life, weather, gardening and cleaning.
Here are some of the best:
~ Enjoy the pleasures of gardening or don't bother doing one ~
~ Use ketchup to clean silverware ~
~ Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning ~
~ Always have something to do, something to get up for each morning ~
~ Grass stains: use molasses, let stand, then wash ~
~ Keep digging at your garden and keep it
loose between plantings ~
~ Mackerel sky: not long wet and not long dry ~
~ To remove pen stains on clothing or crayon marks
on the wall, take the outside of a cucumber
and slowly use it to erase the stains ~
~ Follow the Canadian food hints and keep active
in your personal life ~
~ Put vinegar on rags to keep deer out of the garden ~
~ Blueberry stains: soak in milk ~
~ If you are retired, adopt hobbies with up and going activities. Avoid sitting down and too much napping as it is not good ~
~ To deodorize shoes, place sheets of Bounce in them overnight ~
I am always on the look-out for terrific things to bake and this fills the bill. This recipe is incredibly easy, requires no mixer and turns out perfectly every time. I found it in two places almost at the same time and one of the sources called it "Swedish Visiting Cake". The reason? Because you can have this recipe baking in the oven between the time you see your visitors at your gate and they are knocking on your door!
Swedish Visiting Cake
325 degree oven Butter a 9x13 inch baking pan
Mix the following ingredients together thoroughly:
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
4 large room temperature eggs
2 sticks unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
2 teaspoons almond extract
Spread this batter in the pan evenly.
Sprinkle about 1/3 cup sliced almonds over the batter and then sprinkle about 1 tablespoon sugar over the almonds.
Bake for 30 minutes or until the cake tests done with a toothpick and is golden brown around the edges. Cool, and cut into cake-sized squares or into bar-sized treats (about 24 of these). Swedish Visiting Cake is perfect with tea or coffee, it freezes well and I doubt anyone you serve it to will have tasted it before!
My sister Beth has been visiting for the holidays and we both love to cook and bake. We just whipped up a batch of delicious, unusual jam. Probably nobody you know has tasted this before so this is a delightful gift to give special people. It has a gorgeous, clear-red appearance and it is very easy to make.
Here it is:
1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise
1 (12 oz) bag fresh cranberries
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup fresh orange juice
1/2 cup water
Scrape vanilla seeds from pod into a heavy saucepan. Add pod and remaining ingredients and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until thick, about 20 minutes.
Jam will thicken as it cools.
Puree jam in a food mill set over a bowl, discarding skins and pod.
Pour into sterilized jars and seal. Makes 2 cups.
My grandmother was born in Finland so I am part Scandinavian. My grandmother, although Finnish, spoke Swedish to her mother on the telephone and most of the traditions and food around my grandmother's house at Christmas, especially, were Swedish.
I love Swedish anything. Swedish design in textiles, hand knit sweaters, Christmas decorations, furniture....Ikea is my favorite store. Lately I've been looking on eBay and at flea markets and have turned up some charming Swedish finds:
.......from an auction in Sweden, a great copper mold featuring a Swedish Dala horse and a handsome striped handwoven table runner.......
and a box of old recipe cards called "Ing's Swedish Kitchen Notes"!
We've also had a long-standing Scandinavian baking tradition going. Long ago my grandmother, whom we called "Mimi", taught my husband, Steve, how to make her famous Swedish biscuits, which are divine cardamom-scented breakfast rolls with a buttery-sugary top. Steve is the yeast-dough baker in the family and these are quite a project but well worth the all-day effort. He also does Finnish Nishua braided breakfast bread at Christmas for us, also cardamom-scented. Cardamom has got to be the national spice of Scandinavia.
What has been fun for me in the last year or so is the discovery of several Scandinavian baking books with a huge variety of delights to make that don't involve yeast - my kind of baking. One of the best recipes has been little almond shells made in tiny Swedish molds which are filled with whipped cream and topped with lingonberries. Here's what the molds look like:
I've found recipes for and made cardamom-almond bundt cake, midsommer almond cake, Swedish thin pancakes and crumb-topped cardamom coffee cake - all wonderful and so Scandinavian! Gearing up for the holidays, I've earmarked some new Swedish gingerbread cookie recipes - lots to choose from. Below is apparently the most popular baking book in Sweden, and also a Swedish tomte (little gnome) cookie cutter I just found at a resale shop.
We have a south-facing house with an enclosed unheated porch near the garage. Over the years we've lived here I've found this space to be so useful. It gets full sun most of the day and no matter how cold it gets the temperature in the room doesn't fall below freezing. I can put the cooked remnants of the Thanksgiving turkey out there if my refrigerator is full, or start soup stock, cool it off on the porch overnight and complete it the next day. For a large upcoming dinner if I find myself with too many fresh vegetables to squeeze into the refrigerator bins, they stay out in the cold porch.
This space functions very much like one my grandmother had in her house - an unheated staircase next to her kitchen. She used this constantly for such things as cooling off pies, storing apples and I'm sure, keeping the turkey after its debut at the holiday table.
The cold porch also allows me to over-winter container plants from the summer deck and store dried hydrangeas. I've got a large rosemary plant and two Swedish ivy plants out there, all of which have been flowering since August!
Last July I did a posting on an easy way to make pickled hot peppers. It's pickling season again so I thought I'd post photos of what these peppers look like.
The first photo is of a jar just made - the peppers are bright green and red. These need to spend two weeks or more in the refrigerator to become pickled. The second photo is of a jar made months ago - the colors of the peppers (more drab) indicate the pickling process is complete. Once the peppers are pickled they last almost indefinitely in the refrigerator. I have some from last summer in my refrigerator right now and they are still great.
Some time ago we had quite a large vegetable garden. We would use the vegetables we grew not only in cooking and baking but we preserved them by doing things like canning relish, freezing tomato sauce or drying onions.
We don't have a vegetable garden anymore but our fondness for fresh vegetables hasn't changed. Solution - farmstands! We have a great one a few miles away and it makes a fine runner-up to the real thing. Here's what I "picked" for dinner tonight:
We've done a brunch the last two years and find we really like this approach - lots of creativity possible with a menu like this and the dishes are done by 3 pm instead of 7pm!
The Swedish biscuits below are a recipe from my grandmother, executed beautifully by my husband, Steve. The cake is a fantastic lemon ginger pound cake from Martha Stewart, one of the best pound cakes I've ever made to be sure. Many other items on the menu.......very enjoyable!
