Two Days Off, Two New Recipes from the Tee- Tiny Kitchen.

Day Off Number One found me contemplating a box of Knox gelatin. Once ,congealed salads and fruit molds filled the "Salad" sections of the venerable old Southern Junior League cookbooks such as "Southern Sideboards", "Charleston Receipts",and the "Memphis Cookbook". Jello was one of the four food groups back then. Ladies who lunched because they did not have to work ate "Avocado Mousse" at their favorite tearoom. If they lived in Jackson, Mississippi, a friend's cook might have served them "Ginger Ale Salad", composed of canned mandarin oranges, pears, peaches, grapes, and the ever useful crushed canned pineapple.

Here is an example of flavored gelatin in individual molds, waiting for 3 hours of set time in the refrigerator.

And here it appears ready to be composed-

Then, with the help of cold roasted beets flavored with Creole seasoning, pimento stuffed olives. marinated artichokes, a few greens, and the ritual dollop of Duke's mayonnaise, it appears on the table-

A luncheon fit for a debutante.



My molds were not made with Jello mix, but with gelatin powder, pomegranate juice, Ribena Black Currant syrup, and water. If I had had pomegranate seeds I would have added them.

For anyone interested:

1 cup of pomegranate juice and 1/2 cup of Ribena. If you cannot find Ribena use 1/2 cup more of pomegranate juice.

1/2 cup of cold water.

2 small envelopes of Knox gelatin.


Put the juice and the Ribena in a sauce pan and bring them to a boil. Mix the gelatin powder well into the cold water then add the mix to the hot juice and whisk well. Pour into individual molds (Mine were 3 inches), then allow to set in the fridge for two to three hours. Remove them from the metal molds by running a knife around the edge. Holding the mold upside down, run some very warm water over the bottom so that the gelatin mold will drop into your palm. When you serve it surround it with whatever you like, but do not omit the mayonnaise in the middle.






Day Number Two lunch was for a different demographic, and probably not Southern. Clearly not for any ladies trying to keep their figures. Here is food for the potluck, for the fire hall and the logging camp. Food out of the galley on a barge headed from New Orleans to St Louis. A meal that makes the best of 3 yellow potatoes, a small head of cabbage, 4 cloves of garlic, 1 1/2 cups of shredded cheese, and a package of smoked sausage I bought for half-price as a Manager's Special at Kroger.

To cook this-

1 small cabbage, shredded in a food processor grater blade.

3 Gold potatoes peeled and shredded, as above.

4 garlic cloves.

Salt, or sea salt to taste.

1 pound of smoked sausage, cut into 1/4 inch rounds.

1 1/2 cups shredded cheese. Monterrey Jack, Gruyere, Swiss. Any one of them. I used Gruyere. I will bet a milder cheddar might be good.

1 cup of water with a chicken broth cube dissolved in it.

Use two big skillets. Saute the potatoes in several tablespoons of olive oil and in 1/2 stick of melted butter. Toss to coat, add more oil if needed, then salt to taste, but not too heavily. Remove the skillet from the heat when the potatoes are soft and tasty.

Saute the cabbage in the other skillet in 1/2 of a stick of butter and several tablespoons of olive oil. Add salt to taste, then the garlic cloves, diced or crushed in a press. Toss to coat, then add 1 cup of water flavored with the broth cube. Cook on medium heat until the cabbage is cooked through and the broth has been reduced.


Layer half the cabbage on the bottom of a 9 inch casserole or glsss pie plate. Then add 1/3 of the smoked sausage rounds. Sprinkle 1/2 cup of the shredded cheese next, then top with all the cooked potatoes. Layer in 1/2 of the remaining sausage rounds, cover with the last of the shredded cabbage, and cover with the cheese. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

This should serve 4 large men.

What would Jesse Do?

These are Southern breakfast biscuits, and they are the real thing.

And Jesse Willis Lewis, a legendary cook of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, showed me his way to make them. Jesse was the family cook for Marshall Ballard, editor of the" New Orleans Item". Edith Ballard Watts, Mr Ballard's daughter, wrote a book about Jesse and his recipes and dinners, which she says dazzled opera tenors, Catholic bishops, Henry Luce, and H.L. Mencken, (the last no fan of the South, which he called "The Sahara of the Bozart"). The book is"Jesse's Book of Creole and Deep South Recipes".

Anyone who hates lard should click away now, for lard these biscuits have in abundance. On the other hand ,you might want to take a chance on something delicious that arguably might take ten minutes off your life in the distant future. The chances are that your doctor and Big Pharma may get you first when they prescribe you the Next Big Drug that just happens to have leukemia as an "adverse reaction". I would rather take my chances with the biscuits.

Jesse's recipe is very forgiving. I know this because it forgave me. I have the bad habit of looking at the ingredients and ignoring the directions. Regular cooking may overlook this but baking will smote you down every time. Just not with this recipe. I added the milk before I cut the lard into the flour. This created a doughy mess I had to cure by adding more flour. What was the worst that could happen I wondered? I can always give the biscuits, or whatever comes out of the oven in their place, to the beagle and the possums. And then I did something worse- I worked the lard into the dough with my fingers. For an eternity. I knew this would be fatal. Rigor mortis would set in after 5 minutes at 500 degrees. A Yankee kills another batch of biscuits-

But I didn't. Butter. Strawberry jam made from Portland, Tennessee strawberries. Lard heaven! I ate four biscuits, 2 Jimmy Dean sausages, and a fried egg. Then I drank a glass of pomegranate juice, which is supposed to be some kind of life preservative. Maybe breakfast would only shorten my life by five minutes, if the juice kicked in.


Jesse's Old Fashioned Hot Biscuits


2 cups of non-self -rising flour.

1 tsp salt.

1 teaspoon of sugar.

2 teaspoons of baking powder.

6 level tablespoons of lard.

1 cup sweet milk.



Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl.Then add the lard and cut it into the dough with the edge of a spoon until it is the size of peas. Then stir in the milk. Put flour on a board, put the dough on it, then roll the dough out till it is 1/2 inch thick. Cut out biscuits with a glass or a biscuit cutter. Place on a greased baking sheet and bake 10 t0 15 minutes at 500 degrees.

Makes 12 to 15 biscuits.


And remember- I did this backwards. And it still worked.

Miss Betsy's Carrot Vichyssoise

I intended to make conventional Vichyssoise today, but added garlic cloves and carrots to give the soup a new twist. And not only is this soup lovely to look at, it is lovely to eat. It is a winter soup, rich and filling. Not to mention simple to make. You need-

3 leeks (White portion of stalk), cut into small pieces.

4 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced.

3 medium carrots, peeled and diced.

2 15 oz cans chicken broth.

1 cup of water.

Sea salt, to taste.

1/4 cup of heavy cream.

1/3 stick of butter.

1/4 teaspoon Herbs de Provence.

3 peeled garlic cloves.

Put the broth and water in a large sauce pan. Add the vegetables, the butter, and the herbs. Cover and heat over low medium until all the vegetables are tender. Then strain the vegetables through a colander, puree them in a food processor and then add them back into the broth. Add the heavy cream and stir well. Taste, and salt as needed.

This should serve at least six.

"All the World's a Stage". Facebook and the Detritus of Drama.

People live now who think their lives deserve to be broadcast daily to anyone riding a mouse around the World Wide Web. That their readers might be DEA agents, background checkers, prospective employers, current employers, police detectives, ex-wives, wronged wives , girlfriends, co-workers, the Department of Homeland Security, and serial killers does not seem to occur to them. Like stained underwear on a clothes line, their embarrassments are out in the world for all to see. Their privacy, one of life's true Good Things, is gone. Squandered and abused. These people would rather be a character than possess character. No more is a veil drawn, no more is there the dignity of reticence.

What is more banal than an office affair? Its only originality the new ways it can make the innocent suffer. It is always the same story. Yet since Hell has no fury, the disdained wife now seeks a Cyber Jury and her husband's name, his girl friend's name, rocket at light speed out over the planet where every "friend" they claim can weigh in in Facebook's on-line Colosseum.

No drama too trivial.No incident too small. No lapse in judgement forgotten. Who needs the priest behind a screen when one can seek absolution and understanding from dozens of strangers?

Time for a Cyber Stoning! Off with his Reputation! Thumbs up and let her live! Thumbs down ,and let him die.

Oh- the things one overhears standing in line or sitting in the break room. There is only one decent reply to all of this.

"Silencio!"

The Annals of Nursing- Senior Year. A Prologue.

I read an article on line today that reports that a recent Gallup Poll of the public found nurses the most trusted professionals, and ten points ahead of doctors!

This is good news, if it is accurate, and nurses are in need of good news. For I, and every nurse my age that I know, are close to despair about the future of our profession. Across the country employers, stung by falling and failing government money, are declaring war on nurses' salaries and benefits. Nurses in California are striking hospitals that are threatening to eliminate paid sick leave and to take away the shift differentials that mitigate the miseries of working nights and weekends and holidays. Employers have grown bold, seeing the numbers of unemployed new graduate nurses, and they are not afraid to demand give backs from people they feel should be happy they have a job at all- I can remember one of my former nurse managers telling me that "hospitals can't afford us any more".

And soon, the situation will get worse. Hospitals stand to lose up to thirty percent of government reimbursement if the patients in those hospitals are not" satisfied" with their care. And they will lose even more if discharged patients end up coming right back to the hospital.

Not every patient can be satisfied. Not every patient can be fixed.

In some hospitals nurses must now wear phones so patients can call them directly. What happens when the nurse cannot answer the phone because she is doing a dressing change or giving insulin or talking to another one of her patients? The patient, or their family, is not satisfied. They call the supervisor to complain.

People with heart failure go home from the hospital, but cannot afford the medicine they need to keep them out of the hospital. Back in they will come, and the hospital and the people that work there will take the blame.

Discouraged, and without one idea how to fix this predicament, I look back now to 1971, and to what must have been a golden age for hospitals and health care. An age when squads of diploma nursing students staffed their hospitals for free. And who worked for $3.00 an hour when they became RNs. Who worked three out of four weekends and ten eight hour night shifts in a row. New nurses who needed no expensive orientation to wards they knew intimately. Nurses who had time to give patients back rubs because those nurses did not have to spend hours bar coding each medicine they gave and filling out eight pages of "documentation" on every patient they cared for. Nor had we yet entered the heart of The Tube Age, when nurses became jailers whose mantra was "Thou shall not pull out thy tubes." And oh how many tubes would be in our future, and they would get more care than the patients they were inserted in-

So let us return now to the antique days of September 1971. And I will leave you with the first sentence of the final chapter of my story of the old Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital School of Nursing.


In the fall of 1971 I entered my third and final year of nursing school-


To be continued.

Maple Hominy Custard

The American Heritage Cookbook has a recipe for an antique Yankee dessert called "Indian Pudding". It is yellow cornmeal flavored with molasses ,and without frills. I remember eating it once, but who fed it to me and where, I cannot remember. I have never made it myself, for it did not taste as good to me as it must have tasted to snowbound settlers of early New England who lived on farms along the Connecticut River ,and who kept forts such as the Old Fort Number 4 in Charlestown, New Hampshire to protect themselves from the Abnaki Indians. It is a" make do" recipe of pragmatic Yankee housewives.


Never the less, seeing the recipe set me to inventing the other afternoon. Why not, I thought, use hominy instead of cornmeal? Why not use a sweet flavoring more elegant and precious than plain molasses? Why not use maple syrup, the best sweet the North Country can provide-

I do not know how to make molasses. Nor could I refine sugar. But I do know how to make maple syrup, and I made several pints of it for my family in the winter of my twelfth year. My father had moved us to an old farmhouse in North Charlestown, New Hampshire. It had been our summer house, but my restless father had made it our all year home. It had a barn that had stanchions for a handful of cows, and a tiny patch of pasturage behind the house. The rest of our land was steep, wooded hillsides with granite cliffs that dropped to the Little Sugar River. There were no dairy cows anymore, but if there had been a market for porcupines, we would have been rich for they tunneled into our rocks to make their dens.


We had eight old maple trees along the Unity Road on the hill behind our house. I pounded in three taps to a tree and hung my sap buckets. Cold March nights and warmer days made the sap run, and every evening after I came home from school, I collected my sap and pored it into a big rectangular metal pan I heated over an open fire I kept down near the back side of our barn. I remember sitting there watching the distant red sunset across the Connecticut River and over the hills of Vermont. Gallons of sap boiled away to make a few cups of maple syrup. If we had fresh, clean snow we would toss the syrup on it where it congealed to "Sugar on Snow". Sometimes I finished the reduced sap on the stove in the house, and one night I boiled it too hard and ruined a batch-

But I digress, and need to get back to my recipe. I decided to make an egg custard with hominy and maple syrup. I wanted it to be simple and good and requiring nothing more than home made whipped cream on top- and someone happy to eat it.

It turned out well, and I plan on taking it to our Christmas night potluck at work.


Maple Hominy Custard.


29 oz white hominy, drained very well.

3/4 cup maple syrup

3 eggs

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/4 stick butter, melted.

Ground cardamon

Ground cinnamon


Puree the hominy in a food processor. Add the cream, the butter, and the maple syrup and mix well. Add the eggs and process for a minute or two. Pour the mixture into a nine inch tart or pie pan. Sprinkle on some ground cinnamon and ground cardamon. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes. Top with whipped cream. This should serve six or more after a winter weekend or holiday dinner.

Curried Sweet Potatoes with Coconut and Honey

I cooked this last evening with Japanese sweet potatoes I bought at K&S world Market. I could have as easily used regular sweet potatoes. I glazed them with a mixture of honey, ghee (Feel free to use butter instead), and red curry paste. Then, before wrapping them in foil and baking them at 350 degrees for an hour, I sprinkled a few teaspoons of very finely shredded coconut over them.
Very tasty. This makes enough for four.


3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced

1-2 teaspoons red curry paste, depending how spicy you want the glaze.

1/3 cup honey

1/3 -1/2 stick of butter or four or five tablespoons of ghee.

A couple tablespoons of finely shredded coconut.

Salt, to taste.

Melt the honey, the butter, and the curry paste in the microwave. Put the sweet potatoes in a bowl and pour the glaze over them. Toss well to coat. Sprinkle a little salt over them, and then the coconut. Bake in a baking dish with the potatoes sealed in foil.


What would go with this? Ham? Pork loin? Roast Chicken, or turkey? I think any one of them-