sketches of my day May 2008 - Nov 2010

October 15, 2009

biscuits

Yield: 12 biscuits

8 ounces of sour cream

2 sticks of butter

2 cups self rising flour

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Spoon into ungreased muffin tin. Bake at 400 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes.

I was checking out the Almanac this morning and stumbled across this recipe. I have not tried it, but I certainly will. I think this would work with fig preserves and an autumn morning.

yum,

p.s.

October 16, 2009 

Brown Bags

I was frying potatoes last Friday night for potato sandwiches (my dad was from Texas/ Oklahoma and potato sandwiches were quiet the thing there). Anyway, I did not have any paper towels to put them on to drain – OMG – so I used a brown paper bag (not easy to find in this elegant era of the "Wal Mart Bag").Three of my kids were in the kitchen with me then and were quiet taken with this resourceful idea of the brown paper bag soaking up the oil. I started thinking about my childhood and realized my mother called upon the service of the brown “sac” on many an occasion. I wonder how surprised my children would be to know that after the brown paper bag brought in the groceries, it sometimes ended its life as a garbage bag? Sometimes, when you picked it up to throw away, the bottom would literally fall out if wet Community Coffee grinds settled there.On Sundays, it is where my mom  shook the chicken to be fried. It was essential when we went on vacation - folded beach towels and our picnic lunch were safe inside the brown bags in neat rows in the trunk of the LTD.

  It got me to thinking about what point in my life plastic trash bags were introduced into our homes and subsequently into our landfills. I goggled it: “Union Carbide manufactured the first green garbage bags under the name Glad Garbage bags for home use in the late 1960s” .They were green (literally, not ecologically).

I continued to think more about how things used to be in my mother’s kitchen. I thought of how she could prepare a home cooked meal (the only kind there ever was) without a chest freezer full of meat and a walk in pantry but with only a small freezer at the top of the Kenmore icebox that shared space with 3 aluminum ice trays and two shelves in the kitchen cabinets lined with a floral shelf paper where can goods and staples sat. Seems to me we weren’t nearly as needy (euphemism) or wasteful then. I certainly speak for myself in a haze of shame on this subject. I have a chest freezer with a huge ration of unidentifiable carcasses at the bottom of it and my pantry is stocked for Armageddon. I also have a garden. Do we need more stuff now or what?  I am thinking of my mother often and how she could easily survive this economic climate of uncertainty, because of the frugal way she chose to live her life.

in the words of Fats Domino, "now ain't that ashame?"

check out this web site for some ideas

http://www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/article_cdo/aid/397335/jewish/Uses-for-Brown-Paper-Bags.htm

peace,

p.s.