Cook Wannabee

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I genuinely enjoy eating egg salad sandwiches, ham, and tuna also. They are so easy to fix, that it is amazing there are not a lot of recipes on possible variations.

My question is this. What do you do when one of your family members cannot eat Mayo, or 1,000 Island salad dressing. The 1,000 Island makes it easy to fix the mix without a lot of worry. What do you use instead of those things, though?

I have been trying to think about that and have come up with some really strange ideas.
I have thought about using BBQ sauce - not with tuna, no thanks. I have also thought about using Caesar salad dressing, but it uses Parmesan cheese which my husband can’t eat. So, what do I do next? Haven’t figured it out, yet.

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I happen to love pickles of all sorts.

Gherkins, sweet pickles, dill pickles, polish dill pickles, pickled onions, pickled beets, pickled cantaloupe, pickled watermelon rind,…..I guess you get the idea here.

Not only do they do good on a juicy burger (that is another story), they are good by themselves. When I have a sore throat and nothing seems to help it, sucking on a pickle just like a lollipop will ease the pain in my throat. Of course you cannot always tell people to go suck on a pickle when they talk about their throats, though. They might think that you are weird or something.

I don’t care, I like pickles.

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Yup, I am talking about breakfast here. Of course you could also use this for a church luncheon, a meal at home, almost anything. Putting it in a casserole dish makes it handy.

6 eggs beaten
8 ox thinly sliced ham, chopped up
1/2 onion grated
1/2 lb. cheese cubes broken up
5 medium potatoes thinly sliced, not quite like hash browns

Fry the potatoes, onion and ham in the same pan until done, drain. Place in a baking dish that has been greased. Mix in the cheese, pour the ggs over the mixture, stir gently.

Bake in a 350′ oven for 15 minutes. YUM

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Egg Rolls can be used as appetizers, a side dish, or even if you like them a lot, as a main dish.

I used to wonder how they were made and how hard they could be to do. My Texas sister showed me one day. We had some canned meat (pork, chicken, turkey, shrimp seem to work best) that we shredded. She had me shred a head of regular cabbage (we didn’t want to get fancy and use Chinese cabbage). She also had some Chinese veggies in a can and bean sprouts in a can.

The shredded cabbage was slowly cooked in a pan with a little oil and seasoned with soy sauce when mostly done. The Chinese veggies and bean sprouts were also drained and then added when the cabbage was almost done. Mix it thoroughly to get all of the juices mixed. Fold in the shredded meat, add more soy sauce to taste. You could also add finely ground pepper if you want. When the cabbage is fully cooked, set the pot aside to slightly cool. When you get used to making these, you can vary the veggies used, and the flavorings used to have fun. Imagine chicken, bell peppers, onions. They would almost be like fajitas. You could add shredded cheese when rolling them up. YUM

Then get the packages of egg roll wrappers out of the fridge make a paste of flour and water for sealing the egg rolls them selves.

Sit all of this on the table and prepare to make egg rolls, and a mess.
Place a wrapper on a plate, place a spoonful of the mix on it. Slightly fold over two opposite corners on top of the spoonful of mix. Tuck a third corner over and around the mix, then roll up the egg roll until the wrapper has completely gone around. If it won’t go around, you have used too much stuffing mix, and might have to remove some in order to shape the egg roll. Use a dab of the flour paste to seal the last end onto the roll, set aside the completed roll and start on the next one.

Heat up some oil in a frying pan until it is hot. Gently place egg rolls into the pan to fry. Turning occasionally to avoid burning. When they are golden brown, they are done. Remember that the stuffing is already cooked, you are just cooking the wrapper.

These egg rolls can be frozen when cooked completely and microwaved later to heat them up. Each batch of egg rolls will make quite a few, if you have a big family, they can help with the preparation, and will probably have fun doing so. Imagination would be the only limit. Left overs could also be used when making these. With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, left over turkey is handy.

I wonder if this can be done with fruit, too? Good thought…..

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My grandmother gave me a book that has a lot of recipes in it. She gave it to me more than 25 years ago. The pages have gotten just as borwn as a paper sack, it is still readable however. It has a good recipe for drop biscuits. The name of the book is the Fanny Farmer Boston Cooking School Cook Book. It is filled with hundreds of good ideas. Any way here is the recipe written in a simplified manner.

Drop Biscuits

2 C Self-rising flour / or 2 c. all purpose flour with 3 Tb baking powder + 1tsp salt
1 1/4 c milk
2 Tb oil / I used melted oleo
mix thoroughly together
Drop by spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet.
Bake @ 425′ for 10-15 min.

The biscuits will be fluffy and very tasty. I will blog about this on another blog that I have but will mention the errors that I made when I first used this recipe.

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I know that I had mentioned earlier that I like squash, well here is another one.

Summer squash can be fixed in a lot of different ways: fried, soups, stews, casseroles, steamed, mixed with other vegetables, etc. One of my favorite ways is to sliced it thinly, dice or sliver up a yellow onion, and sauté them together in a frying pan.

After they are fixed they can be served with meatloaf, hamburger steak, fried chicken, almost anything. For a variation, you can also slice up carrots to cook with them at the same time.

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I am not sure if I have spelled this word correctly. My grandmother told me about it. She was born in Sweden and tried to teach me some of the recipes that she knew and grew up with.

Anyway, Ruttmusse (root-moose is a way to pronounce it)was explained to me as a mix of rutabagas and potatoes.

Boil until tender pieces of rutabagas, and white potatoes. When done, drain them, mash them together until thoroughly mashed. Add some butter, milk (or cream), and season with slat and pepper. It is a very tasty way to eat rutabagas. They are related to turnips, but with a stronger flavor. I also like them with just themselves and butter, salt, and pepper.

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I truly enjoy squash, Even as a child I enjoyed it. Butternut, acorn, summer, zucchini, almost any type of squash. I enjoyed many types of vegetables, especially green beans. Oh well, back to what I was going to write about. I had been given a couple of those spaghetti squash by my mother-in-law, she didn’t like them. Her loss, my gain.

Well, I looked at the recipe that was on it and thought, nope. I didn’t want to use brown sugar on something that to me would require salt and pepper. So, what I did was to split it, clean out the seeds, and then I nuked it. Thank God for the microwave! It has so many uses.

I placed it upside down in a bowl and nuked it for 4 minutes on high. When the timer went off, I got it out, it was soft, yippee. I scraped it and added some butter, salt, and white pepper. That was a great meal.

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