For a home cook I feel like I know my way around a kitchen. But everyone’s got their blind spots, and mine is baking. I don’t enjoy it and I’m not good at it, and despite a background in chemistry I’m especially bad at yeast breads. I can’t even make a decent pizza crust (although……
Ingredient: melted butter
Funeral Potatoes (California, 1997, adapted)
Funeral potatoes are an almost meme-worthy dish these days, one of the few mid-century canned-soup-and-cream casseroles that’s still aligned with the twenty-first century palate. I’ve never been to a funeral with refreshments, much less a full meal. The dreary name presumably stems from a custom of serving them at a post-service family meal, or perhaps……
Spam Puffs (adapted from Sunset Cook Book, 1949)
Say what you will but I’m a big fan of Spam. No irony, no poverty cuisine voyeurism, no pining for some lost Hawaiian vacation: fried Spam is a genuine treat for our family. At any given time we’ll have a half a dozen cans on hand, ready to whip up a quick batch of musubis……
Cheese Apple Sausage Brunch Tart (Wisconsin, 1989, adapted)
One of the things I appreciate most about Ascension Lutheran’s 1989 cookbook is that it devotes an entire section to brunch. Twelve pages. Thirty recipes. And a little bit of everything, not just subtle variants on a breakfast casserole. The Cheese Apple Sausage Tart is a delicious and hearty brunch dish and also checks all……