In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When my mother, who had been raised on kosher half-sour pickles, first tried bread-and-butters, she was immediately overwhelmed. For someone who was used to the tart flavor of Northeastern dills and half-sours, the Southern sweetness of the bread-and-butters were an absolute delight.
Through a combination of compliments and guile, she managed to get hold of our friend Millie's recipe. From that year on, we had a huge picklefest every summer, when we'd spend two or three days putting up bread-and-butter pickles.
While these are extremely sweet pickles, I have kept the recipe almost exactly the way my mom made it. This is partly due to the necessities of pickling, and partially due to a sense of tradition. Mostly, though, it's due to the fact that I regularly swap these pickles out for gherkins or sweet pickle relish.
Get the recipe for bread-and-butter pickles after the jump.
Hydrox is one of the ingredients. Photo: Chazz Layne/flickr
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I was a kid, Creme de Menthe was a pretty big deal. A local restaurant used to make parfaits that were loaded with the stuff, and the mix of vanilla ice cream and super-sweet mint liqueur soon entered my pantheon of top childhood delights.
When it came time to update my Aunt Evie's recipe for Grasshopper Cake, I played with the idea of kicking it up a notch, but higher level mint liqueurs and Godiva chocolate liqueur seemed excessive, like putting truffles on a hamburger. In the end, half of the joy of this boozy, sweet concoction lies in the humble nature of its ingredients.
While my family traditionally made this dish in a pie plate, I opted to go for a springform pan. The crust, which I deliberately left uneven, rose and fell to reveal the bright green filling, and the crumbled cookies on top offered a coarse yet tantalizing finish. Needless to say, this one disappeared pretty quickly!
Get the recipe for Grasshopper Cake after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I was a kid, pea season was a mixed blessing. On the bright side, it meant that we would get fresh sweet peas on the table. Whether from our family garden or from a local farmers' market, the just-harvested peas were invariably sweet, crunchy and delicious. On the other hand, our regular servings of fresh peas translated into hours spent on the porch shelling the bright green pods. Even under the best circumstances, it was dull, tedious work.
My mother's pea salad recipe, which combines the sweetness of peas with the light flavor of dill, tended to overshadow the peas with a heavy helping of sour cream, mayonnaise and scallions. My modified version, included below, lets the flavor of the peas shine through, but retains the original's cool summer flavors.
Get the recipe for dilled pea salad after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I have access to fresh produce, cucumber season becomes one of my favorite times of the year. Although it runs from May to August, the wonderful green beauties won't reach their full flourish until later in the summer. Still, it's hard to resist the cool, summery flavor of the first cukes of the season. With that in mind, I decided to flip through my family cookbook in search of some great cucumber recipes.
My Aunt Renie's cucumber salad manages to halve the distance between sharp and smooth, sweet and sour, creamy and intense. In my adjusted version, I cut back on the onions, switched in Greek yogurt and tossed in some fresh dill.
The final version had the soothing coolness of a traditional cucumber salad, but also retained a nice vinegar tang that keeps me on my toes. This is great by itself, or as an accompaniment to barbecue or any other strongly seasoned dish.
Towering, craggy and full of inviting nooks and crannies, this mountain of white chocolate and sour cherry scones is one that cries out to be scaled.
Baked by the estimable David Lebovitz, they are, as OutKast might sing, the prototype for the perfect scone, studded with an abundance of cherries, dusted with just the enough sugar for a satisfying crunch and harboring untold depths of white chocolate.
Lebovitz admits to devouring almost two batches in the space of a week; based upon the evidence presented above, who could blame him?
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When I came across a recipe for "Swiss Squares" in my family's cookbook, I got excited. Although the dish seemed like a basic chocolate cake recipe, it used sour cream for leavening. As this is a pretty uncommon choice, I wanted to see its effect on the product.
Overall, I found that the bars were a bit richer than expected, with a nice moist crumb. In my finished version, I massively increased the chocolate and dolled up the frosting. Still, at its heart, this is a recipe for a rich chocolate cake. Then again, even the simplest cake can be pretty profound!
Just in time for your next Saturday night pasta party, a new jarred sauce that's worth a first taste and second helping has appeared on store shelves. Mezzetta, the company famous for such glass-jarred wonders as snappy peperoncini and an addictive giardiniera, has launched Napa Valley Bistro, a line of pasta sauces prepared with Napa Valley wines. We were glad to cook up a sample sent our way and toss it with some noodles. Hey, anything for our readers – especially if it involves eating spaghetti.
We tried two versions: basic marinara and the creamy version. The saucy results are after the jump.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
In my family cookbook, there is a recipe for "Mabel's Spinach Spread," a gelatin-thickened dip that was developed by one of my Aunt Evie's foodie friends. Although the original concoction contains a startling quantity of mayonnaise and a lot of added salt, the basic idea of a molded-gelatin dip was somewhat compelling. Gelatin, after all, is basically a fat-free, sugar-free protein that is, allegedly, great for hair and fingernails. Best of all, it can help a dip to stiffen up without the introduction of cream cheese or some other dense fat.
This recipe combines a basic spinach spread with some Greek flavor notes. The yogurt base is creamy, yet fat free, and the feta greatly reduces the need for added salt. Best of all, the fresh flavors of this dip make it a great, easy-to-prepare snack for long summer afternoons. The recipe after the jump.
Whoopie pies are one of those wonderful concoctions of debatable origin and undebatable deliciousness. A few months ago, a piece in the New York Times proclaimed it was having "its moment," though plenty of its champions knew full well that the perennial classic needed no such official declaration.
This photo of a mint whoopie pie from This Chick Bakes beautifully illustrates the treat's timeless appeal, and looks like it has all of the hallmarks of whoopie pie greatness, with cakey chocolate layers sandwiching just the right amount of creamy mint filling. The chocolate-mint combination points to the endless flavor possibilities that the treats present to the adventurous sweet tooth. Though originally simple snacks created by the Pennsylvania Amish, today's bakers take them in all sorts of inspired directions. And if this photo is any hint, this could taste like the best peppermint patty on the planet, unquestionably worthy of the shout of joy its name entails.
One of the simplest French dishes is also among the most surefire crowd-pleasers -- the croque monsieur. At a holiday dinner last year a room erupted into moans of pleasure when these were served. All for a ham and cheese sandwich!
The name of this crisp and creamy treat derives from the French verb "croquer," which means "to crunch," and the word "monsieur," for "mister." Together they make "Mr. Crunch," which doesn't sound nearly as appetizing as en Francais, in which seems an elegant name worthy of its flavor and Proustian roots. (The meal first popped up in literature in Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time.")
This potato fritter looks, in our humble opinion, exactly as a potato fritter should.
It's crispy around the edges with little shreds of potato and sweet potato trailing seductively from a perfectly golden brown, tender center. It sort of reminds us of the sun, or, less abstractly, of what we'd like to be eating right now. The fact that this fritter's creator, Molly Watson of The Dinner Files, originally intended for this to be a potato latke makes us love it even more.
We know the pain and sorrow of potato latkes -- indeed, our mother's first and only attempt to make the starchy little devils resulted in an unscheduled visit from the fire department -- so we can sympathize with the myriad frustrations Ms. Watson describes on her blog. And we can also relate to the unexpected joys of happy kitchen accidents that yield gorgeous fritters like this one, particularly if they're accompanied by a few spoonfuls of applesauce or tangy Greek yogurt. So please, go fritter some time away -- yes, we went there -- with Molly.
Looking at this makes us want to dive headfirst into a vat of thick, luxurious ice cream and spend the entire summer there.
The idea of ice cream on its own is refreshing enough, but the idea of ginger ice cream -- presented here by the lovely duo behind Rec(ession)ipes -- is a particularly palate-cleansing one. Ginger, a digestive aid, has been soothing stomachs and clearing sinuses for centuries. It's the perfect foil for the rich, heavy cream and eggs called for in most ice cream recipes. Texture-wise, too, it makes a happy bedfellow: biting down on a chunk of candied ginger is a curiously satisfying experience, like finding the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Altogether, the idea of ginger ice cream leaves us so ferklempt that we call upon poet Wallace Stevens to find the words that we cannot: "The only emperor," he once wrote, "is the emperor of ice cream."
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
Looking back on my childhood, I can remember few potluck dinners that didn't feature some version of Jell-O. While my mother somehow missed out on this particular 1970s cultural phenomenon, every one of our neighbors and friends had some unique, idiosyncratic method for serving the famous gelled fruit dessert. Moreover, since I didn't get it at home, every bizarre concoction was an exciting culinary thrill for me.
Searching through my family cookbook, I was pleased to find what I am now convinced is the ultimate Jell-O dessert. The creator, Karen Mono Little, wasn't a blood relative, but her close friendship with my Aunt Evie (and amazing kitchen wizardry) gained her a place in our collection of family recipes. Although my updated version of her dessert is more naturally flavored and has much less sugar, I have to admit that it also lacks some of the savage, addictive intensity of the original. After the jump, I've included Karen's recipe as well as my own. Enjoy!
This may be the cherriest piece of cherry pie we've ever laid eyes on.
The cherries are so big and bright and alive they're practically winking at us. We know food porn when we see it, and in this case we applaud Danny from Food in Mouth for going there somewhat fearlessly, transforming a slightly garish-looking slice from the Little Pie Company into this bit of in-your-face decadence. The best part is the plastic fork: Actual silverware would have implied that the pie was consumed in a delicate and restrained manner. If this photo is any indication, it certainly was not. "This," the photo seems to say, "is pie made for gobbling." Preferably on a checkered picnic blanket, crumbs flying everywhere, or standing in front of the fridge scooped into the palm of your hand when silverware just seems too far away.
As winter yields to spring, farmers' markets teem with bright produce and blooms shed their pollen, allergy sufferers experience the first sneezes of the season. While over-the-counter and prescribed drugs offer some level of comfort, they also come with a hefty price tag and slew of side effects.
Though science is far from conclusive on this front, many homeopaths think there may be another (edible) option. Some allergy battlers have found that an old folk remedy of eating local honey can help reduce the severity of their reactions. The logic goes like this: bees in an area collect nectar from the same plants that cause allergies, and honey produced from that nectar contains microscopic quantities of the allergens. By consuming small amounts of the honey, sufferers may be administering a form of homespun immunotherapy.
Others dispute the effectiveness of this treatment, and even its supporters acknowledge that honey isn't an instant fix. Traditionally, allergy sufferers consume small amounts of it every day for an extended period of time in order to build up resistance to allergens. (Some even warn that local honey can actually set off reactions. Be sure to check with your doctor if you are considering this method of handling allergies.)
This is all a long way of saying that we have a delectable honey liqueur recipe for the allergic and the resistant alike. Krupnikas, a delicious Eastern European liqueur made from spices, honey and grain alcohol, makes an aromatic, golden-hued tipple that can be drunk warm in the fall or on the rocks in the summer. With a spicy flavor and bright glow, it is a great way to celebrate the arrival of (a hopefully sneeze-free) spring.
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
Towering, craggy and full of inviting nooks and crannies, this mountain of white chocolate and sour cherry 
Just in time for your next Saturday night pasta party, a new jarred sauce that's worth a first taste and second helping has appeared on store shelves. 
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
As winter yields to spring, farmers' markets teem with bright produce and blooms shed their pollen, allergy sufferers experience the first sneezes of the season. While over-the-counter and prescribed drugs offer some level of comfort, they also come with a hefty price tag and slew of side effects.
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