I thought that going into the weekend you might want a recipe for a soup that is easy, hearty and most of all yummy.  And there’s a good chance that you already have most, if not all, of the ingredients on hand.  What I love about this bean soup is that it calls for vinegar which gives it an unexpected zing.

Aside:   This recipe comes from my “big tattered envelope file” — only the best of the best, tried-and-true recipes go there.  Some are scrawled on scraps of paper, others clipped out of magazines or newspapers and just now it occurs to me that some of these recipes are about 20 years old. I know the crab cakes recipe is on a blue post it note and the bean soup is on yellow paper folded in half.  They are curled, frayed, have food on them and are a disorderly mess, but it works for me.  How do y’all keep your “go to” recipes?

The recipe suggests that you make this soup in a crock pot, but on many occasions I have forgotten to get it started early on, so I just make it atop the stove, get it good and hot and it’s still yummy.

Ridiculously Easy Three Bean Soup

1 pound of ground beef, browned with one small diced onion

½ lb of bacon, fried and crumbled

1 big can of baked beans (I like Bush’s Maple best for this recipe).

2 cans of white beans

½ cup of brown sugar

½ cup of vinegar

1 Tablespoon of molasses

Do not drain the beans. Put all in a crock pot and slow cook for several hours.

The combination of the brown sugar and vinegar gives this soup a wonderful twist that makes it different from your standard bean soup.

Now here are some variations that I make. Instead of frying up 1/2 a pound of bacon, I use a teaspoon or so of liquid smoke which you can find in the grocery store near the barbeque sauces and other condiments. I want the smoky bacon flavor, but my cholesterol is off the charts so I try to limit bacon and I have found that I don’t really miss it that much in this recipe.

If I don’t have molasses on hand, I’ll use a little maple syrup instead, but I think the molasses are better.  Plus molasses, particularly blackstrap molasses, are a good source of iron which is often deficient in the diets of most women.

I have on occasion forgotten the onion and didn’t miss it.

Cooking is one part art and one part improv.

Have a great weekend!

If you want people to like you better,  make these biscuits.

Cheese Garlic Biscuits (or Red Lobster Biscuits)

2 cups of buttermilk baking mix (I use Pioneer.)

1 cup of grated cheese

2/3 cup of milk

Mix it up. Yes, that’s all, mix it up.

Dough will be thick. Drop on lightly greased cookie sheet with a spoon.

Bake at 400 for about 8-10 minutes till peaks begin to brown.

As soon as you taken them out of the oven brush them liberally with a mixture of melted butter, garlic powder and salt.

Antique Mommy’s Awesomely Good Herbed Butter

But if you are like me and just can’t leave well enough alone, then mix up some herbed butter to brush on top or to serve on the side.

1 cup of margarine

1/4 cup of real butter (softened)

garlic powder

cumin

chili powder

2 drops of liquid smoke

salt

parsley flakes

Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, we went berry picking with some friends. Between three families, we picked 31 pounds of blueberries and blackberries.  Consequently, I have been making a lot of cobbler lately.  I’ve discovered that people are lot happier to see you at their door when you’ve got a fresh baked blueberry cobbler in hand.

Cobbler is fine with canned fruit, but nothing compares to a cobbler made of fresh picked fruit.  Here’s my recipe – and anyone can make it.

Filling

1 quart sized bag of frozen (or fresh) berries

½ cup of sugar

3-4 tablespoons of grape juice (cranberry juice or whatever you have on hand is fine)

2-3 tablespoons of flour

¼ stick of butter, sliced (margarine doesn’t work as well)

Mix all of the above and then pop into the oven in an 8×8 glass baking dish. Bake at 350 until slightly bubbly, probably about 20 minutes.

Crust

In the meantime, mix:

1 cup of buttermilk baking mix (I like Pioneer)

½ cup of sugar

½ stick of butter, diced (don’t use margarine, not as good)

¼ cup of Half and Half  (regular milk is fine)

1 teaspoon of vanilla

Mix all the above. The mixture will be sort of sticky. Put it in the freezer to set up until you take the fruit mixture out of the oven. Let the hot fruit mixture cool for a minute or two and then pull off pieces of the dough and piece together over the fruit.  If you are really industrious, you can roll it out, but I don’t.

When the fruit is more or less covered, sprinkle with a bit of sugar and pop back into the oven until it’s brown, probably about 25 or 30 minutes.

Serve warm with Blue Bell ice cream!

* * *

Start with about a quart or more of frozen or fresh berries.

Toss with sugar, butter, flour and a little fruit juice, then toss in the oven till bubbly.

For the crust, mix up a little buttermilk baking mix, sugar, butter, milk and vanilla. Put in the freezer to firm up while fruit is baking.

When the fruit is hot, pull the dough out of the freezer and piece together over the top. At this point it will look ugly.  If you don’t eat too much of the dough, you will be able to cover the entire cobbler. Not too worry though, it expands and puffs together.

Here’s the finished product. Sprinkle a little sugar on top for pretty.

Serve with or without ice cream.

And now I salute food photographers everywhere who know how to photograph food in such a way that you might actually like to eat it.

When the going gets tough, the not-so-tough start baking.

Sometimes when I’m having one of those booty kickin’ days with my kid, I lay down my aggravations and we bake bread.

On Tuesday of this week, the schools were closed.  By 10am booty kickin’ was well underway, so I suggested we make bread.

I know it sounds crazy that one would open up a canister of flour around someone with under-developed judgment and impulse control and over-developed enthusiasm. And sometimes Sean is a problem too. (Stop it. I can hear you rolling your eyes.)  But in keeping with the many mysteries of the universe, it works.  Somehow.  There is just something therapeutic about baking together and working the dough.

(Disclaimer:  I have one child.)

I have discovered that there are a number of life lessons to be found in the ancient art of baking bread, aside from the obvious lessons of fractions, science and farm-to-market commerce and they are as follows:

All things work together for good in the proper measure.  Too much flour and not enough water and you end up not with delicious bread, but a stone. Too much water and not enough flour and you end up with a very large crusty dumpling.  Life and bread making are both all about balancing the various elements in an effort to create something good and worthwhile.

Baking bread is a process. As in life, an orderly process yields good results.

Know when to work and know when to rest.  The bread maker knows when to work the dough and when to rest and let the yeast work. The same is true in life, sometimes we just need to give it a rest, quit managing.

Life and bread making bread are messy. It just is.  Expect it.

Making bread is work. It’s good for the human spirit to work to eat.

Life and bread making both improve with experience and failure.

Homemade bread doesn’t last more than a day or two.   Live in the present and take joy in your daily bread.

And I’m sure there are many more.

Does Sean get these things about making bread? Probably not just yet. But I’m not just baking bread, I’m planting seeds.

Here is my easy recipe for Focaccia Bread that you can make with your kiddos.

***

Focaccia Bread

2 to 2.5 cups of bread flour

1 package of yeast

1/2 teaspoon of salt

2/3 cup hot water

1 tablespoon of olive oil

Mix 1 cup of the flour with the yeast and salt in a large bowl.

Into a 2/3 cup of hot water (120 degrees) add the olive oil and then pour into the dry mixture. Stir in as much of the remaining flour it takes to make a soft dough. Knead on a flour dusted surface for about 10 minutes.

Cover with a clean tea towel and let rest for about 10 minutes. (If you have a granite or stone countertop, put the dough in an oiled bowl and cover. Granite tends to stay cold and the dough will do better if it’s warm.)

Punch down the dough and divide the dough into two pieces.  Form each piece into a ball and then press flat into a pizza shape into a well oiled 10-inch round cake pan (or you can put both on a well oiled cookie sheet if you don’t have round pans.)

Cover and let rise in a warm place for about an hour or until doubled in size.

Using your finger tips or the handle of a wooden spoon, make little indentations into the dough.  Brush liberally with olive oil and sprinkle with course salt.  Just before baking you can add just about anything else you want — rosemary, cilantro, garlic, Parmesan, goat cheese, grilled onions and peppers, sun dried tomatoes.

Bake at 400 for about 15 minutes. Serve immediately. It’s great dipped in flavored olive oil.

The other night, as I was flipping through the channels before giving it up to the sandman, I happened to come across this show on the Food Network called The Ultimate Recipe Showdown.  It was so fascinating I couldn’t turn away.

It seems that they take four average people who like to cook and they each make their own unique version of a given dish, like a hamburger, and they have to make it in 30 minutes.  Three professional foodies,  chefs or food editor type people, provide useless play-by-play commentary as they closely watch the competitors feverishly chopping and dicing.

At the end of the 30 minutes, the judges taste each of the four dishes and give the wanna-be-chef feedback about what they did and didn’t like about their dish. And then they huddle and vote.  Somehow or another, one of the four amateur chefs emerges as a winner and gets $25,000 or something. Can you tell I wasn’t paying that close of attention?

As I was watching this competition, I was thinking, what is the big deal? All of the ingredients and equipment they need are on hand and ready to go. Where’s the challenge in that?

No, the show I’d like to see is where they take a couple of amateur chefs, drop them into MY kitchen and let them scrounge around in the pantry and fridge and try to concoct something edible out of whatever they can find in 30 minutes.  Now THAT would be a challenge!

Food Network!  Call me! I’ve got your next big show idea.

The tough start cookin’.

That’s right, Wall Street might be crumbling, but I’m brownin’ and crumblin’!! I think after this week we all need a little comfort food and the best comfort food you can find anywhere is in a church cookbook. The recipe that follows comes from the First Church of Tuna cookbook.

Brunch Casserole

1 pound of sausage, browned, drained and crumbled

1 can of crescent rolls

2 cups of shredded cheese

1 small can of chiles (You can leave the chiles out if you are weird and don’t like them, or just put them on one side of the casserole like I have to do because I live with a weird non-chile eating person.)

4 eggs beaten

3/4 cup of milk

salt and pepper to taste

Brown sausage, drain and crumble.  In the meantime, lightly butter the bottom a 13×9 glass baking dish and then line with the crescent rolls, pressing the perforations together. Sprinkled with crumbled sausage and cheese.  Combine eggs, milk and salt and pepper and then pour over sausage. It won’t seem like enough egg mixture, but it is, it soaks in.  Bake at 425 for 15 minutes or until eggs are set.  Let stand 5 minutes and serve immediately.  If you’re like me, you will enjoy a spoon full of salsa on top because salsa makes everything just a little bit better.

I like to mix up a can of mandarin oranges and a can pineapple chunks and serve on the side. If I want to get real fancy, I’ll also add a basket of mini muffins of some kind.

This is a great recipe for overnight company because you can brown the sausage the night before and then assemble it in the morning and pop it in the oven and the clean up is minimal, leaving you time to enjoy your guests or just loll about.  I’m all about lolling.

This is also a good recipe for kid-sized helpers. Sean loves to press the crescent rolls into the pan.  He can also crack the eggs, measure the milk and whip it all together with minimal assistance while I brown the sausage. In fact, I let him do everything except brown the sausage. Maybe when he’s five.

Here’s a little quote right out of the First Church of Tuna cookbook that seems fitting for this week.

“Faith wears everyday clothes and proves herself in life’s ordinary situations.”

Good appetite y’all and have a loverly weekend!  Take time to comfort one another.

Earlier in the week I mentioned on Twitter that I was making bread pudding and a number of y’all asked for the recipe, so here it is. If you are on a diet or diabetic, never mind, move along, nothing to see here…

Antique Mommy’s Bread Pudding

My bread pudding is a lot like my meatloaf – I never make it the same way twice, I use pretty much whatever I have on hand and I consider measurements only a suggestion. Here’s the basic recipe I use, but a lot of times I add in other stuff like coconut, pecans, sometimes pears.

About four or five cups of bread, cubed – I like to use left over cinnamon raisin bread

½ stick of butter, melted

1 cup or more of raisins

¾ cup of sugar

1 tablespoon of cinnamon

4 Eggs

2 Cups of Half and Half or whole milk

2 tsp. of vanilla

Cube bread and put in a large mixing bowl.

Pour melted butter over cubed bread and toss.

Add in sugar, cinnamon and raisins and toss.

Mix eggs, milk and vanilla and pour over cubed bread mixture, toss gently.

Pour in a glass baking dish and mush down a lightly so that all the bread is soaked.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes

Vanilla Sauce (makes way more than enough)

2 cups of white sugar

2 cups of brown sugar

2 cups of Half and Half or whole milk

1 stick of butter (you can get away with less)

2 tsp of vanilla

Put all in a sauce pan and cook over low heat until it boils, stirring occasionally. Pour over warm bread pudding.

I have a whole new appreciation for food photographers. Trust me, it was much yummier and a lot less gloppy than it looks here.