Maine Bicentennial, A Cookbook, and Me

 Yes, we are mid-January. 2021. Aaand I know my personal challenge was to finish all the recipes in the Maine Bicentennial Cookbook by the end of 2020. So what are we doing now? Well, beer has a life of its own, and I had to let the bottle sit around in the kitchen, doing its fermenting thing, for a week. Then sit around in a cooler location for a week. Today's the day! I chilled the beer, popped the cork, and boldly toasted the new year.  This beverage gives you the refreshing taste of sweet nature: essence of spruce, brown sugar, a splash of lemon juice, ale yeast, and water. On another go-round I'll try honey as the sweetener. And I'll be more adventurous with the spruce. I was so concerned that the spruce flavor would overwhelm. But it didn't! In fact, I could have added a wee bit more. Have you ever tasted mead? This beverage is really rather like mead. How do I know? I was gifted a bottle of mead at Christmas. No spruce essence, but it was pretty good. In fact, I ...

 Appearing in the State of Maine Cookbook, published in 1920 for the Centennial, this recipe clearly dates well before 1920. And it is not really what we would call a beer today. I decided to give it a whirl, looking up a modern recipe. Not having all of the equipment for beer production, I'm glad there are alternatives. I purchased Spruce Essence (yes, it's a thing). It is highly concentrated. So I did the math to figure out that the amount of beverage I'm making only needs 4 milliliters of Spruce Essence. Plus dark brown sugar, water, and a splash of lemon. Boil it up, and while it is boiling, do what bread bakers call proofing. Put the yeast (not the kind for bread, it needs the kind for ale) in a small amount of warm water for ten minutes. When the boiling mixture is done (thirty minutes), place it in an ice bath, and watch it plummet to 70 degrees F, at which time you bottle the stuff and pour the yeast mixture into the bottle and cork it. Tip the bottle upside down se...

 I've been looking forward to this meal for months! It looks so seafood-scrumptious! And naturally, we had to wait until New Year's Eve... I noticed that the recipe calls this a soup. And so I talked with the Resident Archeologist about doing a roux to thicken the soup, since we really wanted to have more of a sauce poured over rice. A roux was "at the ready" but I soon realized that the soup cooks down such that you don't even need to thicken it.  Not sure why, but I chose to use frozen chopped spinach, where it calls for spinach. We discovered that it is "too chopped" and that it just goes everywhere and wasn't quite the texture on the tongue that we were looking for. Next time, we will buy baby spinach and just gently wilt it at the very end of cooking time, which will look so pretty and lend better flavor than the frozen spinach. Pay attention to the order of cooking the seafood. Whatever just needs warming, pop into the pot for the last five min...

 My middle stepdaughter got her deer this season (her first!). We are very happy for her. Her freezer is getting pretty full, since both she and her boyfriend like to hunt. So she gave us some venison for our freezer. And I was delighted to be able to cook some of it up for this recipe. I'm actually not a mincemeat eater...altho I made mincemeat cookies for my dad every Christmas until he died, and he loved them. I plan to make either mincemeat cookies or small pies with this recipe, for some friends who love mincemeat. I cut back on the amounts in the recipe, as it clearly makes a big batch. I also studied up on beef suet and chose to use vegetable shortening instead, adding in beef stock to make sure there was plenty of moistness for the venison. The donor says this recipe comes out of "an old cookbook, All Maine Cooking, by Ruth Wiggin and Loanna Shibles" and so I found it amusing to read the ingredient portions: "one package golden raisins" "1 jar red j...

 I have this childhood memory of a gallon jar setting on the counter at my grandfather's general store in a little town in Vermont. It seemed to be filled with murky liquid, yet when a person reached in there, out came a whole pickle. She would hand the clerk a nickel and start to munch on the prized snack. These pickles hide in the murky liquid just as well as those pickles of my childhood, but I anticipate the joy of pulling out a pickle and biting into that crisp mustard-y sweetness. The little cucumbers are not quite ready yet, so the taste test will have to wait a little longer. Looking forward to these awesome pickles! The recipe calls for a gallon jar, but all I have are quart jars, due to the pandemic run on canning jars. Which works rather well, fitting maybe seven or so small cucumbers in a quart jar. This recipe completes the Preserves chapter of the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook. It's tough to pick a favorite, but I know we are just loving the "Stinky F...

This recipe presented two distinct challenges. Firstly, I live in a parsonage and I'm not likely to receive permission to dig up the lawn just to try my hand at cooking bean hole beans. Secondly, we are now solidly in winter, and even if I had opportunity to dig a hole, it's not the right time of year. So I allowed as how baking the beans in the oven would have to do for now, and we'll see what summer brings. Who knows, maybe the church will want to offer a bean hole bean "suppah" as a fundraiser. The picture shows off pea beans, and yet the recipe calls for yellow-eye beans. I must say, were I pressed to pick a favorite bean recipe, I did so love the Baked Yellow-Eye Beans (see blog). But when it came time to try this recipe, there were no yellow-eye beans in the pantry. So I used pea beans. I do like pea beans, but I have to wonder if these beans were getting a little old. They seemed to take longer to cook. I checked the difference between the Yellow-Eye Bean r...