Maine Bicentennial, A Cookbook, and Me

My husband is usually the expert when it comes to cooking fish. So I was a little nervous putting this together. How would it turn out? I knew that you have to be gentle when cooking fish in a stew such as this. So as to make sure the chunks of fish don't disintegrate, so you actually get mouthfuls of wonderful fish. I got home from the store and found that my husband had already planned a meal for himself, something I'm not fond of (tuna sushi) so I said I already had a plan for my meal and began to lay out the ingredients for cooking. He watched with interest. Now, I'm not much of a sausage person, and my husband loves sausage. This recipe calls for a little smoked sausage. Not too much, just enough to flavor the dish. When I finished cooking the soup (which seems to me to be more thick and stew-like, not soup at all), I ladled it into a bowl and began to eat. Perfect! Just the right mix of seafood and sausage and veggies and sauce. I casually said to my husband, "Yo...

Okay, if you want to go to the cost (bourbon and maple syrup combined are a tad pricey), this is kinda fancy and decadent. But as for me, I like my bacon to taste pretty much like bacon, grease and all. Isn't that why we crave it? If I want candy, I'll go get a candy bar. Honestly, it takes rather a long time and the result, well, let's put it this way. The resident archaeologist wandered into the kitchen, watched me covering the bacon strips with brown sugar, and said, is that all you can fit on a pan (5 strips)? That's all the recipe calls for. If I've done the math right, with the fancy ingredients, one strip of bacon cost $2.50 and that doesn't include the inordinate amount of time to prepare the sauce, set sauce to cool, then pour over bacon and set That to cool, then place bacon on cookie sheet and coat with brown sugar mixture, and bake, and babysit it and keep sprinkling brown sugar on the bacon while it's cooking. And it's Some Sticky, so be sur...

I saw this recipe and said to self, "This has got to be delicious, because I know Grandmother Maggie's Molasses Blueberry Muffins were melt-in-my-mouth wonderful." I made a half recipe, as I do with many of these recipes, because we are just myself and the resident archaeologist to feed, usually. And while I'm prepared to live with a few quarantine pounds, I don't need all the pounds that the dessert section of this cookbook would love to put on my short frame! I scouted around amongst the baking pans and found the small bundt pan I use sometimes for my coffee cakes. Not my mini bundt pan, just the small. You'll see the size I mean, in the photo.  I thought it would come out pretty.  Well, it baked up just fine, but it is still cooling, so we'll see how they come out of the pan. Always a little tricky, getting baked goods out of bundt pans. I'm hoping I can carefully release at the edges with a knife and then tip the whole thing upside down and they wi...

Funny how childhood memories will pop up when a food reminds us... This dip is not one that I recognize from reading its ingredients, but when I tasted it, oh, wow, did it ever take me back in time! As a child, we lived in a large house in Bangor, and my parents loved parties. My mom enjoyed making dips and this one tastes very familiar to me. Maybe it's the cottage cheese base, but there are other ingredients that compliment the cottage cheese and really bring it together. A nice mix with other cheeses to bind it together. My husband is not fond of blue cheese, but I love it. I decided that, since I promised myself I'd try to stay true to the original recipes in the book, the first time around, I would keep the blue cheese in, and see how it tasted.  Turns out, it is in such small proportion to the rest of the recipe, I doubt he will really notice. It simply adds strength to the cheese base, I think, but not enough to overpower other flavors. He hasn't come downstairs to t...

Now, I'm one for a nice cold thirst-quenching non-alcoholic drink on a hot day. Lemonade. Iced tea. I even tried that Strawberry Lemonade that is popular nowadays. But this one "takes the cake" as they say. Evidently, it dates back to the American Colonies, and was served to men haying in the fields, to keep them hydrated. Now, I won't list the ingredients, to keep your interest piqued enough to go get yourself this cookbook. But let's just say that if you like molasses cookies, you might like this drink. And if you don't like molasses cookies, you might want to pass on taste-testing this beverage. I, myself, like molasses cookies, in moderation. But it's been awhile since I hefted haybales and worked up a powerful enough thirst to warrant this level of thirst-quencher. So I'll finish this glass, but it might be a good long while before I try another one.

These cupcakes do not have eggs or butter. The son who submitted the recipe mentions that his mother could not find eggs or butter during the rationing days of World War ll, so made these cupcakes for sweets for her children (all seven!).  All I had on hand was "golden" raisins, but they plumped up nice and moist as I cooked them on the stovetop. The only spice used is cinnamon, which is actually perfect, in its simplicity. I often find modern spice cupcakes to have too many spices fighting for attention in your mouth. Warning: the recipe says to bake for 25 to 30 minutes. I always babysit a "first-timer" recipe, and am I glad I was in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the oven! At 16 minutes, the cupcakes were done. Any longer and we would have had crispy cupcakes, I'm afraid. Assuming that Arlene would not have had butter for the frosting, since she had none for the cupcakes, I chose to make a simple powdered sugar frosting, with a little vanilla extract to compl...

I'm encountering some "firsts" for my taste buds. Molasses and blueberries? I faced this recipe with some trepidation. What if it tasted terrible? I mean, in the "backstory" of this recipe, it says that the handwritten notes for the recipe read: "heavy and delicious." I wasn't quite sure how both of those descriptors could fit together in one muffin?  Thankfully, my worries were for naught! These muffins rose beautifully and were moist, dark, and yes, delicious. Heavy? No, I wouldn't use that word. "Rich" might be a better word, in that it is rich in flavor.  I've been baking muffins since my 7th grade home economics class, when I got hooked on baking. So I am very familiar with the "look" of a muffin batter. It needs to have some pour-ability, but not too liquid, and definitely, not too dry. When I mixed up this batter, it was terribly dry. I added between 1/4 and 1/2 cup whole milk, and that got it to the "pour-ab...