Dreaming of France - Cooking in France

Thank you for joining this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

I haven't cooked very much in France because I enjoy visiting restaurants while we travel, but once we live there, that will have to change.

Like many people my age and older, I have amassed a number of cookbooks but I can't imagine moving them to France. 

My friend Sheila pointed out that I probably rely on recipes on the web more than cookbooks anymore. And she's right, but there are some favorite recipes that I want to take along. 

That's why I came up with my solution of taking pictures of recipes and bringing them along in my computer. 

Last week, I started the process. 

This recipe has seen a lot of use. It's in a cookie cookbook that belonged to Earl's sister. 

My Southern Living cookbook is also well loved. 

The muffin recipe is hardly legible anymore, and it isn't even my favorite muffin recipe any more.

This apple cider and soy sauce turkey breast is surprisingly tasty. 

Even as I choose which recipes to capture, I'm wondering what I'll do with the cookbooks once I'm finished. I just can't picture throwing them out even though I'll have all the information I need.
I can't really expect one of my kids to take on these mottled cookbooks, can I?
It's another dilemma I didn't expect to face as we prepare for our move to France.

Thanks for playing along with Dreaming of France. I hope you'll visit each other's blogs and leave comments. Also post your blog info in the Linky below.

Comfort Food & Cake Recipe

My life continues to have too much drama in it, but it's nice to be able to fall back into traditions and things that comfort.
That's what I thought today as I pulled out a well-worn recipe for Buttercup Cake.

It's a recipe that my Aunt Ruby makes. Aunt Ruby is well into her 80s. She has lost her husband and she doesn't remember things the way she used to, but she still makes a delicious cake. We call it red cake rather than the official title of Buttercup Cake.
At the last family reunion, she said she wished she had kept track of the number of red cakes she has baked throughout the years. In addition to family reunions, she makes them for birthdays and funerals and church functions.
I made a red cake today to celebrate Spencer's 21st birthday. Since the recipe is so stained and faded, I figured I should make a copy. I'm sharing it here on my blog, so I'll always be able to find it.
Buttercup Cake
1 1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of shortening (I used butter)
2 eggs
2 1/4 cups of flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 cup of buttermilk (I use milk with a tsp. of vinegar)
1 tsp. vanilla
red food coloring

Cream the shortening and the sugar until fluffy. Blend in well-beaten eggs. Sift flour, baking powder, soda and salt. Then stir into the batter in parts with the buttermilk. Add vanilla and food coloring. Bake at 350 degrees about 25 minutes. Makes 2 layers

Fluffy Icing
1/4 cup of flour
1 cup of milk
1 stick of soft butter
1/2 cup of shortening
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
I used butter in place of the shortening, so one cup of butter replaced the butter and shortening steps.
Mix and cook the flour and milk until thick, stirring constantly. Let cool. Then beat with a mixer for one minute. Add remaining ingredients. Whip until the texture of whipped cream. Spread on cake.

I consider myself a pretty good baker, but I'm not good at layer cakes. They might taste good, but they never look good.

Aunt Ruby's recipe calls for shortening. I use butter instead, which worked fine for the cake. In keeping with the name, it requires red food coloring. I didn't have a lot, so my cake ended up being a little more pink than red.

Spencer was getting ready to go to a friend's house, so I rushed the icing, not waiting long enough for it to cool. It kind of dripped off the cake.
I wouldn't have taken it to a family reunion, but it did taste good as we all ate slices to celebrate Spencer's final step into adulthood.

Home Cooking

I once knew a girl who begged her mom to please make macaroni and cheese for dinner. She wasn't asking for homemade mac and cheese, just the kind out of the box. Her mom refused. They were eating out, as they did most every night. Her mom and dad both worked full time so meals from scratch, or even from a box, were a rarity.
My kids would have loved it if I forced them to eat out for all of their meals. I didn't.
I was a stay-at-home mom, for the most part. I wrote a column for the newspaper and I taught classes at the local college, but I was home with my kids nearly all the time.
I baked bread from scratch and mixed up cookie dough. I would make mac and cheese from the box, but sometimes I'd make homemade with fancy cheeses. All of this home cooking made my kids crazy for store-bought cookies and restaurant food.
Since the two oldest have been away at college, they have an appreciation for home-cooked meals, but Tucker still prefers restaurant food.
I was home on Wednesday and Tucker was home and I asked what he would like for dinner.
"I'll fix anything you want," I told him.
"I want penne rosa," he said. "From Noodles & Company."
Noodles & Company is a chain restaurant here that makes some fairly healthy pasta dishes.

Not a great picture. Should have waited for the
 salad along the side to add some green. 

I turned to the computer and found a recipe for Penne Rosa with chicken.
Then I went to the store, bought the ingredients and whipped it up.
Delicious!
I didn't add the mushrooms because my kids don't like them.
I forgot to get the spinach, so ours didn't have spinach. If I do it again, I will definitely add some spinach, but I think it can be overdone.
Tucker and Grace ate early before heading off to evening activities.
Earl and I ate around 8 when he got home from work.
The remainder went into a container in the refrigerator.
When I got up this morning, it was empty and in the dishwasher. Spencer finished off the penne rosa when he got home from work around midnight.
A successful meal even though it was homemade.
Here's the recipe from Noodles and Company at Home Blog.
Tucker agreed that the recipe tasted similar to Noodles, so he grudgingly ate it. But I've promised him Jimmy Johns sandwiches for lunch today as I move from teaching at one college to my evening class at another college. You'd think I could recreate a sub sandwich at home.
Even now though, my kids prefer Oreos or Chips Ahoy to my homemade chocolate chip cookies. And when Spencer was  younger and I asked him what kind of brownies he wanted, he said, "The kind Cathy makes."
I asked Cathy. She said she uses "the red box." Again a mix was preferred to my homemade brownies.
Someday, they'll all yearn for my homemade cooking.

Baking Day

So, you all know I was in a tizzy about getting ready for the graduation party. The theme Grace and I chose was "Let Them Eat Cake" and I had a plan for 12 different kinds of cakes.
Could I have done this alone? I'm thinking my family would have felt the brunt of it if I'd tried. But I didn't have to.
On Thursday night, Grace and her friend Emily took the ingredients to Emily's house and baked a turtle cake. Turtle cake has a layer of German chocolate cake on the bottom, caramel and chocolate chips in the middle then a layer of German chocolate cake on the top. I made another one of those at our house. Then I made two Cola cakes. Ever take a cake out of the pan and put it on a serving platter? It's very flat looking. So I increased the recipe by half to make it look fuller. For some reason, I kept messing up on the math for that increased recipe. The cakes turned out okay, but not my best Cola cakes.
I also made a carrot cake which is practically healthy enough to serve for dinner. It has carrots, coconut, pineapple, yogurt and golden raisins in it.
I had been to the grocery and had all the ingredients. I was ready for baking day.
Ruth drove down from Michigan on Thursday night, arriving after 11 as I waited up bleary-eyes.
The next morning, Sheila came by 8:30 a.m. loaded down with cake pans and a mixer.
Sheila created a Lemon-Lime refrigerator cake that includes lime jello and lemon pudding. On the day of the party, one niece asked whether we'd injected the cake with Sprite. She thought it tasted amazing. Ruth started making lemon curd for her lemon cake with raspberries. I know. Who makes homemade lemon curd?
"Good lemon curd tastes like sunshine," according to Ruth.
I kind of scurried around getting ingredients and staying ahead of the dishes. I also made the icing for the Cola cakes and had Grace ice them. Grace was so sweet when she got up and saw us in the kitchen. She said something like, "You guys are the best."
The oven was full of cakes and the smells emanated as the air conditioner worked overtime to keep us cool.
Earl and I had to run back to the store three times when we needed extra ingredients, like red food coloring for the red velvet cake.
Sheila baked a chocolate cake with cherry pie filling that was so moist. She also made a chocolate cake with whipped cream and heath bar icing.
A firefighter who stopped by the day of the party said, "That heath bar cake is awful. You'll probably want to donate it to the fire station so no one has to eat it." He had a couple of pieces.
Ruth whipped up a white cake in a bundt pan (because that was the only free pan I had left by then) that we later iced with a butter cream frosting and put strawberries and blueberries in the layers between and on top.
Sheila's daughter Bethany came over and hung with Grace. They made little name cards for each of the cakes and decorated some cakes with their own interesting style. Like the carrot cake. Too cute, right?
Ruth baked the red cake, which is really a buttercream or Italian cream cake with red food coloring added. I don't know why we add the red food coloring, it's just what Aunt Ruby has always done.
Somewhere along the way, I made two pineapple upside down cakes.
My friends oohed and aahed at the pineapple upside down cake and how perfect it looked. It's so simple, I'm not sure how they mess it up, but my prediction is that they don't wait for it to cool before they pull it out of the pan.
All of these cakes we made, plus the bakery cake Earl picked up Saturday morning, and the two cookie cakes we got from the grocery store, made up our selection of the "Let Them Eat Cake" party.
Because Lucia asked for it in a previous post, here's the recipe for Cola Cake from Southern Living Cookbook
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
2 cups sugar
Combine and set aside.
In a heavy saucepan, combine 1 cup Coke, 1 cup butter and 2 Tbsp. of cocoa.
Bring to a boil stirring contantly.
Mix into the flour mixture.
Add 1/2 cup buttermilk (Since I don't ever buy buttermilk, I use milk with a tsp of vinegar), 2 eggs beaten, 1 tsp vanilla and 1 1/2 cups of mini marshmallows.
Pour into a greased and floured 13X9X2 inch pan. Bake at 350 for 30 to 35 minutes.
The icing needs 1/2 cup of butter, 1/4 cup of Coke, 3 Tbsp of Cocoa, 3 cups of powdered sugar and 1 tsp. of vanilla.
Cook the butter, Coke and cocoa together and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add the next ingredients. Spread it on the cake and Voila! Enjoy.

Let Them Eat Cake

Grace's high school graduation is quickly approaching. Two weeks, don't remind her, she says as she clings to her childhood. I think she pictures us kicking her out the door when she graduates, but really, we plan to wait until August when she goes to college.
To celebrate her graduation, we're having an Open House, which basically means people are welcome to come and go as they please on the Saturday afternoon before her graduation. We chose that time because my parents will be in town from Florida for the graduation, and my brother in Dayton will be able to come up on the weekend. I already feel bad that she said each family gets 8 tickets for graduation and I said we only need six. Earl and me, the boys and my parents. Really, who else do you invite to sit through the graduation?
I want to make the graduation party fun. I was thinking of different food ideas. Traditional grad party food would be platters of lunch meat with buns for sandwiches, along with vegetable trays and fruit. Then I thought we could do shish kabobs. Then I had a stroke of genius.
Grace at one point had said she wanted many kinds of cake at her graduation party. The memory came back to me, and since it is in the middle of the afternoon anyway, I decided on an all cake party. Thus, the theme, "Let them eat cake," that and the fact that Grace is a little bit like a queen and she loves royalty.
My friend Ruth may come down the day before to help me bake cakes. I want to have at least 10 different kinds.
Some choices are easy. I'll order cookie cakes that look something like this but say "Congratulations Grace" rather than If you give a mouse a cookie.
I'll also order an ice cream cake, but I won't really be able to set that out on the table with the other cakes.
Then I'll bake some favorites. Turtle cake is similar to the turtle candy. It is chocolate cake with caramel and chocolate in the middle. I skip the nuts.
Cola cake is a southern favorite here in the U.S. It has Coke, as the name implies and marshmallows in it. It is one of the moistest chocolate cakes I've ever had.
I also have a great recipe for carrot cake that includes crushed pineapple and yogurt.
I experimented with a Pineapple Upside Down Cake the other day. It was gone pretty quickly. I'd never made one, but it was easy and delicious. What's not to like with all that butter and brown sugar.
Now, I'm stumped. I need some more great cake recipes. Does anyone have any suggestions?