Summer in the South is one of two seasons, the other being winter. It seems what little fall or springtime there is it can never be taken for granted, as fall can be hot and spring often is gone before you can spell it. It’s June 1 and believe it, at 98 degrees Fahrenheit, this is summer, no matter what other folks call it. At least this is how this transplant sees it, having come from cooler climates. Accordingly, school’s out, the pools are open and it’s time to adjust to the heat by switching to summery meals.
After the daughter left for college, my cooking went into a slump. Well, not right away, as the appreciative husband liked my cooking and that kept it going for some time. But then, with an empty nest, inertia set in and dinners where sometimes haphazardly thrown together and I admit that far too often a can opener was used in preparation of meals. I realized that something needed to change when the daughter (now an accomplished cook in her own right) returned for her summer break and requested a childhood favorite to be made which consisted of not much more than a can of Manwich sauce with ground beef thrown in, and guess what: I forgot the meat! Since said daughter seems to have the memory of an elephant, this is the one story she likes to tell when it comes to my cooking skills, despite of all the years of flawless execution I had accumulated in my favor previous to the vegetarian sauce.
Change is good but it does not always happen easily and often needs a catalyst. For me, that catalyst was a cookbook. Now, I love cookbooks and collect them, and as I leaf through the pages I can imagine what the recipes would taste like. Not that I would make them (I highly recommend this approach for all of us who fight the middle age spread)
But then I stumbled across Christy Jordan’s cookbook: “Southern Plate”. Simple recipes from the South, the kind my mom would have made would she have been born here instead of in good old Germany. Isn’t it strange how memory works? I immediately recalled hot summer days when my mother made sweet tea with lemon (no sodas in our house, since we were on a limited budget), potato salad, noodle salad…lots of different salads, actually, sometimes accompanied by schnitzels, sometimes by fried meatballs or something from the grill. And there were summery sheet cakes and tarts with plums, rhubarb, apple, blueberries (we handpicked these in the mountains of the Black Forest, a veritable von Trapp family including the singing) Ripe raspberries and plump strawberries, all grown in the huge garden my mother had. Everything tasted amazing, even though at that age I was not necessarily appreciative. We three girls were often tasked with weed pulling duty and since we could not visit the pool until the beds were freed from the weedy invasion the garden’s bounty did not impress us in the least. (Once you pay premium prices at a Farmer’s Market to get succulent berries, attitudes change, trust me)
But, I digress. For some reason, nothing that I could explain, Christy’s cookbook made me want to actually TRY to make her recipes, not just look at them. Maybe what lured me in was that no huge investment needed to be made, not of time and not of money. Everything seemed pretty straightforward and besides, what I really appreciated, where the little asides (well, these came from her website) where the things we shouldn’t do but sometimes do anyhow (stir instead of fold or not waiting for the margarine to be soft enough) were mentioned with a little wink, so we knew that these sins would be forgiven.
So I started out with the Banana Crumb Cake. Big Banana taste! My husband’s office mates, employed as tasters, proclaimed that it must be a European cake because it could not possibly be American since ALL American cakes are cloyingly sweet. Little did they know!
Again, I have to digress. In general, Europeans come in contact with the American cake species when they go to a birthday party (often an office birthday) and there is the usual offering of a commercially prepared sheet cake with 2 inches of sugary frosting. Even though I have been known to valiantly ride to the rescue of the art of American baking, the impression persists that overall American baked goods are just too sweet.
So, big compliment, as I said. Next, it was onto the Orange Supreme Cake (in our case Lemon Supreme because it took me a while to locate the Orange Supreme Mix), also a winner. At this point my husband started to wonder whether Aliens had taken his wife since my baking had languished even more than my cooking. To mix things up, I made the pork chops with the House Autry mix – a simple, but delicious idea, even though the mix did not quite adhere as much as I wanted it to (but, that I can fix), followed by the Patriotic Punch Bowl Cake (very summery and tasty).
My husband complained about his expanding waistline (while going for the second helping). However, undeterred we moved on to the pudding poke cake, because it was fun, fast and I already had all the ingredients. My suggestion to take the leftover cake to the office, so we could have our cake and not eat (all of) it, was not favorably received. Sometimes the proof is literally in the pudding.
Right now, I feel I have to control myself since I am itching to cook or bake something! And temptation is always lurking with a daily new recipe posting on facebook . But, I am having fun and it is nice to spend some time and end up with a finished product that invariably tastes good.
I also may have to buy new clothes.
I will take a break from Southern Plate to bake a Buttermilk Chocolate Cake from the Washington Post’s Food section, it just sounded too delicious to pass up and also, it is a little more challenging and time consuming, so I am excited about it. However, I already have the ingredients for the Lemon Poppy Seed Bread. Sigh! Somebody come and rescue me, please.
It seems, as long as Southern Plate posts, the cook may just be in.
And she is having fun.
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