Research Tip of the Week

Each week I provide a research tip to help build better genealogical researchers. This week with the holiday season is full swing, my research tip is about preserving treasured family recipes.

Family history is richer when it includes more than just vital statistics and records. It is the extra details that bring family history to life.

Family Recipes

Many families have holiday traditions and many of those traditions center around food. For some families no holiday is complete without decorating cookies. Other families may spend days leading up to the holiday gathering with a full day of pie making.

Great Grandma’s recipe box

One of the greatest genealogical treasures I own is a recipe box that belonged to my Great Grandmother with handwritten recipes on the index cards. It includes a peanut butter cookie recipe that I have made for my own grandchildren and hopefully someday my daughter will make cookies from that recipe box for her own grandchildren.

Too often we forget to document our family recipes and traditions which is sad. Few things can transport us to a memory of times long gone and loved ones who have passed like the smell or taste of a food or treat we associate with a warm and fuzzy distant memory. If we don’t take time and make efforts to master Grandma’s biscuit recipe it can be gone in the passing of a single generation.

As you gather this holiday with your loved ones take the time to look around the table and see if there is any dish that your holiday would be incomplete without and take the time to record the recipe and its origins. Your descendants might thank you.

Happy Holidays from Dusty Roots & Forgotten Treasures!

Family Recipe Friday – Pizza

It is Friday so it is time for the next family recipe. This week I decided to put a twist on the regular family recipe and show how recently my family managed to adapt a family favorite into a low carb version that is still delicious and satisfying. If you notice one constant with all my recipes over the last couple of weeks it is none of them have any sort of nutritional information. No calorie counts and not a single suggestion of how adding it to your menu might affect your long-term waistline…and that is how the people in my household got put on a diet.

Like most families, mine loves pizza. I would be hard pressed to name a single year of my life where pizza did not appear on the menu on a regular basis in all my nearly 4 decades. Pizzas delivered, carryout, home baked pizza, and even campfire pizza cooked under a blanket of stars in the Rocky Mountains. Stuffed crust, dessert style, or ordered with toppings by the pound in a popular little restaurant in Idaho Springs, Colorado. It seems there are no end of warm fuzzy memories in my life that involve pizza.

All those delicious pizzas….and many other treats…have led to a few extra pounds. So here is family recipe Friday…with a twist. Crust less low carb pizza and its traditional counterpart pepperoni pizza.

Most typical American families love pizza. We learned to make a quick and easy version at home years ago. It is not pizza hut but it’s an affordable substitute. The only problem with most traditional pizzas is the carb content is through the room and carbs add up quick on the waist line. The crust we typically grab is 32g of carbs in crust alone and that is only ¼ of a 12” pizza. If you cut the pizza into 8 small pieces you can have 2. Yikes!

Currently my family is on a low carb diet so we located a recipe we hoped would be a suitable replacement for that crazy high carb crust. We were skeptical but this won us over before the first bite. It smelled amazing while cooking.

https://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=2499418

Like many of the recipes I find myself using the details were a little vague on this one. Here is how I made mine. Also we only got 6 pieces out of ours.

Finished “crust less” Pizza

For the Low Carb Pizza “Crust”

8 oz cream cheese

¼-cup Parmesan cheese

2 eggs

1 teaspoon garlic powder

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 425.

Grease a 9 X 13 glass casserole dish. Add all crust ingredients to a mixing bowl and blend well. I used an electric hand mixer to get it mixed up well. Pour into greased dish and bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown. The crust should start to pull away from the edges of the dish when done.

Let crust cool for about 10 minutes. After it has cooled top with favorite toppings and return to oven for 10 minutes until cheese melts.

For the traditional pizza prepare following the directions on the package. Top and bake. I doubt we will have the traditional version around my house much anymore in the future.

Family Recipe Friday Peanut Butter Cookies

It is Friday so as promised I am doing another family recipe for family recipe Friday. So far, in my series I have done a simple sauce recipe that my paternal grandmother, Loree, used on meat. I have also done a family favorite casserole that my maternal grandmother, Sally, made often while I was growing up. Today my own grandchildren will be here to visit for the night so I dug deep into the old wooden recipe box that belonged to my great grandmother, Lillie Mae, and found a favorite recipe of my own…Peanut Butter Cookies.

I do not have many memories of my Great Grandmother in the kitchen growing up. She was an insulin dependent diabetic and living alone from the time I was only a toddler so most of her meals were delivered by meals on wheels. Baking for the residents at a local nursing home was one exception to that. Every holiday season she and some of her church friends would bake dozens of cookies, and loaf after loaf of various breads all wrapped in neat little packages and left on her back porch until it was time to go visit the lonely people at the “home.”

This is a basic cookie recipe and I find it to be one of the most forgiving. I typically always have the ingredients needed on hand and we whip up several dozen of these a year. The fact that they have peanut butter makes me feel better about giving them to the kids. Peanut butter cookies are almost a health food right?

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. The recipe calls for

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup Crisco (I’m using margarine because I have extra on hand)

2 eggs

1 cup peanut butter

2 ½ cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla

The directions indicate to “Put in small balls and pat down with fork”

They also indicate that “grease cookie tin the first time only and bake at 350 degrees for about 12 to 15 minutes. Let cool before taking them off the cookie sheet. Makes about 5 dozen.”

MMM Yummy!

Tater Tot Casserole – Family Recipe Friday

Last week I pulled a recipe out of my Great Grandmother’s recipe box for my first family recipe Friday blog post. It was my paternal Grandmother’s recipe, Loree’s barbecue sauce. This week I have my own out of town family coming into town so I am turning to a family favorite tried and true for generations.

I got this cookbook from my maternal Grandmother for Christmas the second year I was married. She had a matching copy in her own collection. The Leroy United Methodist Church published it in 1996. Honestly, I cannot imagine a world in which my maternal Grandmother ever needed a recipe. Even now, she is 91, bedridden, and has not cooked in several years but if I have serious cooking question she would be my go to person. The kitchen was her domain and most people were thrilled to get a chair at her dinner table.

On page 22 of the cookbook, there is a recipe for Tater Tot Casserole submitted by Alberta Houseman.  Tater Tot Casserole has about a million variations and this one looks very similar to how I make my version of it. I may have used this recipe when I first made the dish a couple decades ago.

Over the years, I have made the dish so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. I have taught my own grown children how to make the dish and my daughter has perfected it. We have adapted it and made a few changes to make it how it suits us so here is my tweaked version of Tater Tot Casserole.

TATER TOT CASSEROLE

1 pound ground beef

2 pounds of Tater Tots

½ large onion

2 Cans Cream of Mushroom Soup

2 Cans Milk

2 Cups Shredded Cheese

1 Can Green Beans

 

I start mine by putting my tater tots in the prepared baking dish to brown in the heated oven while I brown my ground beef. I also like to add garlic to my ground beef while I am browning it.

After the ground beef is brown drain off the excess fat. Layer the meat on the tater tots, then the green beans, follow with the soup then place back in the oven to bake for 45 minutes.

After dish is finished baking add a layer to cheese and put back in for 5 to 10 minutes until the cheese melts. Let stand 5 minutes. Serve hot.

 

 

Loree’s Barbecue Sauce – Family Recipe Friday

Today is Friday and for the month of March that means it is Family Recipe Friday. Recently a forgotten recipe box that belonged to my Great Grandmother decided to make reappearance. It gave me the idea to make some of the recipes. I came across a blog prompt suggestion by the Armchair Genealogist Lynn Palermo and the idea took root.

I decided to start the series with Loree’s Barbecue Sauce because I had all the things needed to prepare it around the house. Loree was my paternal Grandmother. It was a very simple recipe.

The handwritten recipes are priceless.

Ingredients:

1-Cup catsup (ketchup)

1-Teaspoon mustard

1-Teaspoon vinegar

“a little” sugar

Very basic ingredient list

The recipe directions instruct me to “heat and pour over meat or chicken.” I added the ingredients to a small saucepan and heated on low heat stirring frequently until it was hot. I used about half a teaspoon of sugar.

My take away from the sauce was that it was missing something. I served it over grilled chicken breast like a dipping sauce. It was not bad but it was too much like fancy ketchup. I would definitely make it again in a pinch if I were low on other ingredients and ran out of barbecue sauce.

I could see it being popular during the baby boomer years of a house full of young kids and fewer spice options in the local grocery store. Above any missing flavor layers, it was enjoyable to revive something that my Grandmother prepared ages ago and serve it around my own dinner table.

Grandma’s Recipe Box

Family Recipe Friday Series:

This was my Great Grandmother’s recipe box. I’ve had it since she died in 1999 and for the last several years it has sat forgotten in the cupboard above my refrigerator gathering dust.

I don’t recall ever using any of the recipes to cook with either growing up or over the two decades I have had it in my possession. By the time I started making lifelong memories with my Grandma she was already getting up there in years, a widow living alone, and many of her meals were from meals on wheels. The one thing we always made together…each and every time I stayed at her house…was canned biscuits and sausage gravy and that didn’t require a recipe.

I can’t help but find myself drawn to that old recipe box. Many of the yellowed slips of paper are scrawled in her shaky handwriting instantly recognizable even after so many years with her gone. Many of them are stained with decades old food stains.

Mrs Millers Cake

Later in the same day while searching through a list of blog prompts I see listed a suggestion for Family Recipe Friday and it was too much coincidence for me to ignore. An idea was born.

For the next several weeks, I will be featuring a family recipe in my Family Recipe Friday series. Stay tuned.

 

Blog Prompt suggestion courtesy of:

http://geneabloggerstribe.com/genealogy-prompts/daily-prompts/

• Family Recipe Friday – share recipes with fellow bloggers and foodies alike, suggested by Lynn Palermo of The Armchair Genealogist