Tag: What’s for Dinner

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

In these days of prepared just about everything, for many people what I like to call “old timey” cooking is just a distant memory, and for many others not even that.  Tuesday night I got the idea to write this because I plan, when The Little Girl goes to sleep, to show The Woman how to make chocolate syrup at home for a fraction of the cost of even the store brands.

It is easy, and the recipe can be increased to make as much as you want.  After thinking about that, I sort of randomly selected a few other things that used to be made from scratch that rarely are any more, or that simple are no longer eaten much.

I think that this will be sort of fun, and I suspect that many of you reading will have some recipes in your memories’ horde to share.  Let us start with chocolate syrup.

As many of you know, last Tuesday was The Girl’s (henceforth referred to as The Woman) 20th birthday.  We had originally planned to bake a cheesecake together Sunday past, but she had a better idea.  She asked me very sweetly, “Do you know what would make this cake really special for me?  If you cooked it by yourself since it is my birthday cake”.  Of course I agreed!

I got all kinds of suggestions from the community here Saturday before last, and I appreciate all of them.  I finally took the basic recipe from the Kraft site and modified it, and the result was wonderful!

I shall give you the recipe first, then a photographic gallery with my comments about how to do this.  It is not hard to make a cheesecake that does not dry out or get weepy, but it is easy to mess one up irretrievably!  You should read the entire piece before trying the recipe.

Many people think that lots of space is required to grow a big garden.  This is not always the case.  Part of it depends on what you grow, but another part of it depends on how you grow it.

I have a garden space that is approximately 16 x 16 feet, for a total of 256 square feet.  I chose those dimensions because landscape timbers are eight feet long, but this is not a raised bed garden.

I had originally planned to post pictures of each step, but the weather has been extremely dry in the Bluegrass, and the plat has been too dry to till.  It is now raining, so I can get to it as soon as it stops, although it may take a day to dry out enough first.  I can post pictures as comments during future installments of What’s for Dinner?.

The fall apple crop is in and so jelly has been on my mind.  We shall cover jams and other preserves as well, but jellymaking takes more technique, so more detail will be given to jelly.  If you can make jelly well, the others are easy.  Jellymaking is not really hard, but there are a couple of rules that have to be followed.

Jelly and other preserves thicken upon cooking because of the interaction between pectin (found in many fruits), sugar, acid, and water.  Pectin is one of the soluble fibers that get so much attention as part of a balanced diet, even though it contributes few nutrients.  Its main purpose in the diet is to help regulate the metabolism in the gut, and soluble fiber has been shown to be beneficial for blood pressure and blood lipid regulation.