FIVE CUP SALAD

Many people know this Five Cup Salad as ambrosia. I grew up eating ambrosia that my mother made and loved it. I have several different recipes for it already on this blog. When I was making dinner for Friends Gary and Margaret recently after his surgery, I decided to make this recipe I found in my Square Meals cookbook. They loved it and asked for my recipe. 

The recipe is called Five Cup Salad because you use a cup each of five ingredients. My version should be called Four and Three-Fourths Cup Salad as I only used three-fourths of a cup of the sour cream. I added the sour cream a fourth of a cup at a time and after three-fourths cups, I was happy with the consistency of it. I also used fruit in 100% juice.

FIVE CUP SALAD

1       cup shredded coconut (I used organic unsweetened coconut)
1       cup mandarin oranges, drained (11-oz can)
1       cup crushed pineapple, drained (about 2/3 of a 20-ounce can)
1       cup sour cream (I only use 3/4 cup fat-free sour cream)
1       cup miniature white marshmallows 

Toss the coconut, oranges, pineapple, and marshmallows together in a large mixing bowl.

Add sour cream. I recommend adding it 1/4 cup at a time to desired consistency.

 I think it is best if you do it ahead of time and refrigerate it for a couple of hours before serving.

GRANDMA'S CHICKEN CASSEROLE

When I saw this recipe, I wasn't completely sure about it. So I decided to read the comments - there were quite a few and they helped me decide I should definitely make it. I was convinced to just serve vegetables on the side and not mix anything in the dish. I also read that the recipe called for too many crumbs. (I did go on and make the amount in the recipe and found out they were right...I had a probably 1/2 cup I didn't use - see the picture below. Then when we ate the dish, I realized I had more than I wanted in a bite.) Several said it was a good southern recipe. That's all I needed to hear/read. 

I am so glad I did make it. I love the combined tastes of the chicken, the cream of chicken soup, the cheese, and yes, even the bread crumbs - just not so much.

GRANDMA'S CHICKEN CASSEROLE

1-1/2    cups cooked chicken, chopped or shredded
1           can (10.75 oz) cream of chicken soup
1           cup (8 ounces) grated cheddar cheese
1           cup bread/cracker crumbs
3          tablespoons butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Place chicken in the bottom of a 1-quart casserole dish.

Spoon soup evenly over the chicken.

Top with the grated cheese.

In a bowl, stir together the melted butter and the breadcrumbs.

Sprinkle over the baking dish.

(I used 1-1/2 cups of crumbs and that was too many so your dish won't look this full.)

(Before I put the dish in the oven, I sprayed the crumbs with non-stick cooking spray.)

Bake 35 to 40 minutes or until bubbly.

Serves 5 - 6.

MIRIAM'S PINEAPPLE COOKIES

When I went back to check if I had posted a recipe for Pineapple Cookies, I was surprised to see I shared two in the same week. Each one was a little different, but I still can't believe I made two recipes that were so similar that close together. It all started because I was looking for a cookie recipe to take to Friends Margaret and Gary's house for dinner. Gary had successful open heart surgery and I wanted to take them dinner. I decided to make them Dinner in One Dish (See picture below.) I asked about dessert and Margaret said he hadn't gotten his appetite back completely. He had a cookie in the hospital so she said if I had any cookies around, I could bring some.

I had a cookie recipe I had decided to make (I'll surprise you with it next week since I have decided to make and take them to Hillcrest.), but I made a 5 - Cup Salad (look for that recipe Thursday) that only used a cup of crushed pineapple which meant I had a tad more than 1/2 cup left. So I decided to make Miriam Miller's Amish Pineapple Cookies from her The Wooden Spoon Cookbook. The recipe was one of those easy to cut in half and that meant I only needed 1/2 cup of crushed pineapple. I will give you the full recipe, but it is easy to cut the ingredients in half if you don't want to make a lot of cookies. (like 8 dozen)

I left out the pecans because Gary is supposed to avoid saturated fats. (I made four cookies with a few chopped pecans for the picture and because I like nuts in baked goods and wanted to enjoy a couple with the nuts.)

MIRIAM'S PINEAPPLE COOKIES

2       eggs
1        cup brown sugar
1        cup white sugar
1        cup oleo (I did use unsalted butter.)
1        cup crushed pineapple, drained
2       teaspoons vanilla
1        cup chopped nuts (I chopped a few pecans in the sample cookies)
1        cup chopped nuts
4       cups flour
1/2    teaspoon salt
1/2    teaspoon baking soda
2       teaspoons baking powder

(The only instructions Miriam had was Bake at 400 degrees for 10-12 minutes. This is what I did.)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Cream sugars and butter together til smooth. (I cut the stick of butter into slices to speed up the creaming.)

Add eggs and vanilla. Beat til smooth scraping the sides of the bowl as necessary.

Combine the flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder in a different bowl.

Add and stir (mixer on lowest speed) in flour mixture alternately with the crushed pineapple beginning and ending with the flour. (1/3 of the flour each time and half of the pineapple each time)

Add nuts, if you are using them. (Picture of my sampling.)




Using a small cookie scoop (mine holds 1 tablespoon of water) drop dough on ungreased cookie sheets about 2 inches apart. (I never bake more than 12 cookies on a sheet.) (Oops! I guess I forgot to take a picture of them on the cookie sheet. You can see the first two I made below.) 

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes. (10 minutes was perfect in my oven.)

Remove and cool on wire rack.

I tried two cookies only on the first sheet; one as it came out of the cookie scoop (flatten side down) and one I flattened with my fingers.

Results? The cookie flattened enough that I didn't need to flatten the cookies.



Store in an airtight container.

Here is the Dinner in a Dish I made them.

I used Mrs. Dash's Garlic and Herb seasoning and generously sprayed the whole dish with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter spray which has no salt and no saturated fat. Mrs. Dash doesn't have any sodium either. (Orders from Gary's doctor.) Margaret said it was seasoned just right!

TIP from Patricia:

Does your brown sugar get hard on you even if you store it in an airtight container? Did you know all you have to do is put some bread in the container and the brown sugar softens up? Yep. It works. (I didn't think to take a picture of the brown sugar when I put half a heel in the container yesterday. The first picture is today when I needed some for the recipe.)

And some Wooden Spoon Wisdom :

Any trouble that is too small to take to God in prayer is too small to worry about.

CHOCOLATE-DATE-COCONUT CAKE

I'm going to "date" myself with this next sentence, but that's okay. Remember when Woman's Day magazine had the insert in their magazine back in the 70s with recipes? It was called The Collector's Cookbook and was on light-weight paper sack-like paper. It was several pages and they were about half the size of the regular pages in the magazine. They intended for the reader to tear the pages out of the magazine and even had drawn holes to put it in a 3-ring binder.

Well, inside my Betty Crocker cookbook, I have had one of those inserts since March, 1976.  This particular one was titled Chocolate. Every recipe in the insert contained chocolate. Now you understand why I have hung onto it for so long. The edges are ripped and torn because of the size of the pages compared to my BC cookbook. On the cover, it says, "The Aztecs drank it, the conquistadors plundered it, the first North American colonists imported it, then opened their very own factory in 1765. Chocolate - the flavor that's a perpetual fad. Whether it's pudding, pie, cake, cookie, brownie, or sauce, everything in this month's cookbook is a paean to chocolate."

Inside the "cover", it starts with chocolate tips. Only one of them is a new idea to me. "A good way to melt chocolate pieces is to heat a heavy saucepan until very hot; remove from heat; add chocolate pieces and stir until melted." Never thought of that before.

The second recipe in the cookbook was called Chocolate-Date-Coconut Cake. I have made a chocolate cake before that contained dates. They really make a cake moist! I mean - Super Moist! I also liked that it only contained 1 cup of sugar. I know I used to make cakes that contained a lot of sugar, but not any more. Because this one has the dates, I decided I could probably try it with 7/8 cup of sugar. (Just measure out 1 cup and then remove 6 teaspoons from it.) Six teaspoons is 1 gram of sugar and every gram you can omit, is good. Trust me, it doesn't reduce the sweet taste of the cake. I also used organic unsweetened coconut for the topping. 

As I write this the night before I take it in to Hillcrest Thrift Shop to share it with the volunteers, I don't know for sure how they will react. BUT I think I know them well enough to know they are going to L.O.V.E. it.

CHOCOLATE-DATE-COCONUT CAKE

1         cup chopped dates
1         cup hot water (I did heat my water to almost boiling.)
1-3/4 cups flour
3        tablespoons cocoa
1         teaspoon baking soda
1         cup butter, softened (I just had mine at room temperature.)
1         cup sugar (Okay to remove 6 teaspoons of the sugar.)
2        teaspoons vanilla
2        eggs
1         package (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips (I used 1 cup 60% cacao chips.) divided into two  separate 1/2 cup measurements 
1/2     cup flaked coconut (I used organic unsweetened flaked coconut.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour (or spray with nonsticking cooking spray that contains flour) a 9 x 13 - inch baking pan.

(I gathered all of the ingredients together before I started mixing them up.I don't often do this, but it surely does make it easier to follow the recipe.)

Cover dates with water in a small bowl; set aside. (This picture shows what the mixture looked like by the time I was ready to add it to the batter.)

Stir together flour, cocoa, and baking soda; set aside. (I sifted the three ingredients twice to blend them together.)

Cream butter, sugar, and vanilla until fluffy. (Turn the speed up on the electric mixer and don't cheat on the time.

You want the mixture to be light and fluffy.)

Beat in eggs, one at a time until well blended.

(You will need to scrape the sides of the bowl often.)

Stir in flour mixture alternately with the reserved dates and water until well blended. (I started with the flour and ended with the flour. I add about 1/3 of the flour, then half of the liquid, another 1/3 of the flour, then the rest of the liquid, and then add the last of the flour. Scrape the sides of the bowl as you do this.)

Stir in 1/2 cup of the chips.

Pour the batter in the prepared pan and smooth out evenly.

Sprinkle the coconut on top of the batter and

then the remaining 1/2 cup of the chips. (I did kinda "place" the chips so they would be spread out on the cake.)

Bake for 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool on rack.

Cut in squares to serve.

Cover cake with airtight top to keep it moist.

I took a picture of the front page of the "cookbook" insert just to remind you what they looked like.

SOLAR ECLIPSE, AUG 21, 2017

This past Monday the country experienced a total solar eclipse from ocean to ocean, the first time this has happened in 99 yrs. We were lucky that we lived within 90 miles of the center of the path which meant we would experience the total eclipse.

For days before seemed like everyone was excited about it, buying glasses, planning parties, etc. With so many recalls due to glasses that did not meet ISO safety regulations, my husband and I decided it wasn't worth the risk. We were also getting forecasts that seemed to think we were going to have rain or at least clouds. I also saw many cute, ingenious ways people were going to use to watch the eclipse. I heard many parents who were excited about their children being able to see it while at school and just as many who had notified the school that they did not want their children to be allowed outside to view it. 

The day started off with the bright sun coming through our bedroom window waking me up. I told my husband that apparently the weathermen had gotten their reports wrong. Then maybe an hour later, I looked out and realized it was raining. Crazy. The totality was to happen here at 1:08ish with the start being at least an hour earlier. Before I even realized the time, it stopped raining and the sun came out again. Crazy.

 About the time it stopped raining, I decided to make a "viewer" using a cereal box and a cracker box (since we had not bought glasses). The television was on all morning and we viewed the excitement from the observers in Oregon and other parts of the country as it started. I went outside to see how (and if) my viewer was going to work. Imagine my joy when it did. I decided to take a picture of what I was seeing in my viewer and shared it on Facebook. The clouds hadn't completely gone away but I managed to watch it for a while in my viewer.

We couldn't help but notice how it was getting darker and darker. The cicadas started "singing" and the solar lights came on and then it was dark. (We were so amazed at how dark it had gotten that we completely forgot that it was okay for us to look at the eclipse without glasses at the time of totality.) Totality was about 1 min 20 seconds here and then it started getting light again. We could hear some fireworks in the area. (I told you people were excited here.)

It took at least an hour for it to be back to normal when "normal" was interrupted with rain again. By middle afternoon we were having lots or rain, lightning, and thunder. At about 4:30 lightning hit a transformer lighting up the sky behind our house  which caused our lights to be off for a few seconds. I called the power company to let them know that it had hit the transformer behind our house. The rain stopped for a while, but another storm came through that night before we went to bed. The area was hit by quite a bit of flooding and many people were out of power. We went to bed that night and I told my husband it had been quite a day!

Here are my pictures I took that day...

My homemade eclipse viewers

One of my views...

A later view

Then the rain after the eclipse.

This is one of my favorite pictures from NASA

A friend shared this picture on Facebook, but I didn't see who took it. I love how you can see the craters on the moon.

This is a picture our neighbor two doors down took with his cell phone. Awesome picture David Bulla.

Already looking forward to 2024 when the next solar eclipse will be crossing Arkansas. Definitely planning on seeing it with relatives and this time I will get some approved glasses to view it.