Month: March 2021

This is one of my grandma’s recipes, so it’s at least 50 years old, but I had never made it before. The instructions are a bit sparse, so I did my best to interpret them.

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp. minced onion
• 1/3 C. minced celery
• 1 Tbsp. butter
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 C. milk
• 1 C. cooked rice
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. pepper
• 1/2 can Cream of Celery soup
• 2 Tbsp. mayonnaise
• 1 can salmon

Method:

Whisk the eggs in the milk:

Melt the butter. Whisk in the butter, soup and mayo, then stir in the rest of the ingredients except for the salmon (I added 1/2 tsp. of dried dill):

Open the can of salmon, and add the juice to the bowl. Remove the salmon, then go through it and remove the round backbones (the smaller bones are fine, and will basically melt).

Now you can either flake the salmon in a bowl and add it to the mix, or just use your fingers to flake it into the bowl, then stir it up:

I used some aluminum foil in my loaf pan to make it easier to get it out.

Bake in a 350 degree onion for one hour, or until lightly browned on top.

Indeed, it was easy to get out . . . but the foil stuck to the loaf. Probably better to just use the pan with a bit of butter or oil:

But, you ask, how did it taste?

VERY salmony, in fact maybe a bit too much. Next time I make it I’ll probably add more rice to make the flavor less intense. Also a bit of same-note, and lacking in texture, so next time I won’t cut the onions or celery so fine. In the end, I made a simple sauce with sour cream and (sadly) dried dill. Along with a dill pickle, this was . . .

Yum!

-R

This is an old-fashioned recipe, but yum and one I’ve made loads of times. Have I mentioned that green beans are my second-favorite vegetable (after broccoli)? 🙂

Ingredients:

• 1 C. mushrooms
• 2 Tbsp. butter
• 3/4 C. sour cream
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. pepper
• 1/2 tsp. dried basil (or herb of your choice)
• 1 lb. green beans, stems removed and cut into 1-2″ slices
• Paprika

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Boil the beans for about 7 or 8 minutes until crisp-tender, or until desired doneness. They won’t cook much more in the oven.

Slice the mushrooms, then saute in the butter for about five minutes.

Remove from heat and stir in the sour cream, salt, pepper, and herbs.

Butter a casserole dish:

Make a layer with about half the beans, then spread on half the sauce:

Repeat, then add a sprinkle of paprika:

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until heated through:

Serve:

Yum!

-R

Do you like shrimp chips? I love them, wonderfully crispy if not much of a shrimp flavor.

They start out looking like something you might use in a poker game:

But after a few seconds (that’s all it takes!) in 350 degree oil, they puff up and rise to the surface:

Yum!

I had one lone cha gio (Vietnamese spring roll with pork and shrimp) and a few pork dumplings left in my freezer. Normally the dumplings would be boiled, but I decided to deep fry them along with the cha gio.

But, you ask, how did the dumplings taste?

Delicious. I love the texture of boiled dumplings, but this was a nice alternative.

Yum!

-R

These are the three versions of the book I have.

The hotel I grew up in had a drugstore next door, and it had a rack of magazines, plus one of those revolving metal displays with paperbacks.

When the items didn’t sell, the druggist had only to tear off their covers and send them back to the distributor to get credit. The de-covered remains went into his garbage . . .

. . . which my sister and I raided regularly. I saved the fairly salacious “true crime ‘n’ sex” tabloids for the occasional visit from my mom, and Sis took the romances, but all the science fiction was mine.

So I ended up with a bunch of paperbacks with their front covers torn off. What to do? Rebind them with a bit of cloth, cardboard, paper, flour paste, and elbow grease. A particular favorite, cleverly rebound in orange cloth:

Notice my attention to detail:

What IS very surprising is that even with flour paste, most of the bindings are absolutely fine after 40+years.

On first reading the book, I was extremely annoyed by the Nadsat (mostly Russian-derived slang) and not knowing the exact meaning of each word, but this copy had a handy glossary, so I started to annotate it:

That quickly became tiresome, so I just went with the flow . . . you can get enough of the sense from the context, and the exact meaning is pretty much irrelevant. Although this is sort of an artificial example, it was my first inkling that authors can deliberately use ambiguity as part of their style.

The second one is from a trip to Spain in 1982.

I never got through it, my poor Spanish plus Nadsat, although in retrospect the translations are pretty obvious (droogs -> drugos, rassoodocks -> rasodoques).

The third I bought before seeing the movie.

It’s the script of the film, heavily illustrated with stills. 13 y.o. old me was madly in lust with bad boy Alex, especially when he got naked:

At that age I missed some of Kubrick’s humor.

-R

When life gives you coronavirus, and you now hate to go grocery shopping, although you used to love to, make enchiladas!

And further proof of my enchilada love: https://tiabr.com/can-you-make-enchiladas-from-anything

The only thing in my fridge that was evenly remotely fresh was some cabbage, some carrots, and a bit of broccoli that for not-a-root-vegetable, was surprisingly resilient.

The rest from the freezer:

Make some sauce. I over-sauteed some garlic, then added the flour, some cumin and chili powder (4 Tbsp. fat to 4 Tbsp. flour to 2 C. liquid).

Make some tomato sauce:

I made two fillings. One, vaguely Mexican, which I liked the last time I made it, was chicken, corn, beans, and a bit more cumin:

With sauce:

The other was the parboiled veggies & chicken, plus sauce after this pic:

Hélas! I hadn’t been careful with the flour tortillas in the freezer, and they got a bit broken:

So ended up with mini-enchiladas (and ran out of tortillas and had to use some injera):

But . . .

Pandemic Enchiladas and Sauerkraut on a Broken Plate:

Yum!

-R