white dignity recipes

"dignity bag - This term has a more noble origin than most: it was invented to ease the pain of foster children whose possessions were moved in garbage bags. Dignity bag sounded a little better to Jeanne Fowler, an advocate for foster kids who apparently coined the term. Is she onto something? I wonder if we’d all have more dignity if we used the word dignity instead of garbage, trash, rubbish, junk, and squalor. Then we could live in a shiny new future, full of dignity cans, dignity trucks, and dignity men who empty the dignity dumpsters. White trash would be white dignity."

--wordlustitude (http://wordlust.blogspot.com/2008/01/euphemism-hall-of-fame.html)


often, whenever i make an easy recipe, i feel like i'm cheating.

yesterday, for instance, i made pot pies. so yummy. so easy.
it felt like i was almost doing something wrong to claim them as homemade.
as though i took the easy way out.
everyone was satisfied.
maura ate thirds.
i'm happy when she eats like that.
but i still felt like i cheated.

the pot pie went like this:
- frozen pie crust thawed and baked in the oven at 400 degrees for 9 minutes.
- while the pie crust was baking i cooked three chicken breasts on the stove top.
- i sprayed the sautee pan with cooking spray, then seasoned the breasts with salt, pepper and a little garlic for flavor.
- pie crusts out of the oven.
- chicken breasts cooked and diced.
- in a bowl i tossed together a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, a can of undiluted condensed cream of chicken soup (the recipe called for cream of mushroom but brian hates mushrooms so i subbed the chicken), a little shredded cheddar cheese, and the diced chicken.
- stirred it all together
- filled the two empty pie shells
- i topped the two with unrolled crescent rolls until they semi-resembled a "pie"
- baked the assembled pie at 375 for 20 minutes or until the crescent rolls were brown and fluffy.
- ta da, chicken pot pie.

easy. breezy. beautiful. we downed one pot pie in no time flat. the whole thing. the other is wrapped, labeled with instructions, and frozen so we can eat it at a later date.

i still felt like i did something wrong. sort of like that old commercial for rice krispie treats where the woman is in the kitchen reading and throws flour on her face before coming out of the kitchen with a martyred look and a plate of the goodies? do you know the one?


the other delicious recipe my sister and i have labeled "white trash party mix" is wonderful, and seasonally appropriate this time of year:

candy corn and peanuts in a bowl.

my sister has developed the perfect ratio of peanuts to candy corn - something like four to one. i'm not exactly sure. she can tell you though.
if you know her personally, please be sure to ask.
it's worth it for the perfectly balanced sugary/salty mouthful.
don't be fooled and try to use the candy corn flavored pumpkins they make this time of year, nor the honey roasted peanuts, nor any generic candy corn.
you need the real deal - brach's candy corn & dry roasted shelled peanuts. together in a bowl. sitting out on your table. the longer they sit out, the better. trust us.
our mother made this yearly, and it's good.

i don't really know why we started calling it white trash party mix. we just did, and it stuck. not very nice, i know. sometimes i was/am a mean girl. going forward i think we should probably find a new name for it. of course, i'll have to clear this with my sister, the co-namer of the recipe. she's nicer than me, so i'm sure she'll agree.

i think, for some reason, that if anything is easy, if anything has cream of anything on it, i'm taking a short-cut, and somehow short-cuts in cooking equate to cheating for me. is that truly the case? is there anything really wrong with doing that in cooking? i mean, let's be honest - who doesn't love green bean casserole, and that has four ingredients (if you don't count the black pepper) and we all know one of the most delicious aspects of green bean casserole is cream of mushroom soup. well, and those fried onions.
i love fresh green beans too. don't get me wrong. but thanksgiving traditions are thanksgiving traditions, and gimme some green bean casserole.

it must be because i grew up in the 70's, and suddenly everything had cream of something or other smeared on top of or throughout it.

stuff. that was the worst. that was a recipe my mom made, and oh, how i hated stuff night. shredded potatoes topped with shredded carrots topped with ground beef, smothered in cream of something soup. blech. i'm sorry i even wrote about it and you all had to read about it. imagine trying to choke it down once a week. nothing was cooked thoroughly. the meat, sure. but not the potatoes, not the carrots. horrid. oh, the memories of undercooked, shredded potatoes smeared in cream of something (barf perhaps? oh, that's terrible, but as a 9 year old - i mean, come on...) soup.

yes, i was a vegetarian for 15 years as an adult, i think as a result of some of those weird and untimely casseroles. vegetarian that is, until that fateful veal brat from the paulina street meat market 6 years ago...quickly followed by another and another, and oh, oops, i just ate three veal brats at this bbq and i haven't eaten meat in 15 years...

anyway, another story for another time.

so. i guess i'm simply here to say for the record: it's ok to use cream of whatever in whatever, and it's not cheating. right? right. cooking is cooking, and if you need to use canned stuff sometimes, so be it.

it's like a chef friend told me once about music when i was admitting to him that i had listened to justin timberlake the entire way to work that day and danced the whole way there and enjoyed myself doing it, he said "hey girl, you listen to what you need to listen to to get you going, there's no shame in that." so i'm going to say to myself..."hey girl, you cook with what you need to cook with to get you cooking...there's no shame in that."

P.S. A little JT for y'all...

food never ceases to amaze me.

yesterday i made stuff.
i woke up baking and cooking, and didn't stop.
homemade chocolate pudding.
ghirardelli chocolate chip cookies.
plum and teriyaki marinade for both tofu and chicken kabobs.
luckily, everything turned out pretty tasty. *pats self on back*. (literally, i just did that, patted myself on the back.)

as i was stirring the pudding in process - watching the sugar, the flour, the cocoa powder and the milk meld together and wait to boil, i thought about its' origins. who originally thought of this stuff? who thought of flour? who thought to put them all together in this delicious form?

i know recipes are formed all of the time. some are happy accidents, some intentional creations.

i thought about my grandmother fox. i thought about the happy memories i have of her related to food. my grandmother smelled of radishes and green onions. she used so much cream in her coffee it was more white than brown. she could grow a tomato better than anybody i've known since, and i've known some tomato growers in my time.

she grew up during the depression, and as a result froze everything food related later in life so that it didn't go to waste. and when i say everything, i mean everything. potato chips. saltine crackers. she had a deep freeze in the bedroom of her one-bedroom apartment when she moved from the house she lived in to a retirement village.

as a young girl, we lived in texas, and drove yearly to ohio to visit her. i used to joke with my parents that upon arrival grandma fox would come out to the cracked cement driveway of her pre-war home and declare, "well, i don't have a thing thawed!" i didn't make the connection until well into my adulthood what exactly this meant...literally, she didn't have a thing thawed.

grandma fox was famous for her vegetable soup, her meticulously cubed potatoes in her homemade potato salad, and her peanut butter cookies. oh how i loved those peanut butter cookies. grandma fox is the one who taught me how eggs work.

i was around 5 years old. i remember being outside at her house. maybe on a swing? maybe at the picnic table? somewhere in her back yard. and out she came, with a peanut butter cookie wrapped in her apron. "oh yum," i thought. "here you go christi, i just made these peanut butter cookies, only i forgot to put in the eggs, so they're all crumbly. eggs work like glue in baking you see, and without them, everything falls apart." it was a great example, one i never forgot.

i carried it with me into 7th grade home ec. when we were learning what everything in baking does and we came to the eggs, i knew immediately. my hand flew in the air, "glue! they are the glue!" yep. instant A. (thank you grandma fox, there weren't that many A's in my academic career, but 7th grade home ec was one of them.)

i thought of this story yesterday when stirring the pudding, waiting for it to boil, and i recounted it to my boyfriend brian.

brian has a nine year old daughter maura. maura likes to do things in the kitchen. she likes to crack open eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. she likes to stand on the step stool and look at stuff on the stove. she loves to wash and cut mushrooms, and sautee them on the stove top. she is pretty great with a knife, i must say. maura is really great at coming up with menu ideas, especially for parties.

maura's favorite food related activity is watching the food network. she could do it for days straight if she'd be allowed. rather, she dvr's show after show after show (and i clear them off of the dvr when she's not looking so that it doesn't fill up the entire thing). smile.

yesterday friends came over for an outdoor celebration. we ate. we laughed. we played bean bags. we discussed dishes from our childhood. watergate salad. lime jello with cabbage and carrots on a bed of iceberg lettuce. some whipped cream creation with pineapple and marshmallows. lots of items with cream of mushroom soup. fruit salads covered in orange juice. childhood pizza party friday nights with homemade pizzas - the 'garbage' variety, chef boyardee just add water pizza crusts.

it's a wonder any of us eat anything at all now really.

and we wondered together - what maura and her friends will grow up and talk about eating from their childhood - plum and teryaki kabobs. sushi. egg white omelettes with aged cheddar cheese. lasagna with arrabiata sauce. real maple syrup. blueberries in season.

like i said, food never ceases to amaze me.