Day 8- Diving into Gram's Chicken Divan - 12 minutes to a delicious dish for hungry, mungry bikers!

My cousin Pam Skoy Hepworth (cutest new newlywed in the Skoy gang) and her husband Kent document their adventures with Grandma's Chicken Divan after a killer bike ride one evening in Salt Lake City.



Recipe:
1-2 and 1/2 lb. chicken
2 c. water
1 tsp. salt

1 bunch broccoli
2 T. butter

3 T. flour
2 c. chicken broth (from the above; add milk to make 2 c. if you have less than 2 c. after cooking the chicken (you will))

salt and pepper

2 T. sherry
Parmesan cheese

Simmer chicken in water and salt until cooked through. Remove meat. Save broth for sauce.

Cook broccoli until tender crisp. Drain and layer in a shallow, buttered baking dish. Slice chicken and lay on top of broccoli.

Melt butter, stir in flour and add broth. Cook and stir sauce until thickened. Add salt, pepper and sherry. Cover chicken and broccoli with sauce. Sprinkle with cheese and bake in 400 degree oven for 12 minutes.

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Hungry riders – We didn’t take time to make a side dish, we just heaped all that divan on our plates and devoured it! Delicious and perfect for a recovery meal! (Note the cool helmet hairdo--so stylish!)

Jenie's cousin, Pam, here. Last evening my husband Kent and I took a killer ride on our road bikes and before we even finished the ride we both had a huge hunger fit,closely followed by some serious fatigue, both of which can only be satiated by lots and lots of food.

When we finally made it home we immediately headed for the refrigerator and sadly, not much was ready and waiting to be consumed. We had some chicken, so I thought I'd cook that up quick-like. But there was my Grandma's cookbook on the counter, and although I hadn’t planned to cook from her cookbook that night and had already selected several other dishes to cook this month for Jenie's "3o Days of June", I thought maybe I could find something easy that included chicken for a quick supper for two hungry mungry bikers.

I was right! What I found was Chicken Divan. I quickly scanned the recipe and I had the main ingredients: chicken and broccoli. PLUS, the cook time in the oven was only 12 minutes. We could wait 12 minutes! Sold! I yelled to Kent, "grab the camera!" We were going to accomplish two things at once: feeding our hungry selves, and adding to Jenie’s blog.

Admittedly, if we hadn't been trying to photograph the process of this recipe, it would have come together quicker, but it was still quick and easy overall.

Special thanks to Kent, the brilliant food photographer — even in his distracted state of hunger he made it all look Yum!

I guess this post and this meal probably don’t constitute real slow food, but in memory of Grandma and because of Jen’s June campaign, the two chicken breasts in my fridge didn’t end up on the grill (i.e. charred and dry, because sadly, that’s how I grill), instead they turned into something wonderful, flavorful and memorable. A good reminder that slowing down really does make everything better—especially food!


Broccoli - The best part of cooking broccoli is watching it turn this beautiful shade of green. Pretty!


Chicken slices – We only had two chicken breasts, so that’s what went into this dish. There was plenty, even for two famished bikers.


Butter the dish – Note the special buttering placemat. Thanks for making everything look better than reality Babe!


Arranging –


Melting butter - And now for the white sauce. Melt your butter and enjoy the aroma while you’re at it.


Roux – Add the flour.


White sauce – Add broth, salt, pepper and sherry. (Or, as in our case, some white wine because apparently all the sherry in the house is gone, gone, gone.) The wine—and I’m sure the sherry—add a nice flavor to the white sauce and I’m pretty sure I’ll be adding it to all my white sauces from now on. Thanks for the tip Gram!


Divan with sauce -


Add cheese – I didn’t read the recipe very closely, so I didn’t realize we needed Parmesan until about this point. We didn’t have any Parmesan cheese, but fortunately it is my creed that everything is better with cheese, so while we didn’t have Parmesan in the cheese drawer (yes, we have a drawer in the refrigerator dedicated to cheeses of all kinds), we had another lovely hard cheese called Dejong something or other, which is a pungent and flavorful Dutch cheese, and it worked really well too.

Voila – And 12 minutes later here is the finished product. Beautiful!

Day 5- Oatmeal Coconut Cookies (with Oregon Fireweed Honey)

My grandmother was a bit of a health nut. Her cookbook features several recipes using whole wheat flour and I recall my Dad's tales of all the crazy things she tried to feed him in the name of good health, including hiding egg shells in his food. In this vein, I thought I'd tweak granny's recipe just a bit to make it healthier. I added nuts, replaced 1 cup of sugar with fireweed honey and added dried fruit to these cookies. The combo worked wonderfully!



3/4 c. butter
2 cups brown sugar (I used 1 cup of br sugar and 1 cup of honey- if you use honey, add 1/4 more flour)
2 eggs, well-beaten
2 cups oatmeal
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup coconut
2 cups flour
1 tsp.
1 tsp. soda

(Optional: 1/2 cup of sliced almonds or other nuts... or add dried prunes, date or dried cherries!)

Cream butter and sugar; add eggs and beat well. Mix soda and baking powder into flour and add. Shape into balls and dip into sugar. Palce, sugar-side up, on a cookie sheet- press down with fork.

Bake in 350 degree oven for 12-15 minutes.

I love this recipe especially using 1 cup of honey to replace one of the cups of brown sugar and dried fruit. I love how these cookies fluff up in the over and get crispy and sugary on the edges. For softer cookies, cook them 12 minutes and for browner crispier cookies, cook for more like 14 min.


I used Oregon fireweed honey.


Coconut again... (My grandmother put coconut in about everything conceivable. It was probably her way of bringing something tropical to snowy Idaho!)


Italian prunes... from the PDX Farmer's Market!

Day 4- Gathering ingredients at the Portland Farmer's Market and Making Music
See tomorrow's post of dried fruit oatmeal/coconut cookies!

Today I bought delicious, dried plums (which tasted nothing like store-bought prunes) at the Portland Farmer's market to use in a cookie recipe tomorrow!



While at the market, I ate a chunk of Fraga Farm's mozzarella cheese, fresh blackberry fruit roll-ups, Italian prunes, a sandwich made with roasted duck, chevre, carmelized onions, pickled beets and dijon mustard (YUM!)

I gobbled up some cookies from Two Tarts Bakery...(hilarious name BTW:)


Snacked on salty SEA BEANS harvested along the central coast of Oregon.

And tapped my foot along with an old-fashioned jug/washboard, banjo picking band. Speaking of which, check out my forthcoming video of one banjo player paying homage to my last boyfriend in a creative on-the-spot composition...




And I sat in the park to rest and get some rare Oregon sunshine~!

June 3- June's Skillet Spaghetti... gone wrong... or did it?
Or how Gram helped me invent the world's most perfect food for teenagers, by accident!

Day 3 of "30 Days of June" and I'm already tired!


I like this recipe because you cook the noodles with the sauce, which makes the pasta tastier.

Recipe:
1 lb. ground beef
1 c. chopped onion
3-4 garlic cloves (I added a few for good measure)
8 oz. can tomato sauce
6 oz. can tomato paste
1 1/2 c. water
1 pint tomato juice

2 tsp. chili powder
1 1/2 tsp. salt
dashof pepper
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. oregano
7-8 oz package of elbow pasta (not spaghetti, like the recipe book says, unless you want a teenage-friendly food that's blob-like... which is what I ended up with)
onion and green pepper rings
Parmesan cheese

In an electric frypan, (or a large pot) combine beef, onion, garlic, tomato sauce, paste and juice; the water, sugar and spices. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat. Simmer 30 minutes. Add elbow pasta, stir to seperate and simmer till pasta is tender. Stir frequently! Add onion and pepper runfs the last 5 minutes. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese to the top!

Guess What!!? I discovered the perfect dish for teens: Grandma's Skillet Spaghetti gone wrong. Here's why. I was trying to make a lovely classic spaghetti dish for a group of four adults and two teens, but what turned out instead was like something out of the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Really!



Okay, so maybe Gram was trying to inject a little humor into my latest episode of "Granddaughter Tries to Channel Dead Grandmother's Cooking Prowess," but I tell you, the whole thing was a bit horrifying at moments.

Here's the deal: Her recipe called for SPAGHETTI with the word (ELBOW) in parenthesis. I remember standing in the pasta aisle of the store and thinking... "Surely Gram wouldn't write Spaghetti if she really meant elbow pasta??" So I opted for spaghetti noodles.

It wasn't until I started dumping noodles south in the saucy pot and watching them hang onto each other like frightened skinny people in a tidal wave, that I realized Gram had probably meant Elbow pasta.



My two friends who cheered me on when cooking, who were a bit older, in their 50's, said, "You know they used to call every pasta spaghetti, that's just what they did, they didn't have a 100 varieties like spinach bowtie to choose from, so she probably did mean elbow."

But it was too late, my perfect tasting sauce was filled with half-cooked spaghetti clumping together. And THIS WAS THE MAIN COURSE! The table was set and I was freaking out, thinking, "there's no way I'm serving this stuff!"

Joanne encoarged me and so did a new friend named Catherine, who's a whiz in the kitchen. She said, "Add some more liquid, stir, and just WAIT... it will be okay!"


Cathy, who bakes Huckleberry pies in a single bound. Love her for keeping me sane during the Attack of the Killer Spaghetti Crisis!

She kept telling me to "wait," A lesson that I have a hard time with. I'm soo impatient!



So I waited, waited and waited, adding more tomato sauce. What we wound up with was spaghetti on steroids: a muscular mass of noodles and sauce which didn't look so pretty, but actually tasted yummy like gourmet Chef Boyaredee and which the teenagers and men lapped up like hungry dogs.


Here's the cute little family, the Schultices, who I cooked spaghetti.... er, pasta for.

JUNE 2- June's Angel Thumbprint Cookies

Today, my sister Cara June Raymond (named after Grandma) uses coconut once again to whip up Gram's cookies - I'm starting to think June had a thing for coconut!


Recipe:
1 c. butter
1 1/2 c. brown sugar
4 eggs
1 cup milk
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp almond flavoring
4 c. flour
slightly beaten egg whites

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks and beat well. Add milk, flour, flavorings, Chill 15 minutes.Divide dough into pieces the size of walnuts. Roll into a ball, dip into egg white and then roll in coconut. Dent in the center of each cookie after placing on a cookie sheet. Put 1 tsp. jelly in each center. Bake at 375 for 25 minutes.

CHEF OF THE DAY: Cara Skoy Raymond and kids. (Can I just say my sister's fresh ingredients put me to shame! Look at that jug of fresh Jersey cow milk!)


As told by Cara Raymond:

If there is one thing I remember about Grandma June's cooking is that she paid attention to the details, she looked at cooking as an art, and at a gathering for a special occasion, every detail from the table settings to the temperature of the food was considered, and timed to perfection!

It always tasted soo good, even as a little girl I wanted to cook just like her when I grew up because she had a love of food, and the people she made it for where kings when they sat at her table.

In keeping with grandma's detail-oriented cooking, I made sure the ingredients I used were fresh, and of the finest quality.



The flour I used is from a local mill, that prides itself with the quality.

The butter-rich milk was freshly milked yesterday from my neighbor's jersey cow.

The butter in the recipe was home spun from the Jersey's cream. And the jam is homemade cherry I canned last year after I picked and pitted cherries with my kids.

My children liked the process it took to separate the yolks from the whites. They had fun rolling the dough and dipping it in the whites and then in the coconut


Then pressing a hole in the cookies for the jam.


Their favorite part was licking the beaters.



It was fun sharing Grandma June's recipe with the kids and talking about how much she loved cooking! But the best part was eating the cookies!

30 days of JUNE!
...or my family's way of inviting our Grandma La June into our kitchens, through cooking her dishes!

DAY ONE: LA JUNE'S TROPICAL WALDORF SALAD


This is recipe #1 in a series of recipes this month from my Grandmother La June's cookbook, Plain and Fancy Cooking.

Recipe:
1/2 cup of coconut
1/2 cup of nuts (I used toasted almond pieces)
1/3 cup mayo
1/2 cup whipped cream (whipped with a bit of almond extract (that was my addition) and a few pinches of sugar)
1 cup celery
1 red apple
1 yellow apple
2 banannas
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp lemon juice (I would used fresh)

Cut up the apples and celery, add the nuts and coconut.

Mix the (fluffy) whipped cream, the mayo, the sugar and the lemon juice.
Add it to the salad. Add sliced bananas right before you serve it!

I love this cool combo- mayo and whipped cream:



The simplicity of two apples:



Yum! Delicious Waldorf Salad!

30 DAYS OF JUNE!

La June is my grandmother and this month, my family and I plan to cook as many of her dishes from her well-loved cookbook as possible! Here's my story:


A few month back, while weathering one of Oregon's most sunless winters and with a severe case of post-break-up blues, I was moving some boxes I'd been storing in a friend's garage when something tumbled from the box and BAM! hit the concrete floor of the garage. Glass shattered, then something unexpected happened. The heady smell of summer roses floated up, permeating the garage. I knew immediately what I'd broken: an old-fashioned glass bottle of rose water that once belonged to my Grandmother La June. I'd been saving it for a rainy day --- just hadn't realized I would use it up in one BIG WAY on one February afternoon.



Being the somewhat superstitious girl I am, I immediately thought: "Ahhhh, grandma's here... and she's trying to send me a message." Now before you go thinking I'm looney, let me add that I'm a Mormon-- a faith that believes Heaven is always close (in fact right here on earth, just in another dimension...), and that loved ones come back on occassion to help us make it through this crazy life.


Here's a photo of my Gram when she was young.

I knew my Grandmother La June, with her flair for drama, would be especially audacious in her attempts to reach her posterity to and let them know she was watching over them. So I caught myself telling a friend, "I think grandma is here!"


But this is how I remember her!

When alive, it was grandma who always set an extra plate at the table in case an angel wanted to join us. Her communication with the "other side" is well-documented in my family, and though some of my relatives viewed it as bizarre, I counted it as one of her spiritual gifts.

But the day in the garage, her message seemed obvious; here it was: "It's okay, Jenie dear, things break, but life is still full of sweetness! Don't fret!"


In life, gramma was a bit of a mystery to me. A strong and angular Norweigian woman with impeccable taste and an endless supply of talent. I'm the tom-boy grandaughter, more comfortable wearing sneakers, casting around a fishing rod or digging in the dirt, but gramma was the embodiment of feminity (though she did love to garden!) What I inherit was her talent for music, writing and an incurable love of cooking. What got lost somewhere in that passage of DNA was gram's sense of order and her meticulousness in the kitchen. I'm a disaster when I cook!

I'd watched grandmother cook several times. She was not one of those affable grannies who will praise all your attempts at cooking, she had been a professonal chef and knew how things "ought" to be cooked. One time, my job, simple as it sounded, to mash potatoes, had not been up to snuff. I remember her pointing out that I needed to remove those stray potato skins I had left floating brown in that sea of beautiful white spuds.

Well, onto the intent of this blog post.... using the moment of breaking a bottle of rose water as an impetus, I've chosen to invite my gram into my life and kitchen (and the lives of my relatives) this month by opening up her cookbook "Plain and Simple Cooking by La June" and cooking some of her favorite recipes!