Sunday, April 5
Q+A with GRANNY, means, QUESTION and ANSWER, if you were wondering
Woohoo everybody, look at me, thinkin of food again. And since i'm one of the few who plays "Q+A", i have a question for GRANNY about food.
Do you remember getting the whole fam, or as many as were in the car, to pick saskatoon berries off the sides of the roads around vermilion with Gramma Morrison? Cuz i do. Distinctly. Not an easy job fishin in amongst the branches.
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Actually, it was not the usual thing to pick saskatoons off the roadsides, because they were either already picked over, or they were dusty. The country roads were not much travelled, but they were dirt roads, not paved or even gravelled, so you could see a car coming 'way down there because of the cloud of dust it gendered up. So when I was a kid and picking saskatoons was one of our summer chores for farm kids, we tended to seek out spots of bush where the saskatoons were growing in great profusion in the open country, the berries in those locations tended to be bigger and juicier. Dang brother Jack used to fill his face as well as his bucket, and yet he always beat me at picking, he was fast and thorough, I was slow and thorough! We knew we had to pick as "clean" as possible, because when we got them home, we would have to go over them and pick out all the twiglets and flotsam and stink bugs. Saskatoons were the only berries that grew in great quantities in our part of the country, so we ate those often as dessert over the winter months. My mother's specialty was fake pie...what is "fake pie" you ask? Well, she would stew up a batch of saskatoons, (just add water and sugar to the raw berries, boil them up for a few minutes until they were softened and the flavour mingled.) Then she'd set them aside to cool, while she prepared a batch of pastry, just as though she were going to make a pie. She'd roll it out into one big piece, then cut it with a knife into oblong pieces, about 2" by 6"....bake them to golden brown in a hot oven. Then she'd dish up the stewed berries into a serving bowl, we'd all fill our dessert dishes, crumble the pastry on top and pour thick, wonderful farm cream over the whole works. Yum! better than saskatoon pie, and you know how good that is. The Hutterite colonies down here make stacks of those pies in the summer season, freeze them and sell them in the winter months to anybody with $8.50 in hand.
ReplyDeletea few years later, my mom, or my gramma m., would do the same recipe for me, but with strawberries, left to soak in water and sugar, again, with the pastry and cream.
ReplyDeletetell us about the scones you and your mither would make at 9257-86 street. with which we would top with butter and our favorite jam.
i do remember the saskatoons with pastry and cream too.
ReplyDeletealso, rhubarb pie, saskatoon berry jam, bottled dill pickles decades old, (my favorite), campbells soup i would snitch from food storage, and the big treat, CHEESE AND MEAT FONDUE.
Yah, fancy you remembering all that! The fondues were great fun, spicy sauce to dip the steak cubes in, nice tangy cheese sauce for the bread cubes.Everybody had their own fondue fork, remember? As to the scones, although I still have my mother's recipe, I rarely made them, didn't have a griddle like she made her's on all the years I was growing up. I think what you are remembering is the cheese biscuits, or baking powder biscuits as they were called....at first when I made them, they were just plain b.p. biscuits, in later years I made them into cheese biscuits by adding grated strong cheddar both in the biscuits and sprinkled on top as well....bit of a forerunner on the Red Lobster's cheese biscuits. They add a brush of garlic butter on top of their's and a hint of dried parsley. I never caught onto that addition, until there were just two of us left to feed, and I started to use internet copy cat recipes.
ReplyDeleteAs to the decades-old dill pickles, there's a story behind that one. Back in the late fifties, we were accepting building fund assessments to build the stake centre in Bonnie Doon, and mine was $300 if I remember correctly. This seemed like a very daunting figure to me, as we were really pinching the pennies in those days. Anyway, I thought, what can I do to raise that kind of money? It was early spring time, and a family in the stake had land out at Ellerslie that was just sitting there, so I approached them and got permission to use part of it to plant a garden. They said OK, so with Dad's help (I didn't even drive in those days!), I planted the garden all in cucumbers! Watered, weeded, we went out there once a week to take care of the garden, sometimes oftener....then, all of a sudden, there appeared thousands of dill-size cukes just begging to be picked before they grew too old to dream. So we picked them, by the basketful, washed, sorted, took orders, priced and sold them. The money rolled in, over $400-worth. The cukes that proved a little bigger than I would accept as dills had to have something done with them, or throw them out! well, that was unacceptable to me, so that year I put down 60 quarts of dills, and bottle after bottle of other kinds of cucumber pickles as well. The dills were not as nice as the gherkins, but OK, they lasted for all those years. Did you know they never spoil? Old cucumbers never die, they just fade away. Anyhow, Jeff, you cleaned up the remnants of them for us, thanks for that, I never did throw any away.
ReplyDeleteI remember your b.p. biscuits, split in two, with butter and jam. But the scone item i was thinking of was something different, that both you and your mother made, usually from leftover bread dough, patted out into a disc about 8 inch across, and fried in a large pan in about an inch of hot oil, goldened on both sides, served with icing sugar, and/or butter, and/or jam atop. I don't know what you all called them, but my brothers and i called them scones, of course they're technically not scones. Much closer to being bannock, except bannock, historically, was unleavened and baked. I think your mother called them scones to me and the brothers...i can hear her saying the word, and in her accent.
ReplyDeleteOh, now I know what you're talking about....you guys probably called them scones, but really that was just fried bread dough. You'd just grab a chunk of dough and slip it into the boiling oil and flip it over a time or two until it was golden brown. We used to make them up for the church bazaars, way back in the days when bazaars were still allowed, and we called them "Grandma's Golden Goodies". Served with various jams or jellies, they were so good, but had to be eaten right away, while they were still hot. The true Scottish scones, which I ate all the time on the farm, did not have yeast in them. The dough was made into a big round circle, pressed out to about 1/2 or 2/3 inch thick, cut in wedges, and baked on a big iron griddle. You split them like an English muffin and ate them with jam or jelly. My mother was very expert at making them, and they were very tasty and a great alternative to bread, different consistency altogether.
ReplyDeleteI think picking berries in the country sounds completely wonderful. I'd like to be a nomad, I think.
ReplyDeleteMe too.
ReplyDeleteas long as i don't have to leave the house.