Growing up in a home where appreciation for food was big but the budget wasn’t, food traditions were important way to make sure we stuck to dishes where the preparation was well-understood. The chance of a mistake or waste was small.
Traditional holiday meals and recipes were set in stone—no surprise there—but other household traditions weren’t obvious to me until after I moved away.
For example, a non-holiday celebratory meal or party always called for breaded fried chicken (or sometimes breaded pork chops) and potato salad with celery and hard-boiled eggs. I don’t have an obvious reason because I grew up in PA and none of us ever lived in the South.
Both my grandmother and my mother made amazing fried chicken, in abundance we could eat for a few days. That chicken was equally delicious served hot or cold straight from the fridge.
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The breading was satisfyingly bready, for lack of a better description, and tore away easily while staying intact. I could have eaten the stuff by itself without any chicken at all. I remember my grandmother air-drying roasterfuls of white bread to prepare the breading. Maybe that’s why.
Fried chicken is still a comfort food for me even though I don’t eat much meat. Sadly I did not inherit their talents in the art of frying.
I’ve never been a big fan of fried food. Just no taste for it. I see why it’s a comfort to many people both including and beyond the fat content. Like a number of foods, I can cook the heck out of stuff I’d rather not eat. I remember a pool party in the 80s when I was in my 20s–just getting my cooking mojo–cranking out steamer after steamer of crabs for 50 people. I’m just not a fan of crabs - too much work, too much mess, too little product.
Salads like potato, macaroni, and pasta certainly have appeal to me. I expect I’ll be making a bunch this week as refrigerator space allows. Not sure what we’re eating for 4th of July yet but by golly there will be salads.
I’m grinning that you thought of this recipe, @digga! Sometimes you think of something, and :::poof!::: it shows up soon after! Hopefully you’re able to come up with a reasonable facsimile of peanut/sesame noodles to use up the peanut butter. (And maybe you can post a pic of the noodles in the WFD thread along with some of Iceland’s beautiful countryside as an “extra” and let us travel virtually with you? )
This is not really an offshore recipe. Offshore just dump some cooked elbow macaroni into a bowl and squeeze a bunch of mayo and some mustard in until it looks and tastes acceptable. Add pepper and serve. On the other hand, at the dock or anchor and certainly for a potluck this is a winner. This serves 6 to 8; or just me – I can eat it all in a day.
I don’t know who Grandma Linahan is. I got the recipe back in the early 80s from a magazine.
2/3 cup minced bell pepper
1/3 cup minced onion
2/3 cup minced celery
2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni
½ cup mayonnaise
½ tsp powdered mustard or about 1 Tbsp of prepared Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp distilled white vinegar
½ cup milk
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
pinch cayenne pepper
2 Tbsp butter, melted
¼ cup thinly sliced scallions
Prep the veg while cooking the macaroni. Drain the macaroni but don’t rinse. In a bowl big enough for everything blend the mayonnaise, mustard, sugar, vinegar, salt, black pepper, and cayenne. Slowly blend in the milk. Stir in the butter. Toss the macaroni with the dressing and add the veg. Toss thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate for at least three hours. Keeps at least five days unless I’m nearby with a fork. The scallions are for garnish on top when you serve.
I was just thinking of comfort foods and found this thread from a bit ago. I’m feeling the need for some comforting foods right now. The weather is dreary and still too cold to work the soil and being Good Friday the library is closed, so I can’t pick up my latest book hold. Anyone interested in reviving this thread?
I love these types of family recipe threads! All that comes to mind at the moment is cheese toast on white bread or English muffins with processed cheese - always good for what ails you. But I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with more.
I posted this the other day on the white\yellow cheese thread. But it fits here as well. (It was also a gray day.)
I made myself a grilled cheese with white American, sharp cheddar and thin slices of tomato. With a snack-sized bag of Utz chips. At the time I noticed that my inner child wanted some Campbell’s chicken noodle soup too, but my adult self doesn’t have than in the pantry.
My folks weren’t great cooks, but three things stood out for me:
1.) Creamed Spinach - chopped bacon and onions, then a roux made from it… with milk or cream for a bechamel, followed by blanched frozen chopped spinach.
2.) Cioppino - kind of a chunky version of tomatoes, celery, onions, spices, bay leaves… poured over a tall pot with layered (by cooking time) white fish, crab or lobster, shrimp, and clams.
3.) Swordfish - 1+ inch thick cut, marinated, and Weber charcoal grilled and basted.
This is a GREAT thread! Here’s my additions to it:
First, my father was THE cook in my family. My mother was ill (colitis, Crohn’s disease, ileitis) from the time I was little until I was in my 40s or so and was either bedridden or too weak to cook. In fact, I have NO memory of ever eating anything cooked by my mother until I was in my 40s (I don’t even remember what it was I ate, though!)
My father was an excellent cook, too! His best dishes were:
Roast beef. ALWAYS made with rump roast and ALWAYS made for Sunday dinners. He made sure to buy a larger roast than we needed so that we had leftovers for cold roast beef sandwiches (with only Best Foods mayonnaise on them!) They were seasoned only with garlic powder, onion powder, salt & pepper. The side dish was always mashed potatoes. My favorite meal of his.
London broil sandwiches on garlic bread. LOTS of garlic powder all around.
Boxed cake mix cakes made with yogurt. These were so popular that friends of his requested him to make them. When I lived in the US (I live in Japan now), I attempted to make them, but never got them right. I would have asked him how he did it, but he died in 1987 before I started to cook.
The oddest and most delicious single thing he made was a chopped (chicken) liver sandwich. The bread was soaked in an egg and milk mixture (like that for French toast, but without the sugar) and fried in chicken fat (or Nyafat). He made the chopped liver himself with lots of sautéed onions and chopped hard boiled eggs in it. I’ve never attempted to make it and never ate it after he died. When he was in his 40s, he had heart bypass surgery and I believe that eating such things led to the need for it. But boy, were those sandwiches good!
Sometimes he would make unusual sandwiches for me to take to school for lunch. My favorites of those were a cream cheese & green olives stuffed with pimento sandwich and a cream cheese and grape jelly sandwich. I was born in NY where those sandwiches were likely not so odd, but grew up in the LA area where no one I knew ate such concoctions. I didn’t care though as I liked them.
My nana Pauline (my father’s mother) was an excellent cook and I’m sure that’s where he learned to cook. However, she never made any of the dishes he made.
Her best dishes were:
Sweet and sour stuffed cabbage (sour salt was a MUST in that dish). I’ve made it, but it’s very time consuming. I sometimes make a lazy version like a stew/soup without rolling the cabbage.
Kasha varnishkes. My #1 comfort food and I make it even here in Japan. I can’t find bow tie egg noodles and use DiCecco farfalle instead. Finding buckwheat groats isn’t too hard because soba is so prevalent here. But the grind is different, I adapt, though.
Mandel bread. She made hers with walnuts and oil. I had the recipe, but lost it years ago. I made a chocolate (cocoa, actually) and almond one (“mandel” means almond, after all) recipe I found on the 'net, but it will never be as good as her recipe. Oh, I wish I hadn’t lost it!
Thanks for letting me relive the wonderful food memories of my childhood (I’m VERY sorry for such a lengthy reply!)
I very much enjoyed your lengthy reply. Your dad’s roast beef was identical to my mom’s, except she used eye roast: salt, pepper and lots of garlic powder and big enough to ensure sandwiches the next day. Also served with mashed potatoes–she always made enough to make potato cakes the next day (just potatoes, onions and s&p fried in butter).
Now I’m off o research mandel bread. I’m a sucker for the chocolate almond combo.
Thank you for your kindness! I wish I could make roast beef here in Japan but an oddity of life here is that the price per gram for any cut of roast beef is quite a bit higher than any cut of steak. Therefore I’ve only made it about 2 or 3 times in my over 13 years of being here.
I’ve never made “potato cakes”, but I have had & made croquettes which might be similar . Croquettes are insanely popular in Japan and the best ones come from butchers who sell them freshly fried…in lard! Speaking of croquettes, my grandmother made wonderful salmon croquettes coated in corn flake crumbs. I tried to make them in the US where canned salmon is somewhat more reasonably priced than in Japan, but have never made them here because fresh salmon (which doesn’t work in place of canned in this recipe or many any others) is oddly enough much cheaper than canned!
Lastly, here’s the recipe I use as a base for the mandel bread I make. I substitute almonds for the hazelnuts (I prefer almonds and hazelnuts are considerably higher priced) and I also add 3 oz/80 g of chocolate chips or roughly chopped chocolate (another oddity of Japan is that chocolate bars or other larger pieces of chocolate are MUCH cheaper than chocolate chips!) Anyway, I hope you attempt to make mandel bread whether from this recipe or another one you find.
I have tons of food memories, mostly from my mother because I only had my maternal grandmother’s cooking once a year (on Thanksgiving) and my memories from my paternal grandmother are limited to Chiclets and boxed melba toast. Thanksgiving in my grandparents’ overheated apartment in Queens was deadly dull, as I was the only child there for many years plus the food was really boring (for example, no-salt vegetable barley soup was the starter).
My mother cooked nearly every day, even when she was working (she was a teacher). Mondays was a dairy (no-meat meal), Tuesdays & Wednesdays were meat, Thursday (supermarket day) was fish, Friday was chicken, and Saturday was leftovers. Sundays we went out to eat or Mom cooked something that took a long time, like breast of veal. For a long time, we didn’t have a ton of money, so our dinners were those that stretched ingredients. We even would have “specials”, aka fat hot dogs, with potato salad as a dinner. Two comfort food meals that I still like to make are:
Spaghetti and hamburger casserole, which also contained a can of Le Sueur peas
Tuna macaroni bake. This came from a Chicken of the Sea promotional recipe book. It’s not tuna casserole–it uses a homemade cheddar-based white sauce, not canned soup.
I learned how to bake by first helping Mom make cookies, then helping Dad make cakes. Mom used recipes from Maida Heatter’s books, plus another promotional booklet with Pillsbury Bake-Off contest winners.
Thank you Tokushima! That recipe looks delicious. My first thought was that it looked like biscotti, so now I know what “Jewish” biscotti is I have everything I need except the almonds. I’m definitely going to try that after my next shopping trip. I’ve already printed the recipe and plan to try the short bake for the softer texture. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
The pricing in Japan sounds very different than here in the US, but it sounds like you’ve adapted your cooking style. And I’m sure there are many other things you have available that I can only find at specialty stores for a premium price.
You’re welcome. IMHO, the most difficult part/step of making ANY biscotti OR mandel bread recipe is the cutting before second baking part. If you cut them too soon, the shape comes out wrong. Too late and they crumble/break up. If the latter happens, you get to eat the crumbled/broken up pieces (I usually make mandel bread as gifts and am hesitant to give small/misshaped ones away). In any case, I wish you the best of luck in your attempt!
Pricing in Japan is indeed quite different than the US. Some of those differences work in my benefit, some don’t. The #1 benefit of those differences to me is that chicken breast is always much cheaper than thighs. As I prefer the breast, that’s GREAT for me. And for some reason, Japanese chicken thighs are always quite sinewy and tough. I don’t recall that issue in the US. Also regarding chicken, other than wings which really are never sold boneless, it’s quite difficult to find bone-in chicken for sale in supermarkets. You MUST special order it (at a premium, I might add!) at a butcher. I’ve made roast chicken for friends when I’ve had a party and they always marvel at the fact that I made one. For me, there’s hardly any roasted meat/fowl dish easier to make than a roast chicken! And yes, indeed there are MANY items (mostly Japanese things of course) that are lower priced than in the US. One item which isn’t Japanese which is nearly almost always cheaper than the US but is imported are bananas. I can usually find a bunch of 3 large or 5 small bananas for only ￥108/$0.82. They’re often imported from The Philippines, but sometimes from as far away as Ecuador. I don’t understand how they can be sold so cheaply!
Interesting about the chicken. I just roasted one today and it’s probably the most economical of meats. You’d think bone-in would be cheaper as you’re not paying for the weight of the bones (albeit how light they are).
And thanks for the cutting tips. I’m sure my first try will be just for me and immediate family, so if it crumbles so be it.
Bananas have been cheaper than dirt here in the US for years and years. I’ve never understood it myself considering how far away they’re shipped from. So there must be money to be made somewhere.
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