Thanksgiving Recipe

My recipe is made up by me due to previous failures.  I have all these cook books and I do not read them.  I like the pictures.  I will never fully graduate from First Grade.  Friends and strangers ask for my recipes anyway.

So Deb, here is the recipe for sweet potato casserole.

Four sweet potatoes.  NOT yams.  They will try to tell you in the grocery that they are the same, but they are not.  Only The South knows this.

Figure one potato per person for a beginning. Maybe 1/2 per person.

Wash, coat lightly with oil and put them in the oven to bake until the skin puffs up real big.  If it dries and wrinkles you are too late: all the juice has evaporated.  You will have to add a little water.  I prefer chicken stock.

Remove the potatoes from the oven, peal of the skins carefully so as not to disturb the potato.  Slice or cut with kitchen scissors or a knife one inch or less wide across the grain.  This will eliminate the strings that you mentioned. Cut off and toss the two potato butts.  That is where all the strings come together to support the meat.

Grease a 9/13 baking dish.  Set aside.

In a large bowl put the sliced hot potatoes.  Smash and hand beat the meat with vigor.  Some of my friends say, “Leave them lumpy.”

Stir in a goodly amount of pecans or walnuts.  Leave the nuts as large chunks or halves so the casseole does not feel like gravel in the mouth.

At this point it is all about texture.

Ever wonder why kids do not like nuts in the their brownies: gravel. The ‘rocks’ they call them get hung up in their missing teeth slots and later in life their braces.

Stir in light brown sugar to taste.  Do not use dark brown sugar as the potatoes will turn an inedible color.  Too sweet is not good. Remember the nuts are sweet; the potatoes are sweet. I don’t add much salt but maybe just a little Pure Vanilla liquor ( a little goes a long way, so be careful).  Most stores still sell it if where you live in Alabama is not Pentecostal Baptist.  The basic Southern Methodist township is the best.

I bought mine in Prince George on a liquor cruise.

Some people add pineapple. You can too, but remember that is adding sweet to sweet).

If I am serving them in Texas, I stir in crumbles of hard fried bacon.  Bacon is a seasoning down here in Zone 9.

Put the mixture into the greased baking dish. If you did not opt for the bacon, put patties of butter down into the mixture every so often.

Lay thinly sliced lemons solid across the top.  Without the lemons the potatoes will turn dark and ugly.  The lemons counter balance the sweetness.

Bake at 375 to 400 for 30 to 45 minutes.  The lemons replace the foil cover.  If this scares you, lightly lay a sheet on top of the baking dish so the steam will continue to escape.

Remove from the oven.

Remove the lemons.  Some cooks often leave the lemons, or call them candied. I absolutely hate to bite into a lemon peal with a mouth set up for sweet.  Some folks do not have a sweet tooth; rather a sweet jawbone.

Now for the grand finale.

TWO bags of Marshmallows: only use the large ones.  Only use Marshmallow brand in the purple bag.  I have my reasons and the off store brands lie.  Those work best on the end of a coat hanger over a campfire. 

Lay on the top back to back or side to side.  This should take one bag of marshmallows.

Place the mixture on the bottom rung of the oven.  Turn the oven on to broil. Leave the oven door cracked open.

STAND THERE and watch the marshmallows brown.  If they start to brown on one side too much, turn the baking dish around.

Important Information: Do not A.D.D. on yourself and leave your post in order to do just one little old thing that won’t take a minute.

Believe me, you will forget the potatoes.  Experienced cooks all know this.

The smoke alarm will go off : You will go back to the oven: You will open the door and the inside will resemble a girl scout campfire: You will shout:::::::FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKK:::::::

Sixteen seated guest, your new husband’s entire family, will know your real self real well real quick. Only one will have the gumption to come into the smoke filled kitchen and say, “It’s okay, it’s okay, Rowwanda likes them that way.”

Translated: Rowwanda (Southern spelling) has learned to eat her failures.

Gently peal off the smouldering black breast plate armor so as not to get charcoal flakes in the potatoes.  Reach for that second bag of Marshmallows and place them over the small amount of remaining white goo topping.

Gently brown the second line of volunteer marshmallows and seriously follow the previous directions.  WaLa!! You have successfully completed the hardest part.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Footnote: Down here in Texas we wrap Blue Ribbon thick sliced pepper bacon around everything; even Atlantic Alaskan Salmon.  Our taste buds are prefried.  And it is a good thing being able to re-fix and serve our cooking failures.  We do not always have that priveledge with the rest of life’s mishappenings.

FROM: Gaylee’s Kitchen filled with promise.

  

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Veterans’ Day Memories

Veterans’ Day I celebrate until my dad’s 1902 birthday on the 12th. He was a supervisor foreman in the machine shop of the San Antonio Arsenal (manufacturing rifles). There is a family story about a cannon. My dad built a toy cannon which fired .22 Long Rifle; with no recoil for the Commanding General. After the demonstration, the General asked my dad, “Do you know what you have done?” According to the family, my dad’s answer was, “Yes Sir, I believe I do.”

He was cited by the United States Armed Forces for inventing a clip for the M-1 rifle.  This rifle would unaccountably jam, leaving the soldier armed with merely a bayonet or a clumsy club. Dad’s clip ended the jam problem and saved many many a soldier’s life. These simple clips were parachute dropped over the battle fields by the thousands.  That is how they got passed out to the waiting allied forces.

For wartime family entertainment, Dad would pile Mama, my infant brother and myself into our fat round Plymouth with red tires (I thought they were pretty). We would drive to Lackland AFB to the very end of a large runway.  We would watch the B-17s piloted by daring pioneer women ferrying them to the Atlantic and the Pacific Front. The large lumbering planes would fly over low just above our heads and shake the car and us with their tremendous roar and backwash.

Our small family of four sold our home in one day along with the greater part of our belongings. We left San Antonio with the most necessary items in a small pull trailer behind the Plymouth.  We headed up The Hill of Los Alamos, New Mexico in February.  I remember the semi-paved dirt road and clouds floating in the ruts. Those clouds would sit on the ground in our small back yard and I would crawl into them. It was a great way to hide from Mama. Dad would work with the a nuclear agenda, safety and equipment ideas until ‘53.

My dad became lost in spirit when the Rosenbergs were put to death as traitors.  We packed up and left The Hill.

We returned to Texas and began to live a post war sane 1950’s life of Bebop, Poodle Skirts, Petticoats, Billy Graham, ‘55T-Birds, and a nuclear submarine sailing under the North Pole with my boyfriend in it.  For a very short time everything was Mayberry and Lawrence-a Whelk-a.

And God created The ’50s and saw that it was good.

The evening and the morning were the 8th day.

I celebrate Veterans’ Day by flying my flag and watching the best of the war movies on TV all day long back to back; The Bridges, The Train, The Planes, The Wives and saddest of all, The Great Raid (Bataan) until they go off the air.  My mother’s long lasting high school romance was ended when Tinny was decapitated during the Bataan March.  She had already married my father, but that first teen love truly never ends.

I believe that WWII was the last of the “fair fought soldier wars, with the possible addition of the Korean (Conflict) War. First World Nations’ caliber and stature is caught in  late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Century wars where superior powers of weapon and inventive brain are undone by poisoned pungi sticks and snap-trap-nets hung in trees. Underground burrows and tiger cages become POW camps in a no-where jungle where rice paddies quickly become our Waterloo. Road side bombs built of tin cans and scrap metal silently wait on barren desert roads. The enemy wears 2000BC dresses and Colorado ski masks knitted in China and hides on the tops of buildings using cell phones for bomb detonators.

I find myself wondering what will be the price finally paid for our high powered brain power in such a case as this?  Years ago, it was ”The Little Drummer Girl” still being played out with suitcases on the backs of bicycles.  This year it was “Body of Lies”: too true, too graphic.

How do we reason this out?

How can this combination of thought come to a peace table, talk turkey and end with Thanksgiving?

Our men and women and those of The United Nations who have fought both in the jungles and in the deserts have my greatest regard and praise for their dedication and sacrifice.

I find myself crying often for their individual losses of strength, family, life, limb and the future they and their families planned.

I do not understand this world!!!!!

I will fly my extra large flag and continue to pray for sanity both in me and our nation and the world as we know it.

May God Bless Us Everyone.

My brother Jay and I are proud of our dad, Harry Christopher Humbert: a Texas born Pennsylvania Dutch Quaker, a Mason, a card carrying member of The Sons Of Herman (San Antonio). More than all of these, he was a man of integrity and honor.  We were always proud to be his children.  His gift to us was a life full of stories. 

Read more Memories of Mama and Daddy on my webpage linked on this Blogroll. My thanks to my friend Billy McKinney for innocently inciting this, my mental riot.

    

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