The Joy of Spam Folder Cooking

Month: May 2017

Lemon Sauce

May 29, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This week, the spam folder had a recipe for Lemon Sauce. What I’d use Lemon Sauce for, I don’t know. I mean, I had no idea what I’d do with the Sweetened Cream Sauce, though I did discover strawberries and cream might work with that. Though I always thought that was just, well, cream. Okay, so I admit, my strawberries and cream is really strawberries and ice cream, but it’s still got cream in it, right?

Anyway, this recipe.  Lemon sauce.  I did a little googling and apparently people use lemon sauce for pasta, fish, and fruit, among other things.  My problem with lemon icing and lemon sauce is that it tends to take over the rest of the recipe for me.  All I taste is lemon  and lemon flavored chicken just tastes wrong to me. My taste buds expect at least some chicken flavoring, but all I get is lemon, lemon, and more lemon.

Lemon Sauce

Print

Place in a saucepan

Grated rind of one lemon,

Two cups of water,

Four tablespoons of cornstarch.

Dissolve the starch and then bring to a boil. Cook slowly for five minutes and then add

One cup of sugar,

Juice of two lemons.

Beat to thoroughly mix and then serve.

For fun, I looked in my spam and found that this recipe was sent with a subject of (4) friend requests.  No wonder it ended up in my spam folder.  Anyone who knows me knows they should include a chocolate recipe if they want my attention!

And the silly people put “Im pretty board and wanna hook up with you.” in the body of the email (before the recipes).  Oh my dear.  pretty board.  Well, I do have a board in my garage that’s nice and pretty, maybe the two of you could get together and make beautiful splinters together.

Dumplings for Stew

May 22, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I was never fond of stew and this week, my spam folder brought me a recipe for Dumplings for Stew.  I think my distaste of stew because my mother would make it on occasion and of all the things she could cook, she absolutely could not cook stew.  I don’t know why.  There was something about the name that just made her stew always fail.   It would sit in the pot so long it wasn’t stew, it was mush.  Thank goodness she stopped trying when I was ten and I’ve had a mental block on the idea of stew ever since.

Fred just loves Brunswick Stew, in fact, that’s his favorite recipe.  But I make him make his own.  He makes it for the company potlucks and it’s a big hit.

Anyway, on to the recipe!

Dumplings for Stew

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  • Place in a mixing bowl
  • One and one-half cups of flour,
  • and then add
  • One teaspoon of salt,
  • Two teaspoons of baking powder,
  • One-half teaspoon of pepper,
  • One teaspoon of grated onion.

Add two-thirds cup of water and mix to a dough. Drop by the spoonful into the stew and cover closely and boil for twelve minutes. If you open the lid of the saucepan while the dumplings are cooking they will be heavy.

I checked out Wikipedia to find out what a dumpling really is, and it says it’s dough wrapped around a filling.  There doesn’t seem to be much of a filling in this recipe, does there?  That’s just weird.  It is just boiled dough.  Personally,  hush puppies sound much better, but that’s fried dough. Fred should to take me out for fried catfish this week with a double side of hush puppies.

Old Virginia Shortcake

May 15, 2017 / / 1 Comment

My spam folder was so nice to me tonight. I mean, I read the recipe and went ‘…what?’ but then I made it and it was awesome. Who would have expected something with the name Old Virgian Shortcake to be so good?

The recipe!

Old Virginia Shortcake

Print
  • Sift the flour and then fill a quart measure, using a tablespoon to lift the flour. Care should be taken not to shake or pack the flour down, as the quart of flour should weigh just one pound. Place in a bowl and add
  • Three level tablespoons of baking powder,
  • One teaspoon of salt,
  • Three-quarters cup of sugar.

Sift again to mix and then rub in one-half cup of shortening. Place one and one-half cups of buttermilk in a pitcher and add one teaspoon of baking soda. Stir to thoroughly dissolve the soda and then use this to mix the flour to a dough. Knead well in the bowl with a spoon and then turn on a slightly floured board and roll or pat out one inch thick. Cut with a large biscuit cutter and brush the top with shortening and bake in a hot oven for eighteen minutes.

I don’t own a sifter, so I cheated and let my KitchenAid® do the sifting.  It’s quite useful that way.  I also took advantage of my kitchen scale and weighed the flour rather than measuring it.

1 pound of flour

1 pound of flour

And that’s one pound of flour.

Once I mixed it all together, I dumped it out, rolled it out and cut out the biscuits:

Shortcake waiting to bake

Shortcake waiting to bake

How boring is that?  I mean, it’s just biscuits.  I know the recipe said it was shortcake, but it looks like my buttermilk biscuits.  It even looked like that when it finished baking.

Old Virginia Shortcake

Old Virginia Shortcake

So it looks like biscuits, right? I mean big biscuits, but still, biscuits.

And ohmygod, SO GOOD. To quote Fred ‘272 kinds of awesome!’ (I think he was working with his IT guys at work, I’ve heard them say that before). But it was! So good! And moist and not crumbly and just plain awesome! This recipe definitely goes on my ‘things to make again, and soon’ list. Next time, though, I’ll make them a bit smaller. These huge ones were just a little too much, in a good and bad way.

 

Sweetened Cream Sauce

May 8, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This week’s recipe from the spam folder is, well, interesting. Interesting in that I have no idea what I’d use it for. Sweetened Cream Sauce. Well, yes, it looks interesting, but what on earth does one use this for? It’s certainly not for savory dishes, I think. I wouldn’t put it on a meat dish, but then, I also wouldn’t put it on ice cream either.

The recipe!

Sweetened Cream Sauce

Print

Place in a saucepan

Two cups of milk,

Four tablespoons of cornstarch.

Dissolve the cornstarch in cold milk and bring to a boil. Cook for five minutes and then add

One-half cup of sugar

One-half teaspoon of nutmeg,

One well-beaten egg.

Beat to mix.

It looks like almost a white sauce, but then you put the sugar, nutmeg and egg in it.  That destroys the whole white sauce aspect.  I found a recipe that mentions using it, apparently it goes with a berry recipe.  That looks awfully tasty, doesn’t it?  I also found a recipe for strawberries and cream.  that uses a sweetened cream sauce.  Their recipe is different from this one though.

I did check with Google, and once again it’s from Mrs Wilson’s Cook Book.  The spam folder sure loves that book.  I suppose it is so old that they don’t have to worry about copyright when copying from it, but considering so much spam has bad things with it, why on earth would they worry about copyright?  On the other hand, it’s right there on the web and they can copy and paste from it with no trouble.  At least this time they didn’t give us a liver recipe or a prune recipe.

Until next time, toodles!

Plain Buns

May 1, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I do like baking bread and I was happy that this week the Spam folder brought me a bread recipe. Plain buns sounds so boring, but why not? I always thought the name Parker House Rolls sounded weird, so why not plain buns.

And then I read the recipe.

It’s missing really important information…

Plain Buns

Print

Weigh out eighteen ounces of dough and divide into one dozen pieces. Mould into balls and let spring for ten minutes. Now [pg 20] mould up nice and round and then set close together on a well-greased pan. Let rise for thirty-five minutes, and then brush the tops with egg and water; wash and dust lightly with sugar. Bake for eighteen minutes in a hot oven. A small pan of boiling water may be placed in the oven when baking these rolls.

For variety's sake, part of the dough may be baked plain. To the balance add caraway seeds, a little citron, nutmeg or a few currants. If carefully baked and cooled, these rolls may be stored in an air-tight box and they will keep for several days. To reheat, place in an oven with a pan of boiling water for ten minutes to freshen.

Egg wash: One egg and one-fourth cup of milk; beat to mix; apply with small paint brush.

It starts with ‘weigh out eighteen ounces of dough’ and lacks the whole ‘and this is how you make the dough’.  I assume the dough has yeast in it, since you let the buns rise, but seriously, if you give me a bread recipe, give me the whole thing!  Not just ‘here’s what you do with the dough after you put it together’, but how on earth do I put it together?
I will say that adding nutmeg and citron to the buns does sound good. Or maybe a little cinnamon and sugar. That sounds like a great breakfast bun and anything but like a plain bun. I think it could be fun to try adding raisins or other dried fruit, like maybe apples. Apples and cinnamon and sugar. There we go, I can’t wait to try that… once I get the whole recipe!

For now, I think I”ll make this apple cinnamon bread.

Until next time, toodles!

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