A Year in Bread is holding a little competition to collect favorite bread stories. As the prize is a signed copy of the new book, Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers
When I was growing up, a staple Sabbath breakfast was rice pudding. We made the traditional custard based pudding but used brown rice, fresh eggs from the hen house, soy milk, honey, and lots of nutmeg grated over the top just before baking. Combining soy milk and eggs now seems odd, but in those days it was just part of the mix of being self-sufficient on the land, trying to make ends meet, and having both vegans and lacto-ovo vegetarians in the family. We made lots of incongruous combinations like that.
I put this vegan pudding together out of thin air this evening, though it definitely harkens to Thai “sticky rice” dishes I’ve eaten at restaurants in more recent times. It is just sweet enough with the rice syrup and fruit; creamy and delicious. (more…)
One of my favorite recipes in the old red checked recipe book is this one for a hearty, hot drink. I well remember the day when little 8-year-old Marta came to the door and handed me the recipe as a gift. It was written in pencil on two bits of notebook paper, whip-stitched through the holes to bind them together. (more…)
Nick Vagnoni, of Slashfood, reports finding an old red checked recipe book at a library book sale the other day. This caught my attention, because I have one just like it in my own library! I pulled it out last night, and was flooded with memories as I thumbed through the recipes. Some neatly typed on an old manual typewriter, others handwritten in the neat, schoolbook script of my mother, or the roughly rendered print of childhood pals. 
My mother gave me the picnic check binder sometime around 1971, and it became the repository of all my cooking lore as my skill and interest deepened. In those days, we lived in a pole frame cabin in the woods, and did much of our cooking on an old Monarch wood-fired cookstove. In addition to the simple fare collected in the book, are ingredient labels from breads that I used as the basis for my own bread creations, formulas for household products, and formulas relating to my animal husbandry. There’s even a recipe for baby formula for fawns—as in baby deer (yep, one of several wild babies I raised during those years).
Some of the old recipes I still use today. Watch this space for a few classics that I’ll pull out and share from time to time.