Norm Matthews

This is the oldest cookbook I have. It was my mom's. It is dated 1945, the year after I was born. I don't remember her ever having any other cookbook but I remember this one being about twice as thick as it is now because it was stuffed full of recipes that she had cut out of other publications or had written down. One of the handwritten recipes by her was one for Povitica bread. We lived in an apartment on Strawberry Hill in Kansas City. It was a Croatian neighborhood and Povitica bread was a holiday bread that everyone made. Mom asked the neighbor downstairs for the recipe and she said it was in her head and she was welcome to sit in her kitchen when she made it and write down how she made it. Wow the memories are flooding back. Watkins is still in business but back then they sold herbs and spices door-to-door. Mom always had a bottle of Watkins Vanilla Extract in the pantry.

I went to the store to get some ingredients for a recipe I wanted to try and to look for something for dinner. The recipe looked good but I make cake so seldom that I can't tell a good recipe from a gimmicky one apparently. The cake was Cherry Dr. Pepper Chocolate cake with icing made with butter and powdered sugar. I didn't care for it and neither did Charlie. But they had some meaty ham shanks and I cooked those with navy beans, carrots and baby bok choy. Charlie had thirds on that. I always forget to make corn bread with it.

Charlie and I went to Costco last week and because the weather had been so nice I got a brisket for the smoker and Charlie washed his car. It was cold and rainy for the next 5 days but today was perfect for running the smoker. I cut the point off the brisket and just smoked that part. The flat is in the freezer until another time. The brisket took 10 hours to reach 200 degrees, and came out wonderful. The only thing I am not completely happy with is I could not tell where the grain ran after it came out and I sliced it with the grain instead of against it. Except for the corn, all the other sides were store bought. The corn was cooked on the grill before being cut off the cob and reheated at serving time with salt, pepper, honey, butter and a little evaporated milk. The carrots were pickled with dill.

@chileheadmike Happy to see some Kansas City BBQ sauce in Kentucky. Good looking meal. Our dinner tonight was Cuban Beef Picadillo. The recipe said it was also good the next day with fried eggs. I am going to try that one too. My son is not a fan of capers so I substituted some chopped dill pickle, and when I reheated if for dinner, I added a little red wine to loosen it up a little.

Made a chuck pot roast in the Instant Pot for dinner tonight. The picture shows a small amount of the whole roast.

I made a pork chop and some sourdough bread for dinner tonight.

A friend posted a recipe on facebook and I wanted to try it. Problem is the recipe is in Italian. A video came with it so it was not hard to figure out. I mostly had to convert metric amounts and round off. It is mashed potatoes wrapped around a hamburger mixture, then fried, topped with Emmenthal cheese and baked. I took a series of pictures which I won't post here because there are a lot of them but you can see them by going to the http listed at the bottom of my post. Here is the finished dish. I put the potato croquette on some left over filling and just incase I felt it needed to be more fattening, I made up a bit of béchamel to serve on the side

Thai grilled chicken. I have been looking all around for Tamarind paste and finally ordered it on line but it didn't get here yet so I used a tamarind glaze which had other ingredients.

@rotuts Glad to share. Here is the information. Discovering Korean Cuisine: Recipes from the Best Korean Restaurants in Los Angeles. Printed in South Korea, 2007. Dream Character, Inc.

I got a pork roast yesterday and gave Charlie a choice: Carnitas, smoked, or pork bulgogi. He chose bulgogi and picked out which recipe he wanted me to use too. It is a lot different from the one I have used since he was little but it is from a Korean cook book that he uses a lot. It only had hot pepper paste, sugar, garlic and sesame oil. I turned the smoker into a grill for this. I also made a salad that was in the same cook book and some marinated beans sprouts.

I was re-reading an account from about 15 years ago when I went to visit my son in Seattle then headed south to meet some friends in California where we had a window seat in a seaside restaurant. I had some cioppino while watching the sun set on the Pacific Ocean. I got hungry for a fish stew and made one for an early dinner tonight. I didn't want to spend as much as it would take to make cioppino but this was good. The view out the window was Kansas though, no water, not even a birdbath.

At a small group cooking site someone posted a recipe from an old Italian restaurant in New Orleans. It included a tomato sauce that had little in it besides tomatoes and salt and pepper but it was cooked for 6 hours. Someone else said that she didn't bother cooking tomato sauce anymore since Paul Newman's was so good. Someone else said Trader Joe's Organic tomato sauce was the best. Jimmy is an Italian and he said that they put raw meatballs in the sauce and cook them that way. I decided to get some Paul Newman's sauce and some Trader Joes and see which one I liked best. I have not tried Paul Newmans yet but I did cook raw meat balls in Trader Joe's Organic Spaghetti sauce. They cooked for a little under two hours. I added some water to the sauce at the start so it would not cook out too thick at the end. Charlie has not had much of an appetite lately but he had two full helpings. The Spaghetti absorbed much of the sauce.

A friend took Charlies' recipe for Bahn Mi pickled vegetables and our recipe for bulgogi and combined them with some shredded cabbage and tortillas to make what she called Korean Bahn Mi Tacos. I liked the idea and gave it a try but added some chopped apple to the shredded cabbage and made four of them with shrimp tempura left-over from yesterday. The bulgogi taco ingredients are on the stove. The shrimp in the roll-ups were briefly reheated in the microwave

@heidih Not too much at a time is right. It all gets stuck together if you put to much in at once and the oil cools down too much as well. We still have fondue once in a blue moon too. If I recall, last time we used boiling broth instead of oil for the meat.

We had an early supper. It was shrimp and vegetables Tempura. It's too messy to make very often but too good to not make at all. Charlie thought I'd made too much but there was hardly anything left when we were done.

The first cook book I had was the James Beard cook book. The second one was a gift from a friend. It was James Beard's American Cookery. Country Captain Chicken was in the book and I always intended to give it a try but never did. A couple days ago I was in a waiting room at a car garage and this recipe was in a Southern Living magazine and I decided it was time to give it a try. We both liked it. I left out the almonds though.

My first smoker was the same design as that. (40 + some years ago) They work very well. Looks like it did well for you too. Properly smoked ribs have some tooth 'tug" to them. Falling off the bone is overcooked... at least BBQ judges think so. What you like to do at home for yourself is what matters though. edit: PS I like apple wood smoke with ribs.

I have not been cooking much lately but two things I did make were Swedish Meatballs and mashed potatoes and today we had Chicken and Dumplings

@Shelby, You could made the marinade and baste it with a small amount as they bake, then thicken it into a sauce and pour some of it over the hens before serving and serve the rest on the side.

A while back I read that Italian Alfredo is not at all like it is in America. I saw the Italian recipe on Facebook today and gave it a try. The sauce is only pasta water, butter and Parmigiano Reggiano. No cream. It was lighter tasting and good except the pasta water in the recipe was too salty for my taste. I'll cut it in half next time.

Rueben sandwich

Even if I didn't have an Irish ancestor, I'd still make corned beef at least once a year. We like it so much. My great great grandfather was born in (now) Northern Ireland almost 200 years ago. He was married in Ohio and settled about 50 miles south of here in Kansas. He is buried at Trading Post and he may have never had corned beef or even heard of it but it is an American Irish tradition and we are glad it is. Someday I will get soda bread down right and I came closer this year that any but I still have a ways to go before I am totally happy with the outcome. I tried a recipe called Irish Apple Pie. I don't know if that is a real thing or not but I wanted to give it a try. If it is a real thing, it was a lot of work for someone who may not have had electric kitchen gadgets. I may have made meringue before but I don't remember when. It got a little brown on top. The first piece out of the pan is always the messy one. I made two sauces for the corned beef. One was a mustard and beer sauce and the other was sour cream and horseradish.

@Smokeydoke Yes.The recipe as I saw it was just the a video.

I saw an oven recipe for Baby back ribs by Alton Brown today. It had a rub, mop and sauce that looked interesting. I never thought I'd ever do ribs in the oven, especially not on a nice day, when my smoker is ready and I have a stack or apple wood but I decided to try the recipe as written first. That is up until the end. The sauce didn't thicken so I added some KC Masterpiece which I don't care much for but my son likes it. In the end, I decided I like my old way better. I did not plan ahead to make Brussels sprouts, I just got some on a whim a while back and decided I'd better do something with them before it was too late. Same with a very small amount of broccoli which i threw in as well.

@HungryChris I like the idea of thin whole potatoes on the top of Shepard's Pie.