Blueberry Delight

We really enjoyed this "Delight"-ful treat! This is an easy and delicious dessert that we will have to make again, very soon. 

In Granny's own words:

"1 cup flour
1 stick margarine
1 cup nuts
Mix and press into 9x13 inch pan. Bake at 350˚ for 20 min. Cool.

1 12 oz. cool whip
1 8 oz. pkg. cream cheese
1 cup powdered sugar
Mix together and spread on crust then spread on top with blueberries topping.
1 can blueberries topping

Be sure the blueberries said topping because pie filling is too thin."

------
A couple of hours before getting started, stick the cream cheese on the counter so that it can begin to soften.


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Chop the pecans. Throw them in your food processor, if you don't have kids that are scared of loud noises. Or pull out the cutting board.

Add 1 cup of the chopped pecans to 1 cup of self-rising flour and 1 stick of melted butter. Mix well.

Poor this yummy concoction into the bottom of a lightly sprayed 9 x 13 dish or divide it between two dishes like we did. Bake this for 20 minutes.

While the crust is baking, combine the softened package of cream cheese, 12 ounce container of cool whip, and cup of powdered sugar. Mix this really well until it is smooth.

Resist diving in.



After the crust has baked and cooled on the counter, place this creamy goodness on top. The crust is pretty crumbly, so go slowly. (We made mini-cakes for friends with half of the recipe.This turned out really well, I think.)

Finally, spread the blueberries on top. Serve and enjoy!

Chicken Casserole

This one's about as easy as they come, but it's really good. Just mix it up and throw it in the oven!

Granny's words:

"Chicken Casserole

1 fryer

1 can chicken and rice 

1 can mushroom soup

1 sm can evaporated milk

1 sm can chow mein noodles

1 sm onion, chopped

small jar of pimento pepper

Boil fryer until tender. Take off bone and cut in small pieces. Mix with above and place in a buttered casserole dish. Dot with small pieces of pimento pepper on top. Bake about 325° until done. Don't mix the pimentos with other ingredients, but use on top." 

The mix.

As before, we used a rotisserie chicken instead of boiling a fryer, so there was a little more flavor from the chicken itself - recommended!

In the dish with pimentos.

Done! 

(Well, sort of. Ours was a little runny, so make sure it's really bubbling all over, 

then give it another 10 minutes or so after that.)

Sweet potato casserole

You MUST try this recipe. It is so delicious; it tastes more like dessert than a side dish. I can't wait to have it again on Thanksgiving!

(Paul)
Here's the recipe, per Granny Beulah:

"Sweet Potatoes Casserole

3 cups mashed sweet potatoes
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 st. margarine or butter
mix through, pour into greased casserole dish

topping:

1/2 st. butter
1/2 cup flour
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup nuts chopped

Melt butter, add other ingredients. Sprinkle nuts over top and bake at 350° until bubbly. You peel, wash, and cut up potatoes first. I usually boil about 4 med. sweet potatoes until tender, drain out water, mash up to use."

This recipe is (thankfully!) really exact and complete. I think she must have gotten to the end of writing this recipe and thought to herself, "You know, those kids probably don't even know how to mash sweet potatoes... I'd better add a sentence at the end so they don't mess this up." She was right. I wouldn't have known exactly how to do it. Pointer: the smaller your dice of the potatoes, the less time they take to boil. If you can see, I cut them up pretty small.

One tweak: Let it cook for a good 15 min or so after it starts bubbling so that you get that good crispy crust on top with those nuts. We took it out right after we saw it bubbling and had to put it back in for a few more minutes.

Finally, here she is with her partner, Mr. Peppercorn Pork Loin. 

They love each other. We love them.

Chicken Broccoli Casserole

(Ashley)

My mom usually brings the chicken broccoli casserole to all of our family gatherings (and it is really good), so I don't really remember Granny B's casserole. We followed the recipe exactly and though it was tasty, it didn't taste very familiar. I may grab my mom's recipe and try that one out to see if that is the casserole that I remember.

(Paul)

Granny's Recipe:

"2 or 3 pckg. frozen broccoli

4 chicken breasts cooked and boned

2 cans cream of chicken soup

1 cup mayonnaise

1 tsp lemon juice

3/4 teaspoon curry powder

1/2 cup cheese grated

1/2 cup bread crumbs

1 tablespoon melted butter 

Cook broccoli, drain, and arrange in butter pyrex dish. Then chicken soup mix, mayonnaise, lemon juice, & curry powder pour over chicken. Sprinkle bread crumbs and cheese on top. Bake 30 min. at 350°."

We followed it almost exactly...

except that we used a rotisserie chicken

 instead of chicken breasts.

I think I would cut the broccoli up into smaller pieces next time.

From what we can tell, Granny did hers this way, but Bobbie (Ash's mom) stirs the whole thing up, cheese and all, before she sprinkles the bread crumbs on top and bakes it. Granny's way gets you a really layered dish; Bobbie's way is more casserole-like, if you will. Both good!

Banana Pudding (No Bake)

Granny Beulah went to be with Jesus less than a month before my son was born. I wish they could have met. She would have gotten so much joy from seeing him smile and play, and he would have loved making her laugh. This week I enlisted his help to make her no-bake banana pudding. Now that's my kind of cooking! It was neat going through her recipe with him and having his help with the "cooking." He will hear stories of her throughout his life, but he will know her a little better, a little more personally because of her cooking. So let's cook!

Her recipe:

Banana Pudding

1 large vanilla instant pudding mix

3 cups milk (mix well)

1 large Cool Whip

1 can Eagle Brand milk

mix together

Layer with vanilla wafers and sliced bananas. Top with pudding and add another layer of same and end with pudding mix on top. Put layer of crackers as garnish if you want to.

First, I gathered all of the ingredients.

 (large container of Cool Whip, 3 cups of milk, 14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk, 4 bananas, and box of vanilla wafers (not pictured)

We added the large container of Cool Whip into our bowl.

Then, we poured in the can of condensed sweetened milk. 

At this point, we realized that we should have added and mixed the first two ingredients (milk and pudding mix) into the big bowl first, so we brought out a small bowl to mix those two ingredients together.  Little man was fine with this; the more bowls the merrier. 

We stirred all of the wet ingredients together really well. 

Next, we got out our serving dish. We added a layer of vanilla wafers and about 2 bananas sliced.

We poured some of the pudding mixture on top of this. Then, we added some more vanilla wafers and 2 more bananas sliced. We poured another layer of pudding on top of this until the dish could hold no more. We finished by garnishing our dish with vanilla wafers.

This banana pudding was so tasty and so easy! When I make it again for just us three, I'll probably cut the ingredients in half. We still have a lot of leftover pudding in the fridge!

Dressing

My grandmother's dressing was so yummy that we had it not only at Thanksgiving but every time the extended family came together, which would happen throughout the year. This is probably my favorite dish that Granny Beulah made for us. Turkey isn't even necessary with this dressing. I love it served with cranberry sauce (the jellied kind that comes in the can) and granny's giblet gravy (this recipe is also in the cookbook). After our family get togethers, Granny would often send home a large plate of dressing with me, which I would snack on for the next couple of days. Paul is going to write about this dish, since he was the one who cooked it last night. Enjoy!

In Granny Beulah's words:

"Boil chicken until done. Remove from pot. Cook biscuits, cut open, put in another pot. Pour chicken broth over them. Place lid on pot. Let steam, then mash up. Add a little meal to the mix. Add a st. of butter or margarine, eggs, & chopped onion. Mix up a pinch of soda with broth in a cup, pour in mix. Pour into a greased casserole dish. Bake at 350 until top is as brown as you want it.

Chicken -
Eggs (6-10)
Meal (1-3 tablespoons)
Onion 1/4 to 1/2 cup
Margarine (1 to 1 1/2 st.)"

(Paul) I'd never made dressing before in my life, but I remember Granny's dressing, and that memory is about all I had to guide the amounts of broth, eggs, and corn meal that I ended up using. Granny's dressing is quite a bit lighter than most dressing, much more like a quiche, so the number of eggs you use is important, I think. I ended up using these amounts:

• 48 oz. Swanson chicken broth
• 10 (from a 12-ct bag) Pillsbury "Gran's" Buttermilk Biscuits (frozen)
• 8 eggs
• 3 tablespoons cornmeal
• 1 smallish onion
• 1 stick sweet cream butter
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

I'm just going to note what I did, rather than telling you how to do it, because we're going to need a few tries to get close to the real deal, and we welcome any tweaks you find that work better!

As it turns out, the first line in the recipe, "Boil chicken until done," assumes that you're going to use that chicken for something else, and only the broth to make the dressing. Since we were just aiming for the dressing for now, we just used store-bought broth. It didn't seem to make too much of a difference in the taste, at least to us.

Also, we'll probably do this recipe again using biscuits made from her recipe, but we didn't have all those ingredients handy. I just baked the biscuits according to the instructions on the bag and cut them up straight out of the oven.

As the biscuits were baking, I diced the onion the way I usually dice onions, which gives you about quarter-inch pieces, but Ashley said that Granny Beulah chopped them much more finely, so the onion in our dressing was a little crunchier and more noticeable than it would have been in hers.

Also while the biscuits were baking, I scrambled all of the eggs together. I wasn't completely sure about this, but it turned out right, I think. In hindsight, you could use 7 eggs, or maybe even 6, and be okay, depending on how dense you want the dressing.

After the biscuits were done, I cut them in half and threw them in a large saucepan. NB: You need a really big saucepan. The one I used, the biggest one we have besides the huge chili pot, was almost too small to hold all the ingredients.

Then, I added the broth (leaving about 2 tablespoons to use in dissolving the baking soda) and brought it to a low boil, with lid on.

As soon as it began to bubble, I reduced the heat and mashed the biscuits up with a spatula (they were really mushy by then) until the mix looked about like a pudding.

Then, I added the cornmeal, eggs, butter, and onion. I mixed the baking soda separately with the 2 tablespoons of broth, then poured that in, too. Once all that was mixed well, I poured the mixture into our Pam-coated pans. It made enough for two of the pans in the picture. We froze half of it and ate half of it over the course of a few meals.

The finished product: Granny Beulah's Dressing!

Carrying on the Tradition

My grandmother enjoyed life. She loved Jesus, being with people, Atlanta Braves baseball, and cooking. Granny Beulah had an infectious laugh and loved making people smile; her cooking put a smile on many, many faces.

On every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mother's Day...growing up, the family would come together in granny's cozy house to celebrate and eat her amazing spread of meats, fruits, vegetables, breads, and desserts. We would stuff our faces, wait a few hours, then stuff our faces some more. From the minute we walked into her door, the smell of her cooking lured us in and we'd find granny in the kitchen working on a few last minute things to finish up the hours that she'd spent cooking. She would be pulling bread out of the oven, stirring the creamed corn, and opening the microwave, but she'd still find time to hug every neck that came in. I don't know how she managed that all with a smile on her face. She was amazing.

I come from a line of great cooks. Not only is my grandmother a wonderful cook, but my mom is a great cook, as well. Then, there's me....I love to eat, but I've never been too great at cooking. On Christmas of 2002, Granny Beulah gave me one of the best presents I've ever gotten. She gave me a cookbook. It was a book of thirty-seven of her recipes that she'd hand-written just for me. There is no telling how long it took her to write all of the recipes in this book, and she made one for each of her grandchildren.

Honestly, though I love and treasure this book, I hadn't even attempted to use any of these recipes. I think it's because I don't feel like I can do them justice and I'd rather just remember these meals the way she cooked them for us up until a few years ago. Another reason that I haven't used these recipes is because most of them seem pretty hard to follow. My grandmother cooked for so long that she didn't need to use exact measurements for her dishes; she just knew what they were supposed to look like along the way. This is not how I cook. I need a formula to follow.

I pulled out Granny's cookbook this week when I started thinking about what I could prepare beforehand and freeze for Thanksgiving. For the first time ever, we will not be in Georgia for the holidays, so I want to make our holiday meals special for the four of us. There it was on page 4: "dressing." Tonight, I left my husband with the cookbook turned to page 4, wished him luck-ha!, and took my little one out on an errand. When I came back a couple of hours later, the smell hit me at the door, and a flood of memories came back to me. It smelled like my granny's house. She felt so near. I knew that it was time to cook through her recipes, and I thought that it would be fun to share.

My goal is to cook through at least one of Granny Beulah's recipes a week until I've been through the whole cookbook. My husband will do a lot of the cooking, so he will share his experiences, too. We'll share the recipe, (hopefully) give some exact measurements, and post pics, too. I'd love for any siblings/cousins to contribute a blog post of a recipe from her cookbook, if you would like. Let's carry on the tradition of Granny Beulah's amazing southern home cooking.