How To Make Homemade Shake And Bake For Chicken Or Pork

This is almost a clone for the commercial Shake n Bake product. It is very tasty! :-)

How To Make Olive Salad For Muffuletta (Olive Tapenade)

I took a few liberties to reflect some of the ingredients we have on hand, including using some of my own home-canned pickled onions and pickled green tomatoes. I suspect there are lots of substitutions one could make to perfect it as "your own". :-)

Grocery Diary Middle Of January & Thoughts on Panic Buying Before a Snowstorn

I started keeping a grocery diary to track how my shopping has changed since I began raising and canning much of our own food, and since I resumed stocking up as a part of preparedness. I don't have to shop as often, and spend far less when I do go to the store. It also takes less time to shop now that I only have to walk around the perimeter instead of up and down every aisle! :-)

Grocery Diary Week 1 January 2015

I've decided to track my spending on groceries this year, as I am growing and preserving more and more of our own food.  I will note when we eat out in these as well, but that is very seldom. We are starting also with a freezer full of various meats, a good stock of flour & sugar, and a pantry from my canning over the past 6 months.  This is the second video I've made on this. I can already see a strong drop in how much I spend each week for food, as well as a reduction in the amount of garbage we have!



I'd love to hear your tips or your reflections on the difference food storage or preservation has made for your family.  If you enjoy the video, please give it a "thumbs up" on You Tube & please subscribe to my channel there. :-)

Homemade Candy for Gifting: Martha Washington Candy Recipe!

YES there IS still time to make these for Christmas! They are unbelievable simple to make, and I share a little melting trick to make the chocolate coating easy to handle. The video also shows how I packaged them for giving.  Paul described these little gems as "Mounds on Steroids" LOL! Enjoy! And MERRY CHRISTMAS! :-)

Mincemeat Cake: Can You Believe You'll Want Seconds?

Even the last gasp of mincemeat – mince pies – are going out of fashion. What a shame we have lost touch with this old standby that dates back to the Roman Empire at the time of Christ, once packed in gallon-size wooden firkins by companies that specialized solely in making mincemeat.  True mincemeat originally contained beef as well as fruits, nuts and spices (Borden's Nonesuch Brand still does). It was a high protein preserved food.

The tradition of mince pies at Christmas goes way back, and they were once made in the shape of a manger. Given that the recipe continued to be used from Biblical times until now, it's a good food to put on your list for "foods of the Bible" - even if it wasn't mentioned in the bible, the Apostle Paul certainly could have eaten mincemeat while he was in Rome.  And incredibly, mincemeat even played a part in America's battle for freedom of religion, being banned (along with Christmas) by Oliver Cromwell in England and some Puritans in the Colonies as "too Catholic".  Just like the traditional American foods of Thanksgiving  really mean something important to America's way of life and freedom to worship, so, too, does eating mincemeat  at Christmas time. 

I miss mince meat pies at Christmas time. My dad's father, "Pawpaw", used to make them. He had been a cook for the Santa Fe Railroad track crews, and his pies were top notch.  The trouble is, every mincemeat pie I've tasted in my adulthood was like fruitcake: one piece is all I can enjoy. The flavor is overpowering.

But now I've found a solution. This Mincemeat Mayonnaise Cake is perfect. It uses one cup of mincemeat, so the flavor blends gently throughout the cake. With a thin cream cheese, frosting, it delights the tastebuds - and our taste for nostalgia!

It's an easy cake to make, but it takes a long time: it must bake for two hours! So start it when you have the evening at home. It is moist and dense, so it also keeps very well. You can make it days in advance and refrigerate it, icing on the day you plan to serve it.

Mincemeat Mayonnaise Cake

3 cups flour

1½ cups sugar

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1½ cup buttermilk

1 cup mayonnaise

2 T orange marmalade or 1 T grated orange rind

1 T rum flavoring

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup mincemeat, reconstituted according to package directions (or half a jar if you are using Borden's Nonesuch brand in the jar)

1 cup walnuts or pecans (optional)

Mix flour, sugar, baking soda and salt together. Blend buttermilk and mayonnaise and gradually add flour mixture, stirring well. Mix in marmalade, vanilla and rum flavoring, then add mincemeat and walnuts.

Grease a 9” tube pan and line with greased parchment or waxed paper. If using a 2-part pan, set it on a sheet pan to catch oil that may will seep out through the bottom seam as the mixture heats up and drip onto the oven.  Bake at 325 degrees for 2 hours.  Turn out onto a plate and allow to cool.

A rather thin cream cheese frosting is good on this, or you could spread slices with cream cheese for a lovely breakfast treat.   

Here's my recipe for the frosting:

½ bag of powdered sugar

3 ounces (1/2 a carton) of cream cheese

½ cup whipping cream or milk

½ tsp vanilla

Pinch of salt

The one pictured is the one I made last night for our Christmas. I'll carry it up to Irving and ice it when we get there.  It will be fun to tell the grandkids they are eating cake with beef in it! LOL!

Wishing a Merry and Blessed Christmas to you and yours.  Thank you for reading my blog, and for spending your precious time here at Pecan Corner. May 2012 be a very good year for us all! :-)

How to Prevent Weevils & Pantry Moths & Get Rid of Them Forever

In Home Economics class, they taught us how to sift flour, but never owned up to the real reason sifters were invented: to remove weevils from flour back in the days when throwing it away might have meant starvation. Some people call them flour moths, mealy bugs, Indian Moths, pantry webs... lots of names because good housewives everywhere have been plagued with them for centuries.

I will never forget how horrified I was in my first home when weevils were in my flour. It really freaked me out. That was when I talked to my grandmother to find out what to do. She told me 3 things: (1) Put a bay leaf in everything, (2) store in airtight containers, (3) if you have them, clean thoroughly to get rid of them, then follow (1) & (2).

Getting weevils in grains or moths in the pantry doesn't mean you don't keep a clean house but once you know how to keep them away, you never have to cope with them again. 

(1) Put a bay leaf or two (a dried, culinary Bay Leaf) in each canister or bag. It will not put out any flavor or odor to the food, but will prevent weevils or moths. Mema told me that weevils come in the flour/grain, and that the secret is to keep them from hatching. That prevention is what the bay leaves do, and they really work. Even an airtight container may not prevent weevils, but the comination of a bay leaf in a closed environment well.

(2) Store everything in airtight containers. I like clear containers so I can see what I have. Otherwise I forget. And I like plastic because I'm a klutz, but glass is superior otherwise. Clear plastic, clear glass, or brand-name zip storage bags (like Zip-Loc heavy-duty gallon bags) are all fine. Tins and opague plastic, such as Tupperware, will work great too so long as you can remember how to find things.

I leave things in their original package, and use a container big enough to just drop them down into. The Bay Leaf can then go into the container and doesn't have to be directly in the package of flour or barley. Plus that way I can remember what brand I bought.

Keep birdseed and pet food in airtight containers too. These are notorious and easy to forget. If possible, keep both of these items outside the house, in the garage. Rubbermaid tubs are super for large quantities or for storing several kinds of items in their original packaging.  Airtight & watertight, Rover and the red birds will love you for keeping their food fresh. Birds don't mind the protein from the bugs but still I'm sure they'd rather have the sunflower seeds!

(3) To get rid of a problem with them if you already see pantry moths or weevils, empty the pantry and brush it thoroughly, including the joints, with a stiff brush, then vacuum using the crevace tool or a dust buster- including the joints. If you don't have a vacuum, use a whisk broom or other stiff brush and give it a good brushing on all surfaces.

If it won't hurt the pantry to get it damp, wipe it down after that with soap & water and allow to dry completely. Don't use pine oil or anything with a strong scent as foods might pick it up. Just use soapy water and wring out your washcloth well. No need to rinse - the soap residue will also help keep pests away.

When you put things back, put them into containers with a bay leaf first. Inspect the stuff you took out to be sure it doesn't have weevils before putting it back. Telltale signs are small holes in the packaging, webby
clumps in flour or meal, and of course, weevils themselves.

All of this may sound like a lot of work, but it's not really. Once you get the pantry set up, it's only a matter of keeping it up. So when a new bag of flour comes in, straight away it goes into the flour tub. New boxes of cake mix can go into the same Zip-Loc bag the others came out of. Easy-peasy.

And it doesn't have to cost much at all. Some will be free: recycle containers you'd otherwise throw away. Start one at a time, with flour and grains, as you get a container, put something in it. Any kind of containers that fit your budget are fine. My stuff is stored in pickle jars, Zip-Loc brand bags, mason jars, cannisters that rice came in, Tupperware from garage sales, big cannisters from the dollar store, sugar in a plastic sherbet tub.

Voila! Vintage living at its best: no more bugs, no more waste, and no poisonous pesticides. Just clean, all-natural remedies and a tidy house.

Cooking at Home: How to Feed A Family Well on $___ a Month

The cost of essentials just keeps rising. To keep up a good standard of living even during tough times we often change our approach. Food prices are expected to climb during the rest of this year. How to avoid an empty larder and keep the pantry full when money is tight? How to keep those boys with hollow legs filled up and keep the lights on at the same time? One way is by stocking up and cooking at home. Make it an adventure! Think of economizing as "vintage living".

During the 1990's, we fed our family of 5 plus the assorted houseguests and friends that three teenaged sons brought home for around $300 per month. I think that would be about $450 a month in today's food dollars. We didn't have a garden, and we didn't receive food stamps. If one does have food stamps and/or a local food bank, there is still a need to make those resources stretch further.

Angel Food Ministries didn't exist at that time, but it is a neat way to save on your food budget and still buy high quality food. AFM is a Christian food ministry that operates on the order of a co-op: everyone qualifies, no applications or limits, and anyone can buy groceries through Angel Food Ministries for about half the usual cost of the items in each month's box.

What we DID have that "saved our bacon" in the food budget, then and now, were:
(1) a commitment to stocking up & eagerness to watch for bargains
(2) a Freezer
(3) a willingness to cook from scratch & eat only homemade meals
(4) a willingness to forego chips, sodas, cookies & other packaged foods

I love to grocery shop. Since I first married, that has been my favorite household task. So I go to all the stores and go up and down every aisle, just looking at things. If I see a bargain on something we use, I buy a lot of it - depending on how well it keeps & where you can store it, sometimes you can buy enough to last a year. I once bought a 50 lb bag of rice. That was a little much. I think I stumped my toes on the cans we stored it in for a couple of years. Ooops.

It's not good to overbuy, but you'll get to a point where you're always nicely stocked up and only have to buy when it's on sale.

For example, Alco recently had canned wild Alaska Salmon with an expiration date of July 2015. We don't use salmon that much so I only bought 5 cans. Had it been canned tuna, I probably would have asked for a whole case. On the other hand, canned evaporated milk does not keep well past its due-date, so I only buy a few cans at a time so that we can be sure to use it up before it expires.

One thing we do use a lot in our cooking is canned mushrooms. We buy the least expensive "stems and pieces" because there is absolutely no difference in the flavor. Big Lots has them right now at 50 cents a can (a savings of about 69 cents each over regular price in the grocery store), with an expiration of April 2012. I bought 20 cans! We're assured of mushrooms til March.

I don't know how families with children survive without a freezer. Ours has always made such a difference for us. I never have to buy meat that isn't an excellent bargain. Tonight, we had a lovely Boston Butt Pork Roast that I bought in July for $1.49 a pound. More than 4 pounds of meat for a little over $6.00. Paul cooked it in the crock pot and it is so tender! The two of us will get 3 or 4 meals from this - & we could stretch it further if needed. Over the next few days, we'll have easy Moo Shu Pork, a catch-all pork fried rice or stir fry, Mexican style in adobo sauce... 

Because we have a freezer, I was able to buy several roasts and put them away. If I had bought one today, not on sale, it would have cost twice as much. I wouldn't've bought a roast at that price, so it's not that I "saved" money so much as that we are able to eat better quality food while staying on a small budget. Here's a link to the USDA's website on safe food freezing practices, including how to save frozen food in case of a power outage. When our freezer is not full of food, we use bags of ice to take up the remaining space & help it operate most efficiently - this reduces electricity use & helps protect against loss in case the power went out.

Eating out is very costly over home cooking, but it is so hard to get off work and still put a meal on the table every night. The freezer saved us during those years because we could cook up meals in advance to pull out and reheat after working all day and having no time to cook. Beans ( I love pintos) freeze great and taste far better than canned. Sauces for pasta, chicken & egg noodles, enchiladas, meat loaf, casseroles, soups and stews...all will make you smile when you pull them out of the freezer for supper. AllRecipes.com has a special category with hundreds of "Make Ahead" recipes.

Even cooked hamburger patties, grilled chicken, and other chopped cooked meats in the freezer can make it easier to put a casserole or skillet dinner together than to fight traffic getting to & from the fast food joint. With sauces made up in advance, we could have pasta at the drop of a hat. German sausage was also a mainstay for nights we forgot to thaw something.

We also froze things for the boys to nuke in the morning for breakfast.  Paul used to make huge batches of pancakes, sausage patties or bacon, then put portions into baggies for the freezer. Ethan could heat them up and have his breakfast while waiting his turn in the shower.  Ditto with sausage biscuits, banana nut muffins, german sausage tortilla wraps, breakfast tacos ...

Our current freezer is a small, 7.2 cubic feet chest type Frigidaire. These cost between $250-$300. For more encouragement about how a freezer can help your food budget, read the reviews on the small freezers at the Frigidaire site. Lots of ideas for where to keep the freezer and stories about how people use them.

Cooking at home made a difference in more than our budget. We noticed that our tastes changed, and our sons became adventurous eaters. They liked eating healthy. They liked eating at home. Nicolas would make a salad for his after school snack. Ethan was on the swim team, and made ramen noodles when he came in - essential carbs and fats for energy. Canned tuna (in water, they requested), peanut butter sandwiches (no jelly), scrambled eggs in the microwave (lower in fat, they said) gave them protein between meals.

Now that they are adults, they all still cook for themselves and their families. And we all have a lot of nice memories to share about the shopping and cooking and eating we did together when they were growing up.

Display Ideas For Vintage Recipe Booklets

A lot of my collections are made of paper. Vintage advertising recipe booklets are one such, and I have a few I just couldn't part with. Colorful and witty, those cute little recipe folders are just too fun to leave in a drawer.

I mean, in our Tex-Mex kitchen, who could resist 1920s and 1930s "Tasty Tested Anglo Recipes", "Gebhardt's Mexican-Style Foods" and "Walker's Red Hot Chile Con Carne"? The Walker's one, red with a bright green sombrero, is actually from 1918, the WWI era.

The company was based in Austin, Texas. Gebhardt is also an old Texas company - I still use their chili powder today for general cooking (I use Morton's Chili Blend for actual chili). And Anglo not only made canned hams and corned beef, but also advertises Deviled Ham, Deviled Tongue and Liver Spread!

One of the little projects I've had on my list was to find a way to display them that didn't take space away from some other wonderful thing that needs a prominent home!

Inspired by my new cabinets, I finally got around to it last month.

This is a super-simple project. I used the hard clear cases that sports cards collectors use, and glued a piece of sheet magnet on the back. It's a good use for those magnetic business cards we keep long after the realtor pictured has moved on.

Voila! (which is how the word "Walla!" is spelled!)

Refrigerator magnets that can be changed out, and the keep the booklet available, just in case we suddenly decide to try that recipe for jellied liver tea sandwiches.

Aren't they cute? If you have other ideas for showing off vintage paper, please share! There's always something cute that needs just the perfect treatment....

How to Organize a Chest Type Freezer Part 2

When I looked around the net for tips on organizing a freezer, three great ideas were to use stackable tubs, to separate beef, pork, and chicken, and to color code. To this I added my own preference to stand things upright in the bins, like a filing cabinet. That way I can see everything in each bin at a glance. Think vertically.

I measured everything, length, depth, width, including the width of the step in the bottom of the freezer, to be sure I would get bins that fit. I found these at the Dollar store in with the school supplies for $2 each. It would also be very easy to just use heavy cardboard boxes - cut hand-holds in the sides and don't worry about color coding.


Here are the first three baskets. We have a lot more beef than anything else right now and I separated the ground beef to its own tub. I put it in the bottom one just because. :-)


Here is the second tier. The chicken is on the left - there's only room for one basket on that side, because it sits on top of the step, and the basket that came with the freezer will fit over it. I put vegetables in the middle one. I filled the space in the back (outside the bins that are just a couple inches too short) with the large bags of blackberries and okra, standing upright. Those are large enough they will not fall over and get lost and since it is only those two things I will not forget they are there.


We don't have much chicken right now so packaged cheese (a good sale) filled the rest of that bin. It is important to fill all the space - the freezer will use less electricity and hold the cold better if things are packed tightly together. If you don't have enough food in it to fill the freezer, store bags of ice or gallons of frozen water, then you can remove them as needed to make room for food. Just be sure you can still close the lid effortlessly so that it will seal properly.

The top bins are for small packets, odd sizes, and things we will want to get to right away. Later on, when I have more packages of bell peppers, I'll probably give them their own bag that can sit down in one of the lower bins so they won't be exposed to warm air when we open it.

Speaking of warmth, this freezer will need to be defrosted once each year or two. It will hold the food far better than self-defrosting ones that work by actually warming up the sides of the freezer enough to melt the frost. It is no trouble to defrost it myself, plus that is good incentive to use up the food that is in there so we do not waste.

Right now, this arrangement looks good. We will see over time how well it actually works in practice.

FDR's Little White House: A Simple American Home

Last summer, we went to the Little White House, in Warm Springs, Georgia. This is where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent much time during his presidency, and where he passed away in April 1945.

The thing that most struck me about this house is how very ordinary it is. Anyone's grandmother could have lived here. There was no ostentation, no luxury. It is a simple home with maple furniture, twin beds, well-read books near the fireplace, and the comfort of homeliness.


The kitchen had no cabinets, only open shelves along the walls. The things we would put into cabinets were stored in the pantry/closet - it was lined with shelves and is shown in the first picture, above.

They told us the living room is exactly as it looked the day he passed away. The nautical decor was a favorite of his, as he was a Navy man.
President Roosevelt's bed, on which he was lying when he passed away suddenly from a stroke. The room is very small, with a single bed, and the furniture you see is pretty much the whole of the room. It is located right off of the living room.
This was Eleanor's room, with a pair of twin beds. The guide told us that their children especially enjoyed coming to The Little White House, and would stay here in Mrs. Roosevelt's room when they came.
The Dining Room is not separate, the table is simply across the room from the living area, with the hutch sitting opposite the fireplace shown in the living room photo. Even so, the whole room is rather small. The proportions of the furniture help keep it from feeling crowded.


This unfinished photo is the one for which President Roosevelt was sitting when he passed away.


There is a small garage apartment over the garage that is labeled "servants quarters", but these were a cook/housekeeper, and a driver/butler whose assistance was necessary to our paralyzed president.

The live-in housekeeper was not unusual even for middle class families who didn't have a grandmother living with them in those days when labor was cheap and goods expensive. Without the labor-saving devices that became common after WWII, help of some kind - whether family or hired - was essential. Notice in the kitchen photos how bare of "things" the kitchen was. Yet nearly all food was made from scratch or preserved at home, so much more time was involved in the preparation.

Oh, he and Mrs Roosevelt had luxury in their lives - both were from wealthy families and they did live in the White house, after all. But this little place where he escaped for treatments at the natural hot spring spa up the road in Warm Springs, and where his children came to spend time with him after they were grown, is by far the best example of an American Home of the era.

Although I am not decorating my little cottage in this same style, I do find much inspiration, and comfort, in these rooms.