Mincemeat Pumpkin Pie

A week or so before Thanksgiving, I was leafing through the cookbook, and discovered, lo and behold, that I had actually not made all the pumpkin pie recipes. There was this little gem, from Oregon, lurking in the back of the book. Not only that, but I had, sitting in the back of my refrigerator, a jar of homemade mincemeat, left over from last year's mincemeat marathon. So, since my husband Bob specifically requested pumpkin pie here was a way of knocking off a recipe.
It is an incredibly easy recipe as well. You dump the mincemeat in the bottom of the premade pie shell, mix up the rest of the ingredients, pour and bake. I was able to made the pie on Monday evening and place it on the table on the day after the turkey marathon. This can backfire. I made the pecan pie Friday night. We were going out, and the pie wasn't done so I set the oven timer for 15 minutes and went out the door..
When we got back at 9:30, a "very thoroughly cooked pie" was sitting on the stove. We investigated it later in the weekend and found it to be cement-like in texture, so I made another one and watched the oven myself.
Bob found the pie under seasoned. If you like a more spicy pumpkin pie, you could double the cinnamon, and add 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves. Unfortunately, it did not seem to be to every one's taste. We found a couple of half eaten pieces in the living room, as well as a plate containing all the mincemeat, carefully picked out. I ate it Friday night at leftovers fest. Seemed fine to me.  Well, it might be an acquired taste.

Mincemeat-Pumpkin Pie

1 1/2 cups mincemeat
1 unbaked nine-inch pie shell, chilled
1 cup mashed cooked (canned) pumpkin
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 eggs lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup milk

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
2. Place the mincemeat in the bottom of the pie shell.
3. Using a rotary beater, combine the remaining ingredients. Pour over mincemeat. Bake thirty-five to forty minutes or until set. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature.
Makes six servings.

Passover Cheese Blintzes

This is the last Passover recipe in the New England section of the cookbook,   Apparently Hewlett didn't run into any Jews in other sections of the country when compiling her recipes. I made it for dessert when the young marrieds came over.  Last year, when I was tackling Passover baking recipes, I was amazed and pleased by how good they were. I was expecting them to be heavy, but they were not at all. Having said this, this is not one of the better recipes, in my opinion.
First of all there were some issues producing the pancakes. I was delighted to learn the Matzoh cake meal was still good. It took me so long to find it last year that if I had had to run around looking for a fresh container, I never would have made this recipe.
Maybe one of you reading this, who has had more experience with blintzes than I have, could offer some suggestions. I made the batter and filling before we sat down to dinner, so I could pull off the dessert quickly. When I went to make the pancakes, the batter seemed too thick, so I added a half a cup of water.
The pancakes came out brittle. When I went to roll them up around the filling, they cracked. They stuck to the paper towel I turned them out on. Now, one reason might have been my interpretation of the instructions. It said, turn the pancake browned side up onto a towel. I interpreted that to mean paper towel. Bad interpretation. The other recipe for cheese blintzes, (June, 2013) which I neglected to read until this minute, said turn it out on a sheet of waxed paper. That worked out much better. So use waxed paper.
Also, the filling seemed sloppy and did not have much flavor. The other recipe said add vanilla to the filling. That turned out really well. I put in a couple of teaspoons of sugar and a full lemon's worth of grated lemon rind. I would suggest draining the cottage cheese so the filling doesn't ooze out.
Everyone was really nice about it, but the blintzes turned out like a train wreck. The pancake packages came apart and the filling oozed out. I couldn't really brown them because they didn't stay together. So, be warned. This takes a more experienced hand with blintzes than I have.

Passover Cheese Blintzes

Batter:
3 eggs
3/4 cup matzoh cake flour
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt

Filling:
1 pound cottage cheese
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
butter

1. Beat together the eggs, flour and water to make a thin batter. Add the salt. Pour about three tablespoons batter onto a buttered griddle or skillet, spreading as thinly as possible by tilting the pan. Fry until brown and turn out, browned sided up, onto a towel (sheet of waxed paper.)
2. To prepare filling, combine the cottage cheese, egg, salt, and sugar. Spread one tablespoon of mixture on surface of each blintz. Tuck in the ends and roll up.
3. Brown the blintzes in butter and serve hot. Makes about ten.

Past Perfect Fruitcake

Normally, one associates fruitcake with Christmas. I am always looking for ways to sneak in various recipes however. Bob and I were scheduled to provide the food for the hospitality hour at church back at the end of January. Unfortunately for the production of Past Perfect Fruitcake I went back in the hospital that week. Bob produced the whole, unusually lavish snack himself, but did not make fruitcake.
This week, a friend of ours at church asked for help with the newcomers' brunch. Saint Margaret's is trying to increase membership and make newcomers feel welcome, hence a lovely social event mostly provided by a neighboring Greek deli, but with fruitcake for dessert.
Now I have to confess, the fruitcake did not seem to be flying off the table. Maybe people did not feel that fruitcake went with Greek food.  I hope the guys at the homeless breakfast program will enjoy it. What this is, for fruitcake lovers, is jewel-like crystallized cherries, crystallized pineapple and pecans in a very light batter. My husband tried to slice it but it crumbled. An inventive man, he hit upon serving the crumbly bits in cupcake papers where they looked very decorative. Please note, you will need baking parchment, which you can usually buy at the grocery store in the same area as the aluminum foil and plastic wrap. If you can't find baking parchment, you can use waxed paper.
Culinarily speaking, this recipe is just dump in ingredients, mix and bake. Simplicity in itself.
You may want to wait to serve this at Christmas, or you could serve it as part of a winter dessert buffet. You may not want to serve it with Greek food.

Past Perfect Fruitcake

4 cups shelled pecans
2 cups unchopped crystallized cherries
5 slices crystallized pineapple, each slice cut in eights
1 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.
2. Grease the bottom and sides of a two-quart cake tin (I used a cheesecake pan.) and line the bottom of it with brown paper or parchment paper.
3. Combine the pecans, cherries and pineapple in a mixing bowl. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a sifter and sift the dry ingredients over the fruits.
4. Combine the eggs, sugar and vanilla in another mixing bowl and beat until blended. Pour this over the fruit and stir with a slotted spoon. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake one and one-half hours. At the end of that time, set the cake pan into a pan of boiling water and continue baking fifteen minutes longer. Makes one dozen servings.

Poppy Seed Cake

The poppy seed cake was intended to be dessert for Christmas Eve lunch. Our family has a series of family meals on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. intended to accommodate my son and daughter-in-law, who have other commitments. We have lunch on Christmas Eve and read the Christmas story from St. Luke, The Night Before Christmas (during which the reader has to ham it up as much as humanly possible) and Beatrix Potter's A Tailor of Gloucester, when the reader, following the tradition of my father, has to read every piece of print in the book. "Frederick Warne and Company, copyright,  1911, copyright renewed, 1935," the reader solemnly intones.
At 5:00 we go to the family mass at Saint Margaret's Church, finally giving in to the reality that I could not stay awake for midnight mass. On Christmas Day, the yms and our friends come over for Christmas dinner about 4:00. 
This year we flew to London for our daughter's graduation from her Master's Program, and arrived  back on these shores on Sunday, suffering from a bad cold (my husband, Bob) and jet lag (the rest of us.) Monday was spent running around doing last minute errands, mailing packages that I hadn't managed to mail before we left for Britain and visiting the horse.
 On Monday night, I had intended to make the cake, as well as peeling the chestnuts for chestnut soup. The chestnut soup recipe failed to mention that peeling two and a half pounds of chestnuts could take upwards of two hours. After an hour of picking chestnuts out of the shell and stabbing myself at least once, I tottered off to bed.
Tuesday was Christmas Eve. I had to go to the Post Office and did so. I got back about 11:00 am bearing drinks from Starbucks for the assembled multitudes, and started making everything else that would go into Christmas Eve dinner. It was plain that there was no time to make a cake or the soup, no matter how simple it might be to peal chestnuts. Christmas Eve dinner was, by our entertaining standards, spartan. Just main course, two side dishes and that was it. No dessert, no soup, no nothing. Everyone survived with good humor intact. At 4:15 the yms went out the door on their way to church. Bob, my daughter and I stayed home.
So Christmas Eve evening, I made the poppy seed cake and peeled the rest of the chestnuts. The only caveat I have about poppy seed cake is, these are ground poppy seeds. I took two 2.5 ounce jars of unground poppy seeds and tossed them into the Cuisinart. I probably netted upwards of three-quarters of a cup of ground poppy seeds. So I would say, buzz one jar of poppy seeds, measure them and figure how much more you need to get to half a cup. Also, you have to soak the poppy seeds for thirty minutes. As you do that, it's a good time to put the butter on the top of the stove so it softens. (Put it on a saucer. You don't want it to melt.)
This is a great cake. I ended up serving it at Christmas dinner, for those who declined Christmas pudding, or who decided they needed two desserts. The icing is a triumph. It reminded me of the icing on Joanne Bakers'
birthday cakes, sold in the 1950s in Great Barrington, Ma., Joanne's cakes were white with pink, yellow and blue roses on them. There was also a dove that rested near the roses. This icing is smooth, not grainy, fluffy, and altogether icing-like. And just think, home made!

Poppy Seed Cake

Cake
1/2 cup ground poppy seeds (grind 1/4 cup of poppy seeds in the Cuisinart. You will probably have enough.)
1 1/2 cups milk
2/3 cup butter
2 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon lemon extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
4 egg whites
Frosting
4 1/2 tablespoons cake flour
1 cup milk
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. To prepare cake, combine the ground poppy seeds and milk and let stand thirty minutes. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the lemon extract and vanilla.  
3. Sift together the flour, salt and baking powder and fold alternately with the milk mixture into the batter.
4. Beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry and fold into the mixture. Turn into three greased and floured eight-inch layer pans and bake about twenty minutes or until done. (In my oven it's always longer.)
5. Cool on a rack.
6. Meanswhile prepare frosting by blending the flour and milk together in a small saucepan. Heat, stirring, until thick. Cook two minutes until very thick. (Very thick is like icing in a can.)
7. Cream the butter, in a bowl. Gradually beat in the sugar until mixture is very light and fluffy. Gradually add cooled flour mixture and the vanilla. Beat five minutes longer. Use  to fill and frost the layers. Decorate with the walnuts.
Makes one dozen servings.

Blueberry Upside-Down Squares

Today we travel to the far northern fastnesses of Alaska to bring you Blueberry Upside Down Squares. We had a dinner party for some old friends on Saturday night. I paged through the book for a recipe that could be made ahead of time and wasn't too complicated or require chilling. In the New England section, all I have left is two kinds of plum pudding and mince pies, also Passover cheese blintzes. I'll get to the blintzes at some point, and the plum pudding and mince pies closer to Christmas. But mid September is not the time.
I finally found this, which I highly recommend. Go out to the store right now and buy the last of the highly expensive blueberries. It's a snap, and extremely tasty.
Hmm. While reading the recipe over in order to write this, I just discovered why it was so tasty. The recipe calls for 1/2 a cup of brown sugar and 1 tablespoon of butter. My eyes ran the two lines together, and I thought it said half a cup of butter. A tablespoon is just fine. However, I would advise upping the amount of grated orange peel. I needed two oranges to obtain the required 1/3 of a cup of orange juice, so I grated both the oranges and obtained two to three teaspoons of grated peel. It gave a nice tang to the pastry.
The finished product has a blueberry glaze on top, (if you are successful in inverting it over a plate and getting it to plop down neatly on said plate) and a sort of crispy shortbread on the bottom. I made the squares ahead of time. When I came to get them out of the pan, there was some resistance, so I just left them in there and served them with a mound of whipped cream on top. With all the whipped cream, it really didn't matter what was on top because the diners couldn't see it. Everyone seemed to like the squares, so I hope you will too. Let me know if you make them.
By the way, in my neck of the woods (Washington, DC) blueberries are now being sold in small containers, the size of a container of raspberries. One of these containers seems to hold about one cup of blueberries. I don't think you need to buy two containers (at $4 a clip) to get the proper effect. One will do, in my humble opinion. 

Blueberry Upside-Down Squares

1 1/2 cups blueberries
1/2 cup light brown sugar 
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 cup shortening
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg beaten
1 teaspoon (or more) grated orange rind
1 1/4 cups cake flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup orange juice
whipped cream

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine the blueberries, brown sugar and butter in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer five minutes. Turn into a greased eight-inch square baking pan.
3. Cream the shortening and granulated sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and orange rind.
4. Sift together the flour, salt and baking powder and add to batter alternately with the orange juice. Spoon batter over berries. Bake forty-five minutes or until done. Invert onto a plate. Cut into squares and serve warm, with whipped cream. Makes six servings. 

Indian Pudding (Gluten Free)

Indian pudding is an old New England recipe. When the early colonists landed here, they brought with them a fondness for a dish called hasty pudding, which was wheat flour boiled in water or milk until it thickened into porridge. But, alas, wheat did not grow very well in New England, so the colonists, learning from the Indians, used corn meal. They gradually began to add molasses, spices and milk as life and cuisine became more civilized.
This Indian pudding tastes a lot like pumpkin pie. After all, it has all the same spices. I made it for dinner yesterday evening when the young marrieds came to dinner. We had corned beef and cabbage as a salute to Saint Patrick's Day, and because everyone loves corned beef and cabbage. They really loved it. I was looking forward to corned beef sandwiches for lunch, but it was not to be. My son handed me the last scrap of meat, about the size of a slice of American cheese.
I reminded my son that we had made Indian pudding 27 years ago, when he was four. He didn't remember. I won't tell you what he said it looked like. Use your imagination about something a four year old boy would say. We had it with vanilla ice cream in the living room around what might well be the last fire of the season. We had tried to have a fire two weeks ago, at the creamed lobster dinner. It turned out, although we opened the damper we knew about, there was another one that the heat auditors had closed. Smoke spewed everywhere, and the guests had to retreat to the addition. This time, both dampers were open, and we sat around the fire talking and throwing logs on.
The only tricky thing about Indian pudding is putting the corn meal on gradually. You just want to float a teaspoon at a time on top of the boiling milk. If you put too much on at one time, corn meal clumps up. So sprinkle, stir, sprinkle, stir. Don't dump. Because my son asked to wait for dessert, ours was not as moist as it should have been, but it was still good. It is also possible that I let the corn meal mush thicken too much before I stopped cooking it. I cooked it until it was pulling away from the side of the pot.

Indian Pudding

4 cups milk
1 cup yellow corn meal
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/3 cup finely minced suet (I left this out. It makes food fatty and greasy tasting.)
1/2 cup sugar
2/3 cup light molasses
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon allspice
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
vanilla ice cream

1. Bring the milk to a boil, and add the corn meal gradually, beating vigorously with a wire whisk. When mixture starts to thicken, set it aside to cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
3. When the mixture is nearly cool, stir in the remaining ingredients except the ice cream and mix well.
4. Pour into a buttered baking dish. Bake two hours. Serve piping hot, with vanilla ice cream on top. Makes ten to one dozen servings.