Sweet Potato Pone (Gluten Free)

Our son and daughter-in-law came to dinner Thursday night. I decided to make lasagna because we had enough lasagna noodles to make at least two pans of lasagna. Also, they like lasagna. Dessert was a close call. I was going to make apple crumble, which I  had made in the distant past and so would not result in a post. Then I started paging through the cookbook and discovered this. Easy, tasty, and as it happens, leaving a half sweet potato to make sweet potato quesadillas.
After walking to the grocery store, which I do nowadays in order to get in fitbit steps, I began boiling water for the lasagna noodles  and grating sweet potato. It has to bake for three hours, so, I got it in at 4:30.
By 6:30, we needed the oven for the lasagna. Bob examined the pone, which was still in a largely liquid state, and suggested we leave it in as we turned the oven up to 350 degrees for the pasta. That was what we did. It turned out soft and sweet. It would have been better if I had started it later, because it is a dish best served warm.
This is a good fall dessert. It has all the fall flavors, molasses, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger. Put it in the oven and forget about it. (Don't forget to set the timer, however!)

Sweet Potato Pone

2 cups grated raw sweet potatoes
1 egg beaten
1/2 cup unsulphered molasses
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons melted butter
grated rind of one orange
2 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon grated fresh or ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
heavy cream or ice cream

1. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.
2. Combine all the ingredients and pour into a one and one half quart baking dish. Bake three hours. Serve warm with heavy cream or ice cream. Makes six servings.

Cheese Grits Casserole

On Sunday, the YMs, our friend Tim, Bob's old colleague and friend Kathleen  and my brother George came to dinner. I decided to have Southern dinner, especially because the New England choices are kind of thin. Tim, who comes from Alabama, was especially pleased.
"I like to know what I'm eating," he said. Apparently, he doesn't always know what he's eating when he comes to our house.
Since the beans had to cook or set for hours, I started them around 2:00. About 5:00, it was time for the grits. I had had my eye on this recipe for several weeks, since I bought the grits for something else. I bought several iterations of sharp cheddar cheese that got eaten or made into some other dish. However, when I opened the cookbook, I couldn't find it. My eyes fell instead on a recipe for grits souffle. I started the grits with the intention of making the souffle. Immediately, I sensed a problem. The directions on the grits box tell you how to make various numbers of servings, not, how many cups of uncooked grits one needs to produce a certain number of cups of cooked grits.
Since time was passing, I winged it. I figured that if one cup of uncooked rice and two cups of water produce two cups of cooked rice, something like that would work for grits. It did. I put two cups of grits and four cups of water in the saucepan. Then I came to my senses . This dish had cheese in it, I said to myself.   I  looked in the index. I hadn't been able to find Cheese Grits Casserole because it was under main dishes at the end, with cheese concoctions.
I scraped the large amount of grits out of the sauce pan into a greased baking dish, mixed in everything but the beaten egg white and set it off to the side while I went to work on the fried chicken. I am not giving you the recipe because I made it once before, sometime in the 1980s. When the chicken was soaking in the milk, I went back to the grits. My husband Bob beat the egg white with a whisk. For some reason I had reached the state of malaise, or fatigue that made taking out the hand beater too much effort.  The whole thing went into the oven and came out onto the plates of the delighted diners.
My son pronounced grits much better as a side dish than as a breakfast food. I have to say I agree. The first time I encountered them was on a ski trip for teenagers in Vermont. I thought it was cream of wheat and put milk and sugar on them. Cheese and butter makes virtually anything downright tasty.

Cheese Grits Casserole

5 cups water
1 cup hominy grits (I used regular grits. I prefer not to use quick cooking anything.)
1/2 pound sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1/2 cup butter
1 egg separated
1 teaspoon salt

1. Bring the water to a boil and gradually stir in the grits. Simmer, covered, twenty five to thirty minutes, stirring often.
2. Stir in the cheese and butter until melted. Spoon a little of the hot mixture not the egg yolk, return to the bulk of the mixture, add the salt and mix. Cool to room temperature.
3 Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
4. Beat the egg white until stiff but not dry and fold into the cooled mixture. Spoon mixture into a greased baking dish and bake, covered, forty minutes. Remove cover, turn oven heat to 375 degrees and bake until top of casserole is slightly browned.
Makes six 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.