TRIFLES FROM TINY TOTS

12 June 2020

It's my night to cook.  Ned brought in a pound of hamburger from the freezer and I was trying to think of something "different" with hamburger that I haven't cooked a hundred times before.

I checked out "Trifles from Tiny Tots" and found Walt's mother's recipe for 7 layer casserole, which I always liked, and had forgotten about.  That is our dinner tonight.

Put each of these ingredients in a casserole in the order listed:

1 cup rice
1 can corn (undrained)
salt, pepper, 1 8 oz can tomato sauce and 1/2 can water
1/2 cup onion
3/4 lb hamburger
1 8 oz can tomato sauce and 1/4 can water

put 4 strips of bacon on the top.  Bake at 350, covered, for an hour.  Uncover and bake another 30 minutes.

When our kids went to Tiny Tots nursery school, we decided to put out a cookbook for a fund raiser.  Char and I were thrilled about the idea because it was a place where we could put all of our favorite recipes and have them all together.  It's a great collection of recipes.  Everyone gave us their best and we got our favorite recipes from our relatives too.

Char's Velvet Hammer is a great punch.  1 bottle champagne, 1 bottle soda, 1 bottle white wine, 1/2 pint of vodka and 1 oz orange curacao.  It tastes lovely and you don't realize how strong it is until you are very drunk.

My father's "Banshee" (creme de banana, white creme de cacao, and half and half, run through a blender with shaved ice) is the reason why Tom exists.

My grandmother's Mayonnaise-cheese appetizers (1 cup mayonnaise, 1 cup Parmesan cheese, 1 bunch scallions, spread on slices French Bread rounds and broiled) were the hors d'oeuvre that we had at every family gathering.

Char also put in her "stuffing bread" (recipe too long to post) that she made up to use for turkey stuffing.  It has also the right spices and everything you need which, when cooked just needs to be sliced, moistened with water or broth, and stuffed in the turkey.

Our friend Michele had the best mushroom recipe:

1 lb fresh mushrooms
1/2-1 cup white wine
1/2 cube butter
3 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
3 Tbsp soy sauce

Wash mushrooms and dry with paper towels.  Sauté 3 minutes in melted butter.  Add wine, Worcestershire and soy sauce.  Salt and pepper lightly.  If desired add 2 Tbsp minced onion flakes, 1/4 tsp oregano, and a few sprinkles of garlic salt, rosemary and parsley.  Simmer gently until tender, about 1/2 hour. 

The main reason we wanted to do this book was so that everyone would have our recipe for Mexican Won Ton, which we got from Sunset Magazine (again, too long to print here), which was everyone's favorite hors d'oeuvre.  With the recipe in the book, we'd never lose it again (which is great because I checked Google for a recipe and none of their "Mexican won ton" recipes are the ones we used.

The one thing this book tells me, as I look through all these recipes, is how much more we all cooked than we do now.  Everything just looks like the sort of things that are more complicated than we'd make now -- or that I would make now.

We decided to let the kids submit recipes too (remember, these are preschoolers).  Ned's recipe for orange juice is "you pour it in and then you put water in and then you put the top on and then you shake it up and then you drink it."

Paul gave instructions for sugar cookies:  "take some flour and some sugar and some dough and some more flour and some more sugar and mix it all together and put it in the oven.

Eric Havel submitted several recipes, one of which was for pumpkin pie ("make curst and put pumpkin in it.  I don't know what else") and another was for pizza ("make pizza, put some chicken on it, and then fry it.")

Fun thumbing through this cookbook today.  It brought back all sorts of memories, especially the fun of writing and putting it together.