Queezle_Sister's Reviews
8 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 8Sort by: Title 
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Joy of Cooking
By Irma Von Starkloff Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker
MacMillan Publishing Company. - 1975
Baked Ham : page 483
Excellent ham!
I guess ham is easy to cook. This recipe was helped by using a high quality locally produced ham. The recipe calls for a brown sugar-mustard-bread crumb-vinegar sauce. I have limited experience preparing ham, but it sure is easy, and enjoyed by my family.
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Buttermilk Biscuits : page 634
Crisp and flaky, tender and crunchy, these are biscuit heaven.
These are probably the best biscuits that I have ever made. I did make 1 variation with adding 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla. I don't know if this actually changed the biscuits so I think that I might need to make another batch ;) . I also mixed them a little differently, I slowly poured in the liquid and wisked it to mix. I think that helped me get a light fluffy dough.
Key lime marmelade as a topping really added to the lovely flavor. (The delicious jam was complements of Burning_Brother :))
-13 daughter
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Chili Con Carne : page 490
This is a solidly good recipe for a very traditional chili con carne - that is, this is the recipe my husband I were raised on, and possibly you, too. I stuck to the recipe, and the kids just loved it (even though they generally eschew meat). We used the beef, not lamb (an option), omitted the cheese topping, and probably used twice as much wine (Cabernet). This made a large pot, and I'm looking forward to left-overs as one or two easy dinners this week.
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Coleslaw for Barbecue : page 97
This is a pretty basic recipe, but the addition of scallions was a nice change. I adjusted the mayo:vinegar ratio to be heavier vinegar (from 1C:2tsp to 0.5C:2T), and I also added celery seed. We had this with pulled pork, and it was delicious.
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Ham Cakes with Pineapple and Sweet Potato : page 258
A three-part dish, perhaps a bit too sweet, but a classic flavor combination presented in a new way.
OK, this is an old book, so perhaps this is an old way to present this threesome of ham, pineapple, and sweet potato. But I've never made cakes of ham - ham, panko, mustard, and eggs. The recipe says make 6 patties - mine were rather thin. I was pleased that they sauteed up crispy on the outside, tender inside, and they hung together OK! Note that instead of the 5 tablespoons of bacon grease, I sauteed these in about 1 tsp butter.
Pineapple slices are sauteed (I used canned), and sweet potatoes are first boiled till done, then peeled, halved, and caramelized with a bit of brown sugar and ground cloves.
At the end the threesome are stacked, basted with a bit of the pinapple juice, and baked.
A lovely aroma greeted 13 daughter when she returned from the gym, and everyone seemed rather happy to tuck into these yummy stacks.
Although its the most worn of all my cookbooks, I do not tend to turn to joy of cooking. Eat Your Books helped me to find this recipe, and holding this book with stained pages and a broken spine is like finding an old friend.
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Hopping John : page 287
I prepare this dish most new years days, and its always so well received by my kids that it enters rapid rotation for a couple months. We affectionately refer to it as "poor people food" and discuss that even if you are poor, and eat dried beans, they still can taste great.
What I really like about this recipe is that it is simple - black eyed peas, some vegetables, and some meat for flavor (it calls for ham hocks, but can anyone find ham hocks any more? Not here in Utah, so I used bacon).
The smokiness of the bacon/hocks, with the silky texture of the cooked beans, and generous vegetable addition makes for good hearty eating. This year, we accompanied it with pre-cooked short-grain brown rice.
I modified this recipe by adding celery and carrots.
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Hot Fudge Sauce : page 772
This was an OK hot fudge sauce, but nothing too thrilling. Typically I make my kids hot fudge sauce by meling chocolate chips and mixing in some skim milk. This hot fudge sauce differed in that you start with unsweetened chocolate squares, butter, sugar, melted on the double boiler. Addition of boiling water and corn syrup gave a beautiful looking sauce. It thickened nicely when applied to vanilla ice cream. But taste wasn't too exciting. It mostly tasted sweet, and no a strong chocolate flavor (despite lots of chocolate among the ingredients). Perhaps a bit of salt would have improved it.
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Spanish Rice : page 209
This produced a heavily bacon product that was somewhat greasy and tasted unbalanced.
Bacon is cooked, rice is then browned in the bacon greese, and the rice and bacon are cooked in the top of a double boiler with canned tomatoes, paprika, green pepper, and garlic. It is cooked in the top of a double boiler, and takes a fair amount of time.
Perhaps not using the bacon grease, and modifying the amount of canned tomato, would produce a more pleasing final product.
Although the adults in the house didn't care for this, the kids were happy to polish it off.
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