Eggs, Food, Pia, scratch cooking, Uncategorized

My Mom’s Potato Salad

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When my mom was a young mother in the 50’s, she spent a lot of time cooking and making up recipes. One of her meals was a potato salad that was a little different from the common one of the time, and a steak marinade.

The potato salad? At a grill out, I made a huge batch of it. One of the guests who tried it then brought *every new guest* over to it telling them to eat it, because it was so good.

I don’t think it’s *that* good, but it is extremely tasty. It’s a kind of bland plain 50’s potato salad (no pickles, no celery, no mustard, yes eggs) with Bacon added.

Y’see, my mom had married a kid of German descent, and her Mother in Law made the traditional hot potato salad that has bacon in it.  My mom looked at it and said ‘that would be good in plain potato salad’. And it is. I mean, how could it not be? So, it’s a plain, fatty potato salad with bacon. And eggs. Yeah. You eat it because it’s fatty. Mmmmmmm, fat….

All summer long, she’d make her steak and this potato salad, and even though she died a few years ago, I get to feel like we are home again when I make them.


I recently was asked if I’d be willing to share my mom’s steak marinade, and since I was making it for today anyway, I figured why not. And then I can’t picture the steak without this salad, so you have both! And like that woman who had her fudge recipe on her tombstone for all to enjoy, I know my mom would love to live on in other people’s cooking. Even if they change it to fit their tastes, like she changed recipes to fit her. So go ahead, add the pickle and celery and whatever else you think would work. I have actually in the past *drained the bacon grease* into the salad as well.

You did good, mom. <3 you and miss you.

Go here for Pia’s Steak.

For this you need

I use my Instant Pot and do my potatoes and eggs at the same time. Makes it harder to get salt in the potatoes, but harder to mess up.

4 cups of potatoes- salted, boiled, cooled, diced

2 hard boiled eggs- boiled, peeled, and diced (I do both of these in the instant pot. These were small so they got 7 minutes. I then peeled then, diced them and salted them.

1 finely chopped onion (about 1 cup of onion.)

1 tsp salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

5 sliced cooked diced bacon (I used three extra thick slices and drained them this time)

~1 cup mayo (add more if you like it gooey. I do.)

And the proof this dates to the 1950’s, after all the above is mixed well, paprika! It’s not just to decorate it. A nice hot paprika adds nice flavor to it.

And there you have it.

Pia’s steak, her potato salad and sauteed spinach. Dinner was silent because no one wanted to stop eating…
drinks, Food, Uncategorized

mulled white wine for February

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There is mulled cider and mulled red wine. You may have even mulled white wine. But for the heart of Winter that is February, we like to make a batch of this Carpathian warm white wine, that isn’t as heavy as mulled.

The syrup doesn’t take long to make and will store in the fridge for a while, so you can have it a glass at a time if you’d like. There is no long cooking of the wine (just heat to warm, 120 degrees ish) so it’s still full of alcohol and crispness. And we take a batch camping, because warm, creamy wine by an outdoor fire is perfect…

This is one of my favorite drinks. I hope you enjoy it as well.

White Wine spice:

First you make a simple syrup. This is a basic technique fro many bar drinks, and it isn’t called simple because of how easy it is to make, but it could be. (don’t have the whole spices? Use what you do have)

In a 1 quart pot (about)

1 cup of water

½ cup white sugar

Boil for 7 minutes.

boiling sugar water.


Add

¼ of a cinnamon stick (about)

3 cloves

Small slice of peeled ginger root (about 2x the width of a quarter)

3 allspice berries

Peel from ½ a lemon AND ½ an orange

ingredients

Heat gently (no boil) for 5 minutes.

after 5 minutes simmering

Strain out the solids.

Add

1 tsp of vanilla

Strained, and vanilla.

That is literally all. Store it covered in the fridge for a few weeks To use, one full batch will do a 950 ml bottle of white wine. Just warm the wine with the syrup until it’s a drinkable temperature (do not boil or cook for ages) and serve. 160 ML (about 2/3 a cup) of the syrup will flavor a 750 ml bottle of wine. And about ½ a tsp will do a single glass of wine, but feel free to change that to taste.

In classic storage in the fridge, waiting wine
desserts, Uncategorized

Granita- Italian Ices

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The other day I was talking with a friend and she mentioned needing a machine to make Italian Ice (Granita).
You don’t.

You need nothing special to make a good, old fashioned Granita (which sounds so fancy and Sicilian). They were made by resourceful people with little work with. You can do it in your kitchen.

It’s hot here, and we’re still in quarantine, so I threw together a peach granita last night. I started it about 2:30, and it was ready by 7. You need a metal pan, and a fork.

I will walk you through the way I made this one, which is the way I make watermelon and kiwi granitas as well. I will also give recipes for lemon and coffee granitas, because who doesn’t want one of those? And a pro tip that will make them ‘better’.

So, I used an old metal loaf pan. A different sized pan would have different freezing times, otherwise, whatever you have works. And a metal fork.

For this one, I made peach. I drained a jar of home canned peaches and tossed them in the food processor. I was tempted to add some mint, but decided to skip it this time. I added some lemon juice, because it was a bit sweet to me. For this, I added no sugar, because they had been canned in syrup. I put it in the pan and put it in the freezer.

Pre freezing

Every 20 -30 minutes, take the fork and scrape around the edges, where ice is forming. You can see it on the sides here, at the ~40 minute mark.

Over the next few hours, I tried to scrape it down at least 2 times. if you forget and it turns solid, it’s completely salvageable- just re melt it.
The next few pictures show the progression from liquid, to slush to ice.

And that is literally it. Keep breaking it up so large ice crystals don’t form. Use any fruit you want for this. Taste it to make sure it’s what you want form the finished product, and cool off. 🙂
Note Bene: there are NO stabilizers in this. It will melt FAST.

Now, coffee (my mom’s favorite) and lemon (my favorite) are a little different, but no harder. Same technique, but with an actual ‘recipie’.

For coffee, take 2 cups of leftover coffee. (If it’s not strong, use 3 😉 ). Mix with 2 cups of water (or 1, depending on the coffee), and 3/4 cups of sugar. When the sugar is dissolved, pour it into your pan and stir every 20 minutes.

Lemon is 2 cups water, 1/2 cup lemon juice, 3/4 cups sugar. Exactly the same for the rest of it.

Making it ‘fancy’ (which will also reduce the speed it melts at) is simple. Whip 1 egg white (I use pasteurized dry egg whites, because I am paranoid. if you aren’t, you do you. ) with 3T sugar until stiff, and add it into the base when the base is almost but not quite frozen. That’s ‘Roman style’, and gets you the creamy, professional bakery-style I grew up with.

That’s it. It’s that simple. A few ingredients, a pan, a fork. And you can have authentic ices of any flavor you want all summer. I know I will.
There are a collection of Italian frozen desserts that don’t need special equipment. If you want more of them, just let me know. I doubt my family will mind testing them. 🙂

Surviving independently in a city.