Two Grandmas ~ one batch of Jam-Jams

We have two kinds of jam-jams in my family. These oatmeal jam-jams were a specialty of my Grandma Jo. The other is a soft brown sugar cookie jam jam. They were the jam jams of my Grandma Irene.

Grandma Jo often put date jam in her jam jams. Grandma Irene usually filled her jam jams with homemade apple jelly. This reflects their two different styles in the kitchen. Grandma Jo liked to make fancy things for which buying dates and making date jam was a perfectly enjoyable step in the process. Grandma Irene had no time for that. She had already put her time into making apple jelly, so that was the perfect filling for her jam jams.
 
Today in our family, my sister Maureen makes the soft cookie jam jams of my Grandma Irene. They are my dad's favourite cookie ~ Irene was his mom ~ and he still gets a tin of these jam jams for his birthday every year.

As for me, I mix the two: I make Grandma Jo's oatmeal jam jams and fill them with my homemade jam or jelly. Cause I loved my grandmas equally!

Oatmeal Jam-Jams
2 cups flour
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup soft butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup sour milk (mix 1 1/2 tsp vinegar with milk to make 1/2 cup, stir, sit 5 min.)

Grandma’s instructions simply say, "Roll these." To elaborate, mix everything together, form into two balls, wrap in plastic and place it in the fridge to chill for 20-30 minutes.

Using a floured counter and a rolling pin, roll each ball of dough to a thickness of 1/8 inch (1/3 cm). Cut out circles with a cookie cutter or a glass. Re-roll and cut more cookies.

Bake on a cookie sheet for 8-9 minutes at 350 degrees. Cookies should just start to brown.

Transfer hot cookies to a rack to cool. Spread a dollop of jam or preserves on one cookie and press another cookie on top. Store in airtight container. These cookies are crisp when they come out of the oven but the filling will soften them up.

Old Timey Gingersnaps

Today I dipped into my own cookbook Out of Old Saskatchewan Kitchens for this old-timey gingerbread cookie recipe so I could make a batch (or two) to take to my sister's place for Christmas. I originally found the recipe in the Maidstone community cookbook Preserving Our Past for the Future. Thank you Maidstone for preserving this

Fill Your Ice Cream Pails with Scuffles

My parents never threw out anything that might be something else. This was never more evident than in the stack of plastic ice cream pails leaning like the Tower of Pisa in a corner of the laundry room. No kidding, it's taller than I am.

Growing up, we ate a lot of ice cream. It was the easiest dessert with the highest approval rating. Now that my parents are no longer cooking for a family, they don't cook much at all. Why bother with all that when you can go straight to dessert, um, ice cream? It's become the food group at the top of the pyramid, the one you eat first. Which adds up to a bottomless pit of ice cream pails.

My fondest use of ice cream pails – once they're free of ice cream – comes at berry picking time, particularly saskatoon berry season in mid-July. With the handle looped into my belt, the plastic pail bobs effortlessly at my side while both hands are free to pick berries at will. This alone is good reason to eat more ice cream.

Just this past summer, while helping my parents clean out their big chest freezer, I discovered four ice cream pails full of frozen saskatoons. I also discovered three ice cream pails full of ice cream. When I grew up and got a house of my own, I equipped myself with a small stack of ice cream pails from my parents' stash. Their uses were endless.

I kept the cleaning supplies in an ice cream pail. I bought bulk lentils and stored them in an ice cream pail. I used them in the garden (picking weeds, picking peas, picking potato bugs) and for washing the inside of my car. The compost bucket was an ice cream pail under the sink.

I checked with my friends, who added a few more uses to that list: fermenting pickles, gathering eggs, stashing toys, trick-or-treating for Halloween candy, pre-mixing a batch of six-week muffins, making vodka slush and collecting small engine parts and other odds and ends you "might need someday."

My friend Carol keeps modelling clay in an ice cream pail and, on occasion, uses the lid as a paint palette. Speaking of lids, how often have you entered a content by writing your name on a piece of paper and dropping it through a slot in the lid of an ice cream pail?

This time of year, I imagine moms and grandmas across the prairies are filling a fair number of ice cream pails with seasonal goodies and staching them in the freezer ready for company and family holidays. This might be the most anticipated reuse of the plastic ice cream pail since berry-picking season.

No doubt, your family has a story like this one from Richard, who discovered his mom's secret stash of cookies in the freezer: "I would eat them and as Christmas approached, I'd tell my brothers about the ice cream pails. Of course, when my mom asked where the cookies had all gone, I'd have to tell her I'd seen my brothers rooting in the freezer."

However, others such as my friend Jen observe that plastic ice cream pails are not what they used to be: "If I can have a Grandpa Simpson moment, they're just not made like they used to be. We used them to collect eggs and carry water, but they're clearly making them flimsier and flimsier to make them cheaper. I wouldn't trust a modern day ice cream pail with 30 eggs!"

No, but I would still trust them with cookies like this one, which freezes very well. But no guarantees they won't mysteriously disappear.

Scuffles
2 1/4 tsp yeast (1 packet)
1/4 cup warm water
3 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
1 cup soft butter
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs, beaten
Sugar and cinnamon for rolling

Dissolve yeast in warm water. In a bowl, stir together flour, salt and sugar. Work in butter with your fingers.

Combine milk, eggs and yeast. Add to flour, mixing well. Turn onto a floured surface and knead briefly until smooth. The dough will be sticky. Wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Divide dough into six balls, working with one ball at a time. Sprinkle sugar and cinnamon generously on the countertop, place a piece of dough on top and roll to a circle 1/8 inch thick.

Cut the circle into 16 wedges, like pieces of a pie. Roll up each wedge from the wide end to the pointy end.

Place 1 inch apart on lightly-greased baking sheet, fashion into a crescent and bake at 350F for 15-20 minutes. FREEZE!!

(This article first appeared in Grainews.)

Zucchini Please Cookies Please

For the first time in 20 years I did not have a garden this summer. And so, for the first time in 20 years, I found myself begging for zucchini. Thanks goodness for friends and facebook! This is my favourite zucchini cookie, made all the more loveable sweetened with honey instead of sugar.

The recipe is from the cookbook Zucchini: You Can Never Have Enough by John Butler. If the zucchini is young and fresh, I leave the skin on for a nice green or yellow fleck in the cookies. However, if the skin is thick I recommend peeling the zucchini first.

Zucchini Cookie
1/2 cup soft butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
pinch baking soda
1/3 cup honey
1/2 cup white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup grated zucchini
1 cup raisins
1 cup rolled oats

Cream together the butter, egg and vanilla. Mix the baking soda into the honey and blend into the creamed butter. Sift the flours, baking powder and salt over the creamed mixture and mix well. Stir in the zucchini, raisins and oats. Drop by spoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350F for 10-13 minutes.

Ancient legacy of the lentil - Lentil Cookies

There’s an old adage in Greece about not adding “myrrh to the lentil soup” because myrrh is too fancy for a humble bowl of lentils. A culinary overkill. Ancient Greeks preferred more simple flavourings such as vinegar and sumac (which grew wild) or olive oil and salt.

They boiled the lentils until they were soft and thick for a soup called phakes (or fakes), a dish the Romans called puls, from which we get the botanical word pulse to describe legumes such as lentils, chickpeas and peas.

The Romans believed lentils were restorative and good for your health. Their famous physician, Hippocrates, prescribed a lentil diet as a tonic for liver fatigue and, amazingly, modern science has backed this up.

The oldest archaeological evidence of lentils for dinner was found on the coast of Greece at a place known as the Franchthi Cave, circa 13,000 years ago.

These were wild lentils. The cave was home to a group of hunter-gatherers but over time they moved out of the cave into a small village by the Mediterranean Sea and took up farming.

By 6500 BC they were growing wheat, barley and lentils – the same domesticated grains that have been farmed in the Middle East for 10,000 years.

Eventually, due to global warming, the sea level rose until it covered their village and fields, which were discovered by archaeologists exploring the cave in the 1960s.

It is interesting to note that with the spread of farming westward from the Middle East, those three grains – wheat, barley and lentils – spread together. Though lentils were late coming to Western Canada (more than a century after wheat and barley) it is barely a breath in terms of historic time.

What was once the breadbasket of the world is now the lentil basket of the world. No nation produces more lentils, of more varieties, than Canada.

However, as Canadian lentil production was rising, Greek farmers were growing fewer lentils, preferring instead to plant crops that qualify for agricultural subsidies from the European Union (which, apparently, lentils do not). According to an online source, farmers in Greece grew 12,700 tonnes of lentils in 1961 and just 2,000 tonnes in 2011. Now they buy lentils from us.

For all I know, I was eating Canadian lentils just the other day when I ordered a bowl of lentil soup in a restaurant in Athens. It was rich and fragrant, seasoned with tomato, carrots and parsley. Simple and delicious, the perfect restorative after a long day of travel and airport food. As much a part of Greek history as the Acropolis.

Despite its ancient pedigree, new varieties of lentils are still being developed. The small black lentil is a Canadian invention, according to Bert Vandenberg, a plant scientist at the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. He says it was bred at the research farm at Indian Head, Sask.

Some enterprising chefs noted that it resembled the black caviar of the Beluga sturgeon and, voila, black Beluga lentils began appearing on trendy menus.

While I’m a big fan of old-fashioned lentil soup, I also like a new food trend. This cookie recipe fits that bill – a delicious new way to enjoy the ancient legacy of the lentil.

Chocolate Lentil Cookies

Small black or brown lentils look deceptively like chocolate chips in these delicious cookies.

1/2 cup soft butter

1 cup sugar
1 cup cooked small black or brown lentils
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp milk
1 cup flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup quick oats

Cream the butter, sugar and lentils. Some of the lentils will puree and some will remain whole. Mix in the egg, vanilla and milk. 

Sift the flour, cocoa powder and baking soda, adding to the batter with the oats until well blended. 

Drop by the spoonful onto cookie sheets. Bake at 350F for about 15 min. Allow cookies to cool slightly then remove to a cooling rack. Makes about 30 cookies. 
 

(This article first appeared in Grainews.)