Are you hungry? You need a sandwich. Let me make you a sandwich.

I made cookies.

Take two, they're small.

I just made some bread, you want a sandwich?

Dinner's ready.

I'm just making some meatballs for the church bake and pasta sale. How many? Well, I put six in a tray, and I have 100 trays. And then I made some extra in case you want to take some home with you.

Do you want a sandwich? I made cookies.

There's coffee, let me get out the cookies.

These are all truly things my grandmother used to say. (That, and "close the light" which I have always loved hearing!)

She was very methodical, and the meatball thing always blew my mind. All year long, she'd keep those styrofoam trays you get when you buy meat, clean them and stack them up. Then when she did something like donate meatballs for the church sale, she used those trays and knew how many meatballs per tray etc...

She did that with pretty much any container that came into her house. It would get cleaned and stored and eventually repurposed to give someone else food they could take home with them.

The other thing she did was, she would bake bread, and shape the loaves or sometimes braid them. She would take the dough that was left after making the shapes and put it in little blobs maybe the size of a smallish apple. Sometimes she'd put pepperoni or anchovies inside the dough, other times nothing. And then she would take that dough and fry it in a big vat of oil. The ones without anything on the inside would sometimes get rolled in powdered sugar afterwards to be eaten as dessert, the ones with stuff on the inside would be eaten as is, to be eaten with lunch.

We called it fried dough (natch) and it was the best thing in the world.

Grandmothers are wonderful that way. Mine used to make potato knishes and chicken liver knishes from scratch. No recipe. Susan's old world Austrian grandmother would spend a day rolling dough on a table-sized cloth (home made phyllo) and then produce various strudels (apple, vegetables etc.) But these traditions didn't get passed down to the next generation, and then to us. Seems that all too many of the "greatest generation" came to rely on processed foods. I have had to relearn cooking on my own.

All good things come from dough....

My aunt made a cookbook of my grandmother's recipes -- she gathered together hand-written recipes, photos, etc. and had 100s made, it's a special gift.

I'll have to look and see if fried dough is in there.

As for passing down... I hardly cook at all, so that's all on me. I do have her sauce recipe and have made that a few times over the years.

My maternal grandmother was also quite the cook. Both of my grandmothers taught my mother their tricks, so my mother is an amazing cook as well.

I, on the other hand, am useless and would starve to death if Mr. SK didn't feed me regularly.

P*D -

https://www.amazon.com/Feed-Me...mother/dp/0762441887

Ask me to make something Indian, or French-inspired, or Italian ... I can do that. My experience with Yiddish is pretty weak. Go figure. I never tried to recreate her cooking, probably because I knew just how labor-intensive it was.

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:
P*D -

https://www.amazon.com/Feed-Me...mother/dp/0762441887

Did you catch the price? New and used from $30?

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:
P*D -

https://www.amazon.com/Feed-Me...mother/dp/0762441887

Did you catch the price? New and used from $30?

Yea, I saw that. Bubbe must have a following.