Trail Mix

By SJWNY, a Trail Mix Contributor

Summer is the time for reunions, potlucks, picnics. Every family has particular food favorites, that special dish that has to be on the menu, recipes passed down & passed around. Safe to say we all have one (or two, or three) that qualify.

My maternal Grandmother had a sister, Dora, who was an amazing cook, baker & preserver. She had the “knack.” Her spotless white house in Coopers Plains, New York, always smelled of pickling spice & vinegar from July through September.

My family’s favorite Dora recipe is her Brown Bread. Don’t know when she started making it or where she got the recipe, but safe to say it goes back to World War One-ish. It remains my brother’s favorite & I make it for him as a treat & as a tribute to all those faces, long gone, from reunions past. A taste of this simple bread brings back memories. No one is truly gone if they are remembered.

What foods are special to you? More importantly, who were the loved ones behind these recipes? Share the food, share their stories.

Dora’s Brown Bread

• Mix together in a large bowl:
• 2 cups Graham Flour
• 1 cup unbleached White Flour
• 1/2 cup Granulated Sugar
• 2 teaspoons Baking Soda
• 1/8 teaspoon Salt
• Then add:
• 1/2 cup Molasses (Light or Dark; your choice)
• 2 cups Buttermilk
• 2 Tablespoons Shortening (Cooking Oil works fine too)

Mix until just blended; pour into two greased 8″x 4″ bread pans. Bake at 350F for about 45 minutes or until center tests done. Cool about 10 minutes in the pans & then turn out onto rack to finish cooling. This tastes better if wrapped in foil overnight before serving; keeps several days.

A tasty addition is tossing in a handful of raisins when mixing in the wet ingredients.

More Posts by SJWNY

 

For Amelia

David Bowie’s Space Oddity, performed by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

A newly discovered and blurry photograph (her back to the camera), the possibility of finding her wreckage, and more theories about her Japanese captivity has put the famous woman pilot back in the news. What happened to Amelia Earhart?

Reading by Bill Barker

I always wondered how they filmed that amazing opening sequence of Sound of Music, to this day one of the most dramatic and moving of all time. Julie told the story this week on The Tonight Show:

“We had this monstrous helicopter that had a camera man very bravely strapped to the side where the door would be,” Andrews described to Jimmy Fallon of her scene in the open field. “He had a camera strapped to him, he was strapped into the copter, and he was over like this [shooting downwards]. And it started at one end of the field and I had started at the other and we walked together, and honestly this thing came at me sideways sort of like this giant sort of crab coming at me or a grasshopper or something, and then I’d come into view.”

She explained how sound speakers hidden off camera would blast music so she could lip sync.

When the chopper came around, “the downdraft from the engines just flung me into the grass, and so we did this about six or seven times and I was spitting dirt.”