Cheese & Pineapple Spears

What do sweet pickles, pineapple, maraschino cherries, and walnuts have in common?

If you answered, "They pair well with cheese!" then you'd be right in a 1940s kind of way! About a week and a half ago, I was invited to a little Christmas gathering among friends. I knew I wanted to add a little vintage flair to our holiday gathering, but I wasn't sure what to make. I flipped through this 1949 cookbook in search of some ideas for entertaining:

What I found was definitely...entertaining. Check out this cheese-based recipe:

Cheese Spears
8 (3/4 inch) cubes of American cheese
8 walnut halves
8 tiny sweet pickles 

Spear a cheese cube, a walnut half, then a sweet pickle on an hors d'oeuvre pick. Serve on an hors d'oeuvres holder. Makes 8.

The photo says it all. I speared the cheese, carefully slid the walnut half on the pick, then topped it all off with a sweet pickle. Voila! Honestly, the hardest part of this whole process was keeping the walnut from crumbling apart on the spear.

The snack book listed a variation on this recipe that looked just as easy, so I gave it a shot, too.

Pineapple Spears
Spear a cube of fresh pineapple, then a cube of sharp Cheddar cheese, and top with a cherry.

So easy! And look how festive they are when put all together on the same plate:

They look pretty enough, but you may be wondering how they actually taste. It depends on how you eat them. If you deconstruct the spear, as some of my friends did, then it's just going to taste like each individual ingredient on a stick. Like a '40s shish kabob. But if you eat it all in one bite, that's when things get interesting. Overall, the flavor combo isn't bad. Both have that sweet/savory/tangy medley going on. The strangest thing, though, is the variety of textures. Crunchy, crumbly, juicy, soft--do all of those belong in one bite? I'm not sure.

What I love most about this recipe is that the pineapple and sweet pickles were a surprising nod to Christmases past with my grandmothers. Each year, my Grandma Linda makes the tastiest holiday dishes, but my favorite thing she brings is a big bowl of freshly cut pineapple. It's a sweet and juicy treat reserved for holidays and special occasions. My cousins and I can usually be found hovering near the snack table throughout the day, sneaking pieces of pineapple directly from the bowl. Grandma, if you're reading this, I'm counting on having pineapple again this year at Christmas, hint, hint! I promise not to ruin it by adding cheese and cherries.

For Christmas at my Grandma Pat's house, I could count on finding a triple-decker serving bowl filled, without fail, with potato chips from the local deli, onion dip, and sweet pickles. Who knows what else was served at those holiday dinners--I loaded up on the pickles. It's been 13 Christmases since we lost her to cancer, and the holiday season just isn't the same without her. But having this weird little cheese spear oddly reminded me of her. It's funny how these old recipes can transport us to another time and place, eh?

Merry Christmas and pass the cheese spears!

Pot Roast of Beef

A few weeks ago, Taylor and I were passing through Urbana, and we were "strongly encouraged" to take some beef from the freezer. Again. Unlike last time, though, we took full advantage of this offer and packed about 5 different cuts of meat into our cooler. Hey, I've got bellies to fill and blog posts to write! Free food for the win!

Once home, I flipped through some cookbooks to see what I could make with this bounty of beef. My Family Fare: Food Management and Recipes cookbook had several promising candidates.

Printed by the Kroger Company in 1950, this is one of the more "normal" cookbooks in my collection. It isn't based around a particular food or brand, it gives practical food handling tips, and it has a good variety of recipes, like this simple recipe for "pot roast of beef." Having never made pot roast before (I know, I know, I'm a pitiful adult), I thought I'd give it a try.

Pot Roast of Beef

1) Select 4 to 5 pounds of beef--chuck, rump, or round.

You know, I don't care how many times I've cooked with meat, I'm still grossed out by the juices in the package. I know it's not blood--it's myoglobin and water--but still. Yuck.

2) Rub the meat with salt, pepper, and flour, and brown on all sides in a little hot fat in a deep heavy pan with a cover.

With no instructions for how much salt, pepper, and flour to use, this is the part of the story where I threw caution (and flour, apparently) to the wind. Normally, I'm conservative in my mess-making, and at the very least, try to clean up as I go along. This time I let the flour fly. And I didn't clean it up for at least 20 minutes. Live dangerously, that's what I never say!

3) Slip a low rack under meat to keep it from sticking to pan. Add one-half cup of water; cover pan closely.

I didn't have a rack, but I fully believed I could keep the meat from burning by sheer will power. And water.

4) Cook slowly over low heat until done--about 3 hours. Add more water as needed.

While the roast cooked, I chopped some potatoes, onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes so that I'd be ready for the next step.

Here I'd like to add my apologies for the quality of the photos from here on out. When I started the roast, it was daytime and I had good light for photos. And like an hour later it was dark because it's winter now and everything is sad and hopeless starting at 5:30 PM. So, yeah, we're going to have some weird shadows and glare from the flash, okay? Somebody pass the Zoloft.

5) During the last half hour, cook vegetables with meat--quartered potatoes, onions, and whole carrots. 

Finally my roast was complete, and I was ready to cut the meat and serve with the roasted vegetables.

 

I'm not a meat connoisseur by any means, but my dinner guests affirmed that the roast was tender, juicy, and well-cooked. We did notice that not all of the vegetables softened quite like we would have liked; there were a few particularly crunchy sweet potato chunks on my plate. I probably should have added more water to fully submerge the vegetables--steam was not enough!--and I think maybe I could have added the vegetables to the pot a little earlier, too.

Otherwise, here it is! A pot roast of beef recipe, still going strong 65 years later. Don't mess with the classics, right?

And before I conclude this post, I just want to draw your attention to this drab photo:

This photo is significant because it is the last one depicting our old kitchen floor in a post. That's right--just a few days later, that old vinyl floor would be replaced by this nice new ceramic one:

From this post forward, those gorgeous gray-brown tiles will serve as the backdrop of the blog. We've still got a few things to finish--like the baseboards, and the backsplash--before we can call this renovation complete, but in the meantime, maybe I'll cook up a post with the before-and-after process. Or maybe I'll cook up some jello. We haven't had any jello recipes yet...