Apple Kuchen and Stuff

I'd love to have a lot of things to show on my blog but I don't. I'm trying to change it but I can't yet. My machine hums all day long but its my customer quilts and when I look at my stuff, its exhausting but I know I'll have new things sometime.
In the meantime, I do know a lot of "stuff" and stories. I had fun with my grandma's story the other day, so I thought I'd share more. My grandma Jenny raised nine kids during the Depression and in Northern Wisconsin. Most of the time its still a Depression up here so I shudder to think of what it was like back then. They had a house on a hill off of a "back street". When I was young, I was pretty sure every street in our town was a "back street". You'd go down the hill, cross the back street, cross the state highway and there was a railroad track. We lived in a logging town so that train was busy pulling carload after carload of logs to make pulp for the mills in Green Bay or the Valley. But that was when I was a kid and I have no idea if there was a lot of that happening during the Depression. I do know they had passenger cars then because my Ma said they'd ride it to go visit family.

I've stated before that my Grandma could make something out of nothing. We still do some of her recipes but of course she didn't write anything down. Our favorite recipe I've learned from my Ma as I watched her hundeds of times cutting up apples, making the dough and it was the treat of the whole day just as it probably was for my grandma's family. Its a German recipe called Apple Kuchen and I've seen variations of that recipe in cookbooks but they look pretty fancy to me. Our family version is just like a biscuit dough pushed into the bottom and sides of a pan, my Mom uses her mom's pan, and I couldn't make a good kuchen until I found the proper weight pan, its critical for kuchen. Then you have to find the right apple tree. This is also hugely important, they can't be grainy apples or too sour or too sweet and you want them juicy. Do you realize that many apple trees grown along train tracks? Thats where we'd find some good apples too. Slice the apples on the dough in the just right pan and then sprinkle on sugar. Of course how much sugar you use depends on the sweetness of the apples but this is no place to be too stingy either. A critical German seasoning is cinnamon and add just enough of this to the top along with a stick of butter or margarine or oleo as we used to call it here in Wisconsin. Some of my old recipes still say oleo and I kinda like it so I might use it again, oleo. Bake until it bubbles over in your oven, its not good until it sets off the smoke alarm or drives everyone out of the kitchen. My grandkids have not witnessed anything quite like this technique before but they are getting used to it now and don't run too far for fear of missing kuchen.

Just like my grandma and my ma, I've used kuchen to pretend that we had a really, really good meal. It doesn't matter that you served potato soup again or a fried egg again, you ended that meal with apple kuchen and thats all that matters now.

Another dish that my Ma talks about with her brother Frankie and some of her sisters is Doughed Potatoes. Now I've never seen this recipe anywhere though I'm sure it must be. My Uncle Frank was being sassy and put the recipe down like this: Make pastry dough. Put a squirrel on the dough. Make sure the squirrel is dead. Add chopped carrots, onion and celery and bake. If you can't get a squirrel, use a chicken. Now I think that version is just wrong. My Ma describes her ma's like this. You do make pastry dough. Then you peel a lot of potatoes and onions and layer them all in a huge pot, layers of potatoes and onion, then add some dough, more layers of potatoes, etc. I think you add salt and pepper and maybe oleo or bacon grease to this because without that squirrel there is no fat. Now my mom did not make this for us but it is legend. It's really high carb isn't it. But people really didn't sit around back in the day and the kids all played hard and had jobs too or the families didn't make it.

Another thing we had sometimes when I was a kid was something my Ma called Minute Pudding. We knew that it was tough in the kitchen when minute pudding came out. You take a pot of salted water and whisk in flour and cook it until it makes a pudding, this is served for breakfast along with sugar and cinnamon on top and with milk over it all. Now it really wasn't bad because we had fresh milk from our milk cow and about 1/3 of that gallon of milk would be cream. It's an unforgettable sight to see that much cream on milk. Sometimes in the late fall and on certain mornings, I get a craving for minute pudding but I'm not seven years old anymore and my brothers and sisters aren't sitting around the table with me and my Mom's not in the kitchen of that old house.