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.

4th of July birthday

My Mom stopped by and while swinging away on the porch, she's been known to tell her wonderful stories about her family and sometimes just little bits that make me wonder why I don't listen better...

Her mom's birthday was the 4th of July, I'm sure I heard that before but it didn't sink in. You'd think I could remember it on that day but no. My grandmother's name was Johanna Ehlinger and I think she had a tough childhood. She contracted rheumatic fever so severly that she was in bed for over a year and it damaged her heart. It appears her father was a pretty rigid character and her sisters became nuns, all three of them and her brother became a priest, mostly to start a new life I think. My grandma toughed it out at home and got married at the age of 32. She was not ever supposed to have children because of her bad heart but she had nine.

Most of the houses they lived in had no lights so they had lanterns, my grandma raised a huge garden and canned enough food on a wood stove so she could feed eleven people. Her mother in law moved in at some point and she didn't care for my grandma so that must have been nice, my grandma was a Catholic and great granny was a Methodist, crumps sake, thats a good reason to hold a grudge hey...in all that she had time to cook meals from practically nothing. Everyone said she could take a little bit of nothing and come up with a great meal, thats a skill thats gone now. My grandma appeared to be a great friend to all, she could do sign language and anyone who was deaf and desperate for a conversation would come visit her. She was also ambidextrous.

My grandma Johanna also known as Jenny, died in her mid-fifties from the bad heart that plagued her most of her life. She died about a year before I was born so I only get to hear about her. She did take care of her mother-in-law to the end of her life and before my great grandma died she asked my grandma Jenny why she took such good care of her when she had treated my grandma so badly. I think that speaks volumes of her and the way she lived each day. Both of my grandmothers died early in my life but the tales and stories about them are inspiring and make me realize how small some of my problems are in comparison. Perhaps thats a good reason to sit on a porch and tell stories about our grandmas and grandpas and parents and make sure our children hear them as they will have their own tough times and need their own inspirations.

Minnesota Quilt Show and the 4th of July

About a week ago, I found out that I had received the Best of Show ribbon in the large category at the Minnesota Quilters Inc. show in St. Cloud. Knock me over with a feather, thats all I can say. The quilt is my Sweet Candy Dots that I entered into Paducah. Right now its the only show worthy quilt I've made for a while so thats all I can enter but I am so proud of it!
The Minnesota quilters show has been a favorite of mine for a long time. A small group of ladies and I would get together and eventually we became a dozen, we called ourself the Dirty Dozen. Almost every year we would rob from our grocery money, pack up two cars or SUVs or whatever we could squeeze in and head for the city of the moment for the Minnesota show. They have a revolving show in Duluth (which is my personal favorite as its not real far from us and quite lovely on Lake Superior), Rochester, St. Cloud and St. Paul. We cram ourselves into two or three rooms but that was after our 15 hour road trip to get to the show since we had to stop at every quilt show along the way, no matter how far out of the way it was. We're talking Amish on dirt road out of the way but they did have good prices on fabric!
The show is huge, and its fun and the people are nice and the food is good. We had an entire turkey dinner with all the fixings in Rochester for crumps sake...served at the show. Nice. Anyway, I did entered into one of their challenges one year and did get an Honorable Mention. I was so thrilled and I always wanted to enter that show with a "real" quilt and this year I did. Unfortunately, our Dirty Dozen has dwindled due to health and death. That kinda knocked the wind out of our travelling sails but I've heard rumors of rekindled interest in a road trip. I think the Moonlight Quilters will be making another run...