Filed under: Recipe Box | Tags: chocolate marshmallow squares, comfort food
chocolate marshmallow squares recipe, 1980s
Months – possibly years – before my mother passed away, I had hounded her for my grandmother’s chocolate marshmallow squares recipe. More brownie than cookie, but definitely not either, chocolate marshmallow squares are studded with walnuts, drifts of marshmallow and glazed with even more chocolate. I can barely contain myself reading my mother’s recipe, thinking of eating those little squares after all this time.
It’s been so long since I’ve eaten one that I thought I had imagined them. Google searches proved fruitless – no recipe I read came close to this morsel of goodness. But this past weekend while organizing more of my mother’s papers, I found it – on a yellow scrap of notebook paper, letters fading – the recipe. I remembered the phone calls where she promised to get me the recipe, but she’d have to find it first; the afternoons I visited and found her digging through those same scraps of ephemera: it’s gotta be somewhere around here.
It had been there all those years among the other recipes written on envelopes, the backs of greeting cards, on even tinier scraps of paper. I am half-tempted to cook a chicken recipe she recorded, not knowing what I will be eating since there is no title to guide my palate – a surprise dinner from my mother, who liked the comforts of cooking more than cooking the dish itself, much like my relationship with food. But this Sunday, you’ll find me in the kitchen, melting butter with chocolate and sneaking maraschino cherries for a taste of a childhood memory.
Chocolate Marshmallow Squares
For Squares:
1/3 cup butter
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 1/2 cup mini marshmallows
Maraschino cherries (optional)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a saucepan, melt butter with chocolate chips over low heat, stirring occasionally. Blend in sugar, salt, vanilla and eggs till a batter forms. Stir in flour and walnuts. Spread in greased 8 x 8 inch square pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes.
While the squares are baking, make the glaze:
Melt 1/2 cup chocolate chips and 3 tablespoons of milk in small saucepan. Add 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar and 1 tablespoon butter. Mix well.
Once the chocolate marshmallow squares finish baking, sprinkle immediately with the mini marshmallows and drizzle glaze. If you want to make it fancy, add a maraschino cherry to each cut square.
Filed under: Recipe Box | Tags: braised lamb shoulder, comfort foods, lawrenceville, polenta, vintage kitchens
The last week of April was pretty grueling.
cook's library
I had a splitting migraine for three days, received some disappointing news at work, then stewed about that for two more days until Friday, when Jeff and I found ourselves being chased home by a road-raging lunatic in a truck.
My comfort during times like these: dreaming up menus, with a bowl of buttered egg noodles at hand. But we were out of egg noodles. Thursday found us eating mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner and Friday, a pouch of Knorr chicken noodles (which are pretty awful. Sometimes I eat crappy convenience food for nostalgia’s sake, and then admit later that it tastes like cardboard).
By Monday, Ms. Leslie to the rescue.
7:00
I’ve known Leslie for over 16 years, since we were undergrads at Pitt. We met when I waitressed at Delhi Grille – she was eating there with three of her friends and later, at a party, she told me she remembered me and thought I was cute. I was pretty cute then, but Leslie is even more adorable – and a naturally-gifted cook.
a kitchen with a view
Food has always been at the center of our friendship – meeting up to eat Indian or Thai, or having one of us cook, while talking about our lives and loves. I am honored that she has eaten my green bean and kielbasa soup and found it to be tasty. Because I am a bad foodie, really, who loves to eat and read about food more than cooking it.
dishes
The best way to start a week is to start over — with braised lamb shoulder served with creamy Parmesan polenta and green beans; a salad of bibb lettuce with roasted golden beets, golden raisins, shaved fennel, walnuts and smoked blue cheese, drizzled with fresh lemon juice, pear vinegar and walnut oil; and a bottle of homemade wine care of Reyna’s Nic DiCio, which was surprisingly not homemade-tasting at all.
leslie
And despite my feeling worn out, I took my camera with me so that I could photograph Leslie’s beautiful kitchen, which is like walking into a hug after a long, hard week.
Leslie’s kitchen notes, for when you need a shoulder to lean on (couldn’t resist!):
Braised Local Lamb Shoulder
(Recommended pot: heavy Dutch oven with a lid)
- Rub a bone-in lamb shoulder roast with crushed fennel seeds, black peppercorns and kosher salt (crushed them with a mortar and pestle).
braised lamb shoulder with creamy parmesan polenta and green beans
- Sear roast in a tablespoon or two of olive oil on all sides until well-browned (about 4 min per side), remove from pan.
- Sauté 1/2 cup chopped fresh fennel, two large carrots, chopped, two minced cloves of garlic, and a big handful of ramp greens (which I was lucky enough to have on hand) for about 5 minutes.
- Add 1/2 – 1 cup red wine (or sub white), reduce for a minute, then add about 1 cup of chopped tomatoes (canned tomatoes are fine), two cups of stock (I used veggie stock). Bring everything to a boil.
- Reduce heat and return roast to pan (make sure that it’s only halfway submerged in the liquid — a proper braise requires a combination of wet heat and dry heat). Put the lid on the pan and roast at 325 degrees for 2 – 3 hours (depending on the size of the roast), until the meat is falling off the bone (mine took about 2 hours and 15 minutes).
I was also lucky enough to have a meat lamb bone in my freezer, so I thawed it out and stuck it into the braising liquid along with the roast. The connective tissue and marrow in the bone made for an extra velvety sauce.
Also, before I served it, I threw in a cup or so of peas at the end. Delish!
Filed under: Recipe Box | Tags: cookie table, new york times, pittsburgh, wedding
“Cookies are comforting in the time of cholera.” S. Lynch
When Pittsburgh hits the national media, the email forwards from resident family and friends start rolling. And since the city has been under the country’s watchful eye since the G20, as well as a curious object of wonder across the States over our perceived immunity to the current recession, it seems only natural to examine such weird-ass Steel City customs as the wedding cookie table in today’s New York Times article.
The drawback of living in one place for most of your life is that you sometimes don’t know what is native and what is not. I thought every wedding in the country had a freaking cookie table. I knew it was a bit tacky to take home a doggie-bagful of cookies and stash it in my purse, but what the hell? The bags are usually provided for you by the wedding hosts; it gives guests the go-ahead to put etiquette aside and take home a souvenir that is much tastier than pastel mints nestled in plastic martini glasses.
When Jeff and I got married, my Italian grandmother, who is 80 this year, was too fragile to bake dozens of cookies. My sister had just gone back to work full-time and I don’t bake. That left my mother, who is a gifted baker, but hasn’t really touched an oven since 1984. But bake she did, 4 dozen wedding knots coated in orange and white frosting for our Halloween wedding.
I am sad because Carrie Pierson and I had talked about researching the history of the Pittsburgh cookie table for a future article in Table, but the NYT and Gourmet beat us to it. Maybe now the cookie table will catch on at out-of-state weddings I attend because a reception isn’t complete without lady locks, thumbprints and pizzelles crumbling at the bottom of my purse.
photograph by Stephanie Foley
Filed under: Pennsylvania, Recipe Box, Vintage Photo Album | Tags: baked rice pudding, comfort foods, food memoir, recipe
1978
As a child, there were a few dishes I could never order in a restaurant or eat at other people’s homes because the only one I trusted to make them was my mother.
I couldn’t eat pasta if it wasn’t made by my Italian mother. It wasn’t ‘real’ pasta unless it was covered in a bolognese sauce slow-simmered for hours over a hot stove (I’ve since gotten over my phobia of non-Italian cooks, or else I’d be missing out on a lot of goodness in the world).
Tuna salad was out of the question because almost everyone used mayonnaise. Except my mother, who used Miracle Whip. She mixed just enough of the salad dressing to keep the tuna bound and moist, adding finely chopped onions and celery for crunch, served neatly packed between two slices of white toast and sliced in half-triangles.
And there was her Southern baked rice pudding, which is not a Southern specialty, but a recipe my mother adapted from the back of an Uncle Ben’s rice package from the early 1970s. It is one of the recipes she collected in the early years of my parents’ short-lived marriage, a dish that permitted even my father to say one nice thing about my mother.
When she actually cooked, she was a damn good cook, and this pudding was one of my favorites. I can still see it cooling on the stove in the long glass Pyrex baking dish, the top a pale rust color from the cinnamon, slightly burnt along the edges. It is more cake-like than pudding, a really rich custard, making me wonder why it’s called ‘pudding’ at all.
Years later in college, I was eating with a group of friends in a diner and one of the vegan girls at the table asked the waitress, “What is in your rice pudding?” The waitress rolled her eyes and said, “Pudding with rice in it.” And indeed it was, a glistening, soupy vanilla mixture with rice tossed in it as an afterthought. Definitely not my mother’s.
The following recipe was printed in a 1980 cookbook put out by Allegheny Valley School, where my mother used to work.
1 cup uncooked rice
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Grated rind of 1 lemon
Dash of nutmeg or mace
Cinnamon
Soak uncooked rice in 2 cups of milk, 2 hours. Add remaining milk to rice and cook over low heat, 20 to 30 minutes or until tender. Set aside to cool. Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter 2-quart casserole. Work 2 tablespoons of butter until soft, then work the sugar thoroughly.
Beat eggs until frothy, add sugar mixture and rice. Flavor with lemon rind, cinnamon, and nutmeg or mace. Pour into casserole and bake for 45 minutes. Serve warm or cold, plain or with cream and sugar.
Serves 6 to 8 people.
the well-loved recipe
Filed under: Recipe Box, United States | Tags: comfort food, eggs in a basket, gross food, guilty pleasure, haggis, ramen noodles, single dining
Hannah Bantry,
In the pantry,
Gnawing at a mutton bone;
How she gnawed it,
How she clawed it,
When she found herself alone.
I confess: When Jeff is at band practice and I’m left to my own culinary devices, I fall back on my single-girl habits: ramen noodles doused in Sriracha eaten right out of the pot (it has to be out of the pot). I like cold mushroom soup from a can, and when I’m dining at a restaurant, I spear pats of butter with the tines of a fork and eat them. It’s the salty-creaminess that I can’t resist, conjuring my grape jelly and buttered toast obsession from childhood.
I eat pasta for breakfast and scrambled eggs for dinner. I love chocolate chip cookies first thing in the morning. One of my more recent favorite meals was a few months ago with Roya. We spent the afternoon talking for hours while eating cold beets with ham and cheese slices. It’s amazing to have a partner-in-food-crime who will eat strange combinations, no matter the time of day.
When I’m not at home, Jeff will work on projects for hours in the studio, forgetting to eat at all. But sometimes I’ll catch him drinking pickle juice straight from the jar. It was recently that my sister reminded me of what we used to do as kids to make our mac and cheese a little tastier: add Italian dressing. She still eats mac and cheese this way when she cooks up a box for my niece and nephews.
What do you eat when you’re alone? The guilty pleasures surrounding freaky food combinations fascinates me. Nobody talks about them, and when it is mentioned, it’s always with embarrassment. Not only did people confess some strange-ass food dishes, they also revealed their own bizarre food rituals (like Derek, the inspiration for this blog, who is so addicted to Sour Patch Kids, he saves the leftover tart-sugar mix at the bottom of the bag so he can roll gummy worms in it). Some dishes did not sound strange or gross to me, like my friend Ralphie’s affinity for eggs in a basket, but his girlfriend pokes fun at his favorite way to eat breakfast.
It made me think about how people assign food rules — what you can and cannot eat — and how, if we break those rules (often through putting condiments on anything other than hot dogs or hamburgers), our eating habits are judged as gross. What one person may call ‘comfort food’ isn’t necessarily universal.
The following meals are not from your grandmothers’ kitchens. 
Dan, recovering MFA graduate missing his adopted homeland, Scotland:
Last year, Alyssa was in the states for about a month and half, around the same time my dissertation was due. Suffice to say, things got weird (and fattening).
Bacon and chopped haggis omelet.
Thick cut chips, slathered in mashed potatoes and gravy, topped with ketchup and malt vinegar (the place I got this dish, across the
street, was called ‘Monster Mash’).
Panini sandwich made with tomato, goat cheese and two pieces of store-bought nan.
Nan ‘pizza’ (though in this case the nan has to be fresh, from the curry shop).
By the end of August, my dissertation was in, Alyssa was home with me, and I had gained about five pounds.Sometimes, when the mood strikes, I will roast a large head of garlic until soft and caramelized, cut the top off, squeeze out the soft garlic, and eat like pudding. Oh, and in Japan, I would buy a fresh baguette, slather it with Nutella, eat half for dinner and eat the other half for breakfast.
Stasia: 
I eat yellow mustard on my plain Lays potato chips – tastes like a pickle.
Mayo is good on everything — hot dogs, chicken fingers, fries, sausage.
I love plain cooked ground beef as a meal. 
I heat pepperoni slices in the microwave for a minute. Makes them crispy like when they are on pizza.
I love vodka with Kool Aid. Yummy.
Becky, mother of four:
Some of my single girl recipes:
Dinty Moore stew (looks like dog food) with sauerkraut or sour cream on top.
Slab of iceberg lettuce, Frank’s red hot, and tuna fish straight from the can, then rolled up.
Cheap tomato soup with ramen noodles crumbled on top.
Ramen noodle beef or chicken flavor packets dissolved in hot water, then throw raw and scrambled eggs on top so it cooks in broth.
Cheap white bread, toasted dark, with Isaly’s chipped ham and Heinz ketchup (my favorite). Variation: add horseradish from the jar.
Poor man’s lasagna: slice of iceberg lettuce, crumbled cooked ground beef, ketchup, slice of lettuce, and repeat. The hot beef wilts the lettuce.
Cheap white bread slice, peanut butter, banana slices, honey, then top off with uncooked oatmeal and another slice of bread. Yum!
Sarah, who is as obsessed about weird-ass food – or anything weird — as much as I am:
Some crap I eat:
Oranges dipped in yellow mustard.
Spaghetti-o’s right out of the can.
Frozen, clumped-together peas.
Spoonful of cream cheese with sugar sprinked on it.
Cold coffee in the evening (been sitting on my counter- or worse, in a cup- since the morning).
Alex, gifted cook who dines out frequently:I eat enough weird stuff alone at restaurants. A couple months ago at Eleven I was dipping bacon and fries into chocolate sauce. Or the time recently when I went to 21st, bought a pint of chocolate milk, had them steam it and add it to my macchiato. Then I put ice cream into it. On a related note, due to someone telling me this, some day soon I am going to go to DQ, get an ice cream cone, put ketchup on top and stick fries into it.
Beth:
My only confession is that when I’m home alone I eat constantly. I actually try not to have snacks around because it makes this easier. But I guess the weird thing is that I only eat things a bite at a time. I’ll go into the kitchen and eat a cracker. Then I’ll leave and do something else. I’ll go back to the kitchen and have a bite of something left over. Then I’ll leave and do something else. I’ll go back to the kitchen and cut a tiny slice off the end of a piece of cake or banana bread or something. Then I’ll leave and do something else. I’ll go back to the kitchen and eat a teaspoon of peanut butter. Then I’ll leave and do something else. I’ll go back to the kitchen and eat a handful of dry cereal. Then I’ll leave and do something else. I’ll go back to the kitchen and ransack jars in the fridge: beets, baby corn, pickles, maraschino cherries. . . Then I’ll leave and do something else.
Over and over all day until someone comes home.
Filed under: Pennsylvania, Recipe Box, United States | Tags: americana, bedford, big mac, coffepot, flea markets, gravity hill, ligonier, lincoln highway, museums, route 30, steakhouse, taxidermy
Last month, I traveled down Route 30 from Pittsburgh to Bedford with my husband Jeff, and our friends Bill, Dan and Beth. The Pennsylvania part of the old Lincoln Highway actually starts somewhere near our home in Pittsburgh, and slides into commercial highway near Philadelphia. Here are some stops we made along the way to Hokee Gee’s, a giant flea market in Bedford, our final destination (Jeff is totally addicted to trash. We have to buy a house soon – we’re running out of room to store all the scary taxidermy and post-mortem photos we collect in these places), before coming full circle home.
Gravity Hill 
If you google “gravity hill” you will find that there are others like this in America – a road that defies the laws of physics. Cars roll backwards despite them moving forward and water runs in the opposite direction (or something like this — this site can explain it so much better). The one in New Paris, PA is on a beautiful winding back country road dotted with farms and a bubbling creek running alongside of it. Not one of us in the group is science-minded, so it took us a few tries to figure out how to drive the car but lo and behold, Beth and Bill got it figured out – they looked as if they were rolling uphill, when they were really rolling downhill. Pretty impressive.
Ed’s Steakhouse 
a word from Beth:
“By the end of the day, we were all hungry and feeling very picky about what we were going to eat. It had to be diner-like, it had to serve tons of awesome food, and it had to have spaghetti and meatballs for Lisa.
So we asked a local where to go. “The Colonial Inn,” he said. We asked again “the Colonial Inn.” But on the way to the Colonial Inn, we saw the sign for Ed’s Steakhouse, and decided that any restaurant with a sign that cool had to have delicious food.
And we weren’t disappointed! Ed’s even provided more than we had hoped – chairs with wheels! Geriatric diners! Van-sized families! Postcards and five-cent mints by the register! Spaghetti & meatballs! It was the kind of dining experience we’d been missing since the last Pappan’s closed.
Unfortunately, we soon found out that although our souls were craving family restaurant food, our bodies would have been perfectly happy to never eat fried chicken and chocolate mousse ever again. We spent the ride home clutching our tummies and looking for gas station bathrooms.” (and thank god we found one; we were still two hours from home. — editor’s note)
The Coffee Pot 
My friend Jason told me recently that he grew up a few blocks away from this crazy-giant structure that once served as a stop for weary travelers bumping along the Lincoln Highway. I always wonder what it’s like to live in a tourist town such as Bedford. It is beautiful and haunted and far from everything - being a city girl, that’s how it would feel to me since I have lived in the city most of my life. While I took artsy pictures of it (me, lying on my back in the grass to get the full view of it with my limited 35 mm lens), the other four, bored as kids, had found someone’s geo-caching stash buried underneath the Coffee Pot historical plaque. Before Jeff could take out all the tiny toys and put them in his pocket, I knew it was time to keep rolling.
Joe’s Bar
“One of the most amazing taxidermy collections outside of a museum.” – Jeff 
But Joe’s is way more incredible and disturbing. The owner has a seal head, a deer’s ass, and a polar bear, not to mention a kangaroo with gigantic nads, all housed in glass cases in the back of his establishment, as well as filling a whole second floor. Walk up the winding staircase and marvel at the elephant head suspended from the ceiling by wing-like cables — its feet are now bar stools (with stiff black hairs still in tact). Chimpanzee skulls, gazelles, a tiger, a hippo and the standard wild boar. And despite Joe’s exotic attractions, it’s still off the beaten path. The bar is pretty ‘local.’ If you don’t mind being ignored by the surly long-haired bartender, then just go for the amazing animal display.
Big Mac Museum
The Lincoln Highway Drive-In radio station 88.3 provided the soundtrack for our ride home – Monsters vs. Aliens was the movie that night. I could see the light flickering from the giant screen, and it reminded me of when my parents took my sister and me to the drive-in for a double feature of Rocky and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We weren’t allowed to watch the movies, but we got to sleep in the back of the car with the hatchback down. (this is what my young parents had to do back in the recession of the 1970s. Who had money for a babysitter?). As the sun set, the boys were getting hungry again, and I was curious about the Big Mac Museum. The Big Mac was actually created in Uniontown, PA, about an hour away from North Huntingdon, but it was never made clear in the museum display how North Huntingdon ended up with the Museum Honors. We ate apple pies and french fries surrounded by blaring TVs airing retro McDonald’s commercials. “I like Big Macs here,” Dan said, “They have a different measure of quality than other McDonalds’ Big Macs.”
And if you are ever in the Irwin area looking for good thrifting, Beth gave us this tip: “We’ve been to [the Irwin] Goodwill. It’s filled with juggalos.”
We’re totally heading there on our next trash-hunting trip.
Filed under: Pennsylvania, Recipe Box | Tags: childhood, comfort foods, government cheese, mushroom soup
