Home Style Lebanese Stuffed Peppers

Erma, only you would take a classic Mennonite Comfort Food like a Buttermilk Pie and add booze. Sometimes I think that you must have stock in a distillery, or get a kickback from the bourbon makers for promotion of their product. Well, see if you can add bourbon to this Comfort Food.

Almost every Eastern European country and much of the Middle East have their own versions of that old standby Stuffed Green Peppers. A Lebanese neighbor years ago shared with me what she called her favorite “real” Lebanonese recipe. My Polish grandmother’s Stuffed Green Peppers is almost identical. She used ground beef instead of lamb and brown sugar in place of the mint, cinnamon and cumin.

Isn’t it funny how the only difference between a Polish classic and an Lebanonese classic is the different herbs?

Home Style Lebanonese Stuffed Peppers:

6 large green peppers
1 ½ cups rice
1 pound ground lamb
1 (6 ounce ) cans tomato paste
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 teaspoon dried mint
Salt and pepper
Cinnamon and cumin to taste
Water

Cut off the tops of the peppers and hollow out. Combine the rice, lamb, one can of tomato paste and the seasonings. Stuff each pepper about 3/4’s full. Place the peppers into a dutch over sized pot. Mix the remaining can of tomato sauce and tomato paste with enough water to cover the peppers. Bring to a full boil.cover the pot, and simmer on low for one to one and a half hours. When serving, pour the juice over the peppers. I like to cook the tomato sauce down to a gravy thickness.

Comfort Food Buttermilk Pie

I tried your Mennonite Cabbage Salad yesterday and it is great. As you know, Max, I love tart sweet and sour salads. With the current price of lettuce (it was $1.69 for a miserable little head Saturday), we will be eating a lot of cabbage for salads around here.

Since we are talking about Comfort Food, and who personifies Comfort Food better than those German Mennonite cooks? Let’s not forget their rich, simple desserts Max.

There is never a time when any cook could not whip up a Mennonite Buttermilk Pie. The ingredients are kitchen staples, the prep time is minimal. Like you can stir it up while the oven is heating. If you don’t have real buttermilk on hand, you can substitute regular milk soured with a little vinegar or lemon juice until it curdles.

I like my Buttermilk Pies just a bit richer than most, so I use bourbon instead of vanilla which would probably cause some older Mennonite cooks to roll over in their graves. The choice is yours. It must be a regional thing. Southern cookbooks often use the bourbon while other regions of the country stick to the vanilla.

Mennonite Buttermilk Pie:

1 egg
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon butter
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup buttermilk
¼ teaspoon vanilla (I substitute bourbon and increase it to a tablespoon)
Unbaked pie shell

Cream the egg, sugar and butter in a mixer. Add baking soda and flour to creamed mixture, Add buttermilk and vanilla/bourbon. And place in an unbaked pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. Pie will continue cooking after removal from the oven. Let cool completely before cutting.

Mennonite Comfort Food

Erma, your Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole reminded me of another classic Mennonite recipe. Our local Mennonites call this Cabbage Salad. Most anyone else would call it marinated cole slaw, and there are dozens of recipes for it. What makes this one different is that the cabbage and onions sit for a while with the sugar to make a kind of sweet brine.

This Mennonite Cabbage Salad would be perfect with your Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole. Like the Pennsylvania Dutch (after all, most Mennonites came from the same regions of Germany), our Mennonites like to combine sweet and sour dishes like the Cabbage Salad with a soft bland one like your casserole. Both of these recipe illustrate a facet of Mennonite cooking that you forgot to mention. Not only are their recipes inexpensive and use common ingredients, but they can be fixed whenever there is time and set aside to eat later.

Mennonite Cabbage Salad:

One large head of cabbage
One onion
1 cup sugar

Shred the cabbage and onion in your food processor. Stir in the cup of sugar and let sit for 10 to 20 minutes for sugar to melt into the cabbage liquids. Then make the Dressing

Dressing:

2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon celery seed
¾ cup vinegar
½ cup salad oil

Mix all in a sauce pan, and bring to a boil. Pour at once over the cabbage and let sit until completely cool. Stir several times. Place in a plastic refrigerator container and chill at least overnight before serving. This will keep for at least a week.

Makes 10-14 servings.

Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole

You made bread yesterday to celebrate the return of cool weather, and I cranked out an old Mennonite chicken recipe. I was busy picking up the house, doing laundry, and getting ready to work outside in the gardens pulling weeds, so I needed a take-care-of-itself kind of recipe.

Long ago, in another life, I worked with a reference librarian who demanded that the library buy a Mennonite cookbook as our standard reference tool. Jasper insisted that all basic cooking questions could be answered from this old classic and he was right. We didn’t have Mennonites in our section of Kentucky, but their style of cooking was just like the home food that I grew up with.

As is typical of Mennonite cookery, the ingredients are things that you always have in the kitchen, are cheap (few meats are cheaper than chicken thighs), and the result is a comfort food you associate with your childhood.

Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole:

¾ cup white rice
2 tablespoons minced onion
2 tablespoons minced celery
1 tablespoon minced carrot
¼ cup flour
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ cup butter
1 ½ cups water with 1 chicken bouillon cube dissolved in it
¾ cup milk
4 large chicken thighs
Seasoned salt that has paprika
Paprika

Grease a casserole that has a tight fitting lid, about 9 x 9 inches. Sprinkle on the rice. Mince the onion, celery and carrot and sprinkle on the rice. Dust on the flour and salt. Chop the butter into small cubes and place in the casserole. Carefully pour in the liquids. Arrange the chicken pieces on top and sprinkle with seasoned salt. Cover tightly and bake at 325 degrees for 2 hours until the chicken is tender. Toward the end of the taking, sprinkle on additional paprika for color. If the mixture is still too runny, remove the top for a few minutes additional baking and a nice golden top.

Serves 4.

Best White Bread

Now that it has finally settled down to our normal brisk Fall weather, I had to make bread today. My recipe comes from an old (1969) Farm Journal cookbook and was simply entitled “Best-Ever White Bread.” And it is about the best too. I added the egg for richness and came up with the Raisin Loaf from some other recipe.

Erma, your alcohol enhanced ways have rubbed off on me. I wouldn’t think of using raisins straight from the package in any of my cooking after I tried your trick of keeping several packages soaked in lots of bourbon so they are nice and plump, and extra flavorful. One should always “test” these raisins by eating a few while you are cooking. All women need the iron in raisins, and the bourbon sauce makes the cooking go faster.

I found this cookbook at my library on the library discard shelf. Each book was a quarter and there are some real dogs on the shelf, but occasionally you come across a real gem and “Homemade Bread” was a diamond in the rough. Over the past few years, I have collected all of the Farm Journal cookbook I can find. You know they are good because they are always stained and very used looking.

A highlight of each month as a child was the arrival of the “Farm Journal Magazine.” There was a kid’s page, and a nice women’s section with down-home, comfort recipes for farm wives who didn’t have access to a lot of fancy ingredients or time to prepare elegant meals.

Erma, if you ever come across some of their cookbooks, grab them. They are our kind of food. Their one on food preservation is my Bible on canning and preserving foods.

Farm Journal’s Best-Ever White Bread and Raisin Bread:

2 cups milk
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon lard or shortening (butter works too) (see how old this recipe is?)
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 package dry yeast
¼ cup warm water
6 to 6 ½ cups flour

Original recipe said: “Scald milk.” Today we only have to bring the milk up to medium warm in a saucepan, then stir in sugar, salt and lard. Cool to luke warm.

Sprinkle the yeast on the warm water and stir to dissolve.

When yeast is dissolved and milk mixture is about body temperature, pour the milk, yeast and 3 cups of the flour into a large mixing bowl. Beat with a wooden spoon until batter is smooth. You could also beat for about 2 minutes in a mixer.

Slowly begin adding the remaining flour until you have a soft dough that leaves the sides of the mixing bowl. Turn onto a lightly floured bread board. Turn the mixing bowl over the dough and let sit for at least 10 minutes.

Begin kneading by hand (or in a mixer with a dough hook) and knead for about 10 minutes. You may need to add small amounts of flour so the dough does not stick to the board. At end of the kneading, pour a bit of oil into the bottom of a mixing bowl. Turn the dough so that all surfaces and sides of the bowl are greased.

Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 ½ hours. Punch the dough down, and divide into 2 loaves. Place into two 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pans that are greased, if not Teflon coated. Cover and let rise again until doubled, which will be about an hour.

Bake at 400 degrees for 35 minutes until a deep golden brown and hollow sounding when thumped. Remove at once from pans and place on wire cooling racks to cool. For a softer, shiny crust, lightly oil or butter the tops.

As soon as the bread is cool enough to cool, cut a slice to sample and slather on the real butter. This step is essential. You would not want to serve your family an inferior bread, would you?

To make a superb Raisin Bread (I always make one loaf Raisin Bread.) Go to the point when you have kneaded the bread well and divide in half. Set the plain loaf in one small bowl. For the other half spread the dough out with your hands and sprinkle on about ¼ of a teaspoon cardamon and a generous ½ teaspoon cinnamon. Knead for another minute or so until the spices are well mixed in the bread. A few streaks may remain, but that just adds interest to the loaf.

When the dough has raised, again pat it out into a rectangle. Sprinkle on a thin layer of brown sugar, a light dusting of cinnamon, and as many raisins as you like. Press raisins into the dough. Roll the dough up tightly so there are no air pockets in the dough. Continue as with regular bread.

This makes a wonderful breakfast toast by slicing and buttering one side of the bread. Bake in a hot 400 degree oven for several minutes, turn over and bake another minute or so until lightly toasted. Watch carefully as once it begins to brown, it cooks fast.

Old Time Hint: When you are shaping your dough into loaves, use a rolling pin to roll out the dough. This removes the bubbles of air that makes holes in the bread.

One Last Apple Recipe

I know, Max, that we have barely scratched the surface of apple recipes, but enough is enough! Still I had to share this one, last apple recipe with you. Except for the addition of the apples, it is your basic sweet potato casserole that everyone makes for Thanksgiving. The difference here is the apples and the fact that the fruits are left in chunks and not mashed as is usual.

No, of course, the original recipe did not call for bourbon, but bourbon and sweet potatoes just go together like crackers and peanut butter. They are a natural mix. This recipe came from a cookbook out of New England, and you know that they do NOT use bourbon. Such a shame too.

Apple Sweet Potato Casserole:

6 sweet potatoes, baked and peeled
6 Granny Smith apples, peeled
1 stick butter
½ cup brown sugar
¼ cup maple syrup
Roughly chopped pecans
¼ cup bourbon

Use a fairly large casserole with lid, and grease well. Cut the potatoes and apples into small bite-sized pieces, mix, and put in the casserole. Pour the bourbon over the sweet potatoes and apples. Melt the butter and sugar in a small sauce pan. Add the syrup and pecans, and then pour over the top of the casserole. (Casserole can be fixed to this point up to a day early and held in the refrigerator. Allow to come to room temperature before baking the next day.) With cover on the casserole, bake for one hour at 350 degrees.

Serves 8 to 10 as a side dish. Reheats well in the microwave too.

Antique Shaker Apple Recipes

Talk about unusual, Max, then check out this Shaker Apple and Pork Stew. It starts out kind of like a Pork Roast basted with applesauce, and then it adds carrots, potatoes, and onions like a beef stew. Come to think of it, I often add potatoes, carrots and onions to my pork roasts. So maybe this isn’t such an unusual recipe after all.

Shaker Apple and Pork Stew:

3 pounds boneless pork
3 pounds applesauce
2 tablespoons mixed cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg
6 small red skinned potatoes
3 carrots
2 onions
2 apples

Cut the pork into small cubes. In a heavy Dutch Oven, place the pork, applesauce, spices. Cover and cook on high heat for 10 minutes. Reduce heat and simmer for at least 4 hours. An hour before serving, add the unpeeled whole potatoes, the carrots that have been peeled and cut into large chunks, and the onions that have been quartered. About 15 minutes before serving, add the apples that have been peeled and sliced thinly. Serve in soup bowls.

Serves 8.