Guide To Good Nutrition (1942)

Since the dawn of the 1900's the Government has been subjecting us to "guides to good nutrition" highlighting what what we should be eating in our daily meals.  It's interesting how health modes have changed so much since the 1940's to today.  When I first grabbed this ad it was the meat at the top that caught my eye.  Wonderfully marbled meat with a nice bit of fat to give the meat flavor and to make the consumer full.  Yes, you didn't need to eat as much meat back in the old days because the meat was more filling owing to the fat content.

1930's Meatloaf Recipe

 

I've been holding on to this recipe for quite some time now and for a really odd reason.  I just kept misplacing the handwritten recipe paper.  Yeah I feel like I'm addlebrained at times but you have to understand that I've moved, twice, in the past 2 years (and we're moving again soon) and stuff always gets misplaced when that happens.  In the meantime I cooked this recipe every time I found the recipe card for it and then promptly misplaced it again.  Well I finally found it again and decided to cook it last night for dinner.  Usually I have a side of mashed potatoes and some sort of vegetable with it and my wife loves it.  Try it with some Southern Cucumber Relish and the vinegary sweetness balances out the rich taste of the meatloaf.

A Look Back...

As you can tell, I've been away from writing for a long time.  Things fell apart when we moved and went through a rough spot in finances which didn't allow me to be as creative with my cooking as I was before so I started relying on tried and true recipes for stir fry and Filipino foods along with large amounts of rice to fill our plates at mealtime.  I have posted at least one recipe for stir fry, my modified General Tso's Chicken but I never got much response about it and the one time I posted a Filipino recipe the silence was deafening.  Hence I stopped writing because I really had nothing to write about.

Make Your Own Brown Sugar

I like to keep things as natural as possible in my cooking, or at least keep the ingredients similar to what would have been available back in the old days.  One thing that is devilishly hard to find though is organic brown sugar.  There's one brand available here and despite my love of their other offerings I was not impressed with the brown sugar they make.

See, when I lived in the Philippines, brown sugar meant Muscavado Sugar and I could buy it at the Palengke for about 60 cents a kilo (2.2lbs).  Here it's $7 per half pound so far out of my price range.  Then it struck me one day that brown sugar in the store is just regular sugar with molasses added back into it.  Problem is they use the lowest grade sugar and molasses to make brown sugar but by making it at home you can control the ingredients and have something that comes out like my beloved muscavado sugar from before.

There's no real recipe here, I use Florida Crystals Organic Sugar and Plantation Molasses.  Simply pour some sugar into a small bowl and drizzle a little molasses in.  Mix with a fork until blended.  Less molasses will yield a light brown sugar and more will yield the typical dark brown sugar.  Use as you would normal store bought brown sugar and store any leftover in a glass jar tightly capped in the pantry.