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.

Remember Real Money?

I remember a time in my youth when money actually had some value left to it.  When I was hired for my first job my pay rate was $4.25 an hour which was a good starting rate in 1991.  I worked with a bunch of Polish nuns as a gardener at a retirement home and they treated me well, at least better than some of my bosses in later years.  Now I'm making more than double that and finding it hard to make ends meet.  Why?  Because over the last 22 years the value of the dollar has declined sharply.  In addition to this those of us left in the workforce find ourselves being taxed out of existence to support the mendacity of the welfare class, the so called "poor" of the nation who somehow seem to accrue more material goods than I can yet deign to call themselves poor.

Chicken/Turkey Croquettes

I have written about Chicken Croquettes before here but that recipe hailed from the 1930's.  I found another recipe for the same thing but this one dated from 1920 and the overall ingredients were different from the 1930's recipe.  The first time I made these I used leftover chicken, but I tried them again with turkey and the end result it the same.  You can make a simple white sauce as an accompaniment to these or just have them as is.  The vintage way to have these would have been as a luncheon with some Lettuce Salad w/ Piquant Dressing and some Banana Walnut Bread.