Out of Vermont Kitchens: Ovens are wonderful things

I live with my Mom and Dad and their weimaraner "Spencer". My Dad has multi infarct dementia

We all come from Vermont and we grew up during the 60's and 70's. One of our favorite things is cooking and so we try and stay sane by writing about cooking. I have an old cookbook from Rutland VT called "Out of Vermont Kitchens that we are going to try and cook from and see what the food tastes like.

The cookbook has some prepared foods in some of the recipes. But we will try and adapt them perhaps to modern cusine.

We also try other recipes but will dive into our Vermont roots as often as we can.

Marion Ballou Smith
The daughter of Orris and Margaret (Mageen) Ballou, Marion Ballou Smith grew up in Rutland, Vermont, graduated from Mount Holyoke College (1914), and taught botany and mathematics. In 1927 she married Esme A.C. Smith, a businessman in Rutland. Active in local business and civic affairs, Smith was the co-compiler, with Alice Chaffee Bowker and Ruth Sutton, of a fund-raising cookbook entitled Out of Vermont Kitchens, published in 1939, to benefit the Trinity Mission of Trinity Church in Rutland, and the Women's Service League of St. Paul's Church in Burlington, Vermont.

3.29.2010

Ovens are wonderful things

We made rolls this weekend using the sour dough starter again. We also sprouted wheat berries that helped give them an interesting texture and taste. I like them the best in the mornings with coffee and some jam.

While the oven was heated, we baked a round of cookies. We made the old farm hand molassas cookies we made a few months ago but this time blackstrap molassas was used and the sticky stuff gave the cookies an almost chocolate appearance and more robust flavor.

I remember once when I was a kid and my sisters and I had made friends with a girl near Underhill, VT whose parents worked on one of the first big corporate owned farms in VT. They raised swiss brown cows. We went into the kitchen and her mother was busy baking pies, and cookie sheets full of cooling doughnuts. The kitchen smelled of deep fat frying, a method of cooking my own mother hated. I was captivated with the scene and all the food.