Thursday, December 5, 2013

Fun Foods

What kinds of fun foods have you made?

Do you remember making fun foods? Did you make cookies for holidays? I accumulated a lot of cookie cutters so I could make sugar cookie dough and cut out holiday shapes for the different holidays of the year. My mother usually used a glass to cut out round sugar cookies, but I liked making different shapes. Did you make candy from scratch? My mother would make fudge and would recruit me to stir the fudge. If it wasn't stirred enough it would be grainy. She also made divinity from scratch. It took a lot of stirring and testing to make sure it was cooked to just the right stage. My mother made rhubarb pies and custard pies. When my mother baked bread, she would often fry flattened pieces of the dough. We could put honey or jam or cinnamon sugar on them, but they were good with nothing else on them. Sometimes we made popcorn in a pan with a lid. We would have to shake the pan over the burner. If we got tired and set the pan down on the burner for too long, we would have burned popcorn. My grandmother had a plum tree. She made plum-filled cookies and frequently offered them to us. One time she gave us dried corn. It was so sweet that it was almost like candy. A couple of years ago one of my daughters wanted to make chocolates. Again there was a lot of stirring to get it cooked just right. Then we added lots of different toppings. Customizing the chocolates with what we wanted was a lot of fun. I have learned to make treats with stevia or just using fruits for sweetening. I like making a type of fudge with dates, coconut oil, cocoa and shredded coconut. I learned how to make teddy bears out of bread dough. They are fun to give to someone for a special occasion or to say thank you or to welcome a new neighbor. Making a family recipe book could be a memory making project. Recording how you made fun foods can be an important part of your life story.