A couple of chicken tenders sit in buttermilk.

I have a package of chicken tenders thawed out & planning on frying them for supper tonight. Sarah & I are talking & she asks the world wide recognized question: “Whatcha doing for dinner?” Now for those of you that don’t speak “teen”, that translates into “What are you cooking for dinner?” Next is the comment “When are you going to fix pretzel chicken? … in my lifetime?” Sigh. Mothers are NOT the only ones who know how to press the guilt button.

As I tell her, she’s in luck on her timing; I already have chicken tenders thawed. I don’t have any pretzels in the house so it’s agreed that it’s Sarah’s responsibility to make sure I buy pretzels on our way home from her piano lessons. Grab a couple of small storage containers & pour some buttermilk in one. Add about a cup and a half of flour to the other container & add some salt & pepper to it.

Prepared flour & a chicken tender

First the chicken tenders sit in a bath of buttermilk for a short time. Turn the tenders so all sides of the tender gets coated with the buttermilk. Next, the tenders are placed in the prepared flour container. For this container, I hunted up the lid that fits the container. With the tender inside, I place the lid on the container & shake until it has a light coating of flour on it. Personally, I prefer using a small, lidded container to using a bag, ziploc or otherwise. Gently removing the tender from the container, I shake off any excess flour & lay it on a plate. Once I have finished all of the tenders, I cover the plate & stick it in the refrigerator. Time to leave for piano!

Crushed pretzel bits

After piano, we stop at the store to pick up a bag of pretzels. A small bag is all that is needed. Once we get home, Sarah decides to be helpful & is going to start crushing the pretzels for me. Oh my! Removing the pretzels from the flimsy bag they’re sold in before trying to crush them is a wise idea as Sarah learns the hard way!

While Sarah sweeps pretzels up from the kitchen floor, I pour some of the pretzels into a heavy ziploc bag & proceed to beat on them with a hammer. It doesn’t take much effort to smash the pretzels. Be careful NOT to smash them too finely as you want to have the pretzel taste.

As the pretzels get crushed I put them in the small container with the lid. Yes, I washed it out for this reason before we left for piano. You might prefer a different method but I find I make less mess using the small lidded container. Once again, it’s a matter of placing the chicken in the container, putting the lid on it, shaking until the chicken is covered & laying the chicken out on a plate or pie pan to set.

Pretzel-covered chicken tenders

While the chicken sits, I start the rice and green beans. Nothing fancy with the green beans as Sarah is such a picky eater, I can barely get by with a little mild seasoning on can beans. As a long time Southern woman, an iron skillet is one of my favorite kitchen tools.  An inch of vegetable oil in the iron skillet and it’s just a matter of letting the oil get hot enough to fry the tender. Don’t crowd them in the skillet as the temperature of the oil will go down and the chicken won’t cook properly.

Pretzel chicken tenders frying in the iron skillet.

Personally, I find a medium-high temperature gets the best result when fixing the pretzel chicken. Let them cook all the way on one side then gently turn them with your tongs. The less turning you do, the fewer pretzel bits will fall off the chicken. Finish cooking the tenders. Then pull them out & drain them before serving. Then it’s only a matter of plating them up with the rice and green beans. The adults also had fresh home-grown tomato slices.

Dinner is ready!

Sarah cooking bacon

If you haven’t fixed it before, you need to do so. It’s one of the super easy things you can fix. Like fixing scrambled eggs, there’s no need to measure things. You want a good quality bread to fix French Toast. Something like French bread, a good bakery bread or the Pepperridge Farm sourdough will make an excellent dish. A bread of substance is needed. If you use your normal sandwich quality bread, the bread will get too soggy as it has too much air & will soak up too much of the egg mixture. Then the end result will be a piece of bread that is toasted on the outside & soggy inside–not an attractive or tasty dish.

Turn your stove on to medium heat & heat your iron skillet while mixing your eggs. Usually when I’m fixing it, I’ll fix a larger batch than necessary to have French toast mixture handy for another morning. There’s 3 of us in my family living at home so if I crack 4-6 eggs, I’ll have extra egg mix leftover. How many eggs I use is based on how many times I figure we’ll have French toast in the next few days. Lightly whip the eggs & add some milk, approximately a tablespoon and a half for every 2 eggs is how much I usually pour in the bowl of eggs. This is a guess as I eyeball it. Then I add around a half teaspoon of cinnamon & half as much nutmeg. Some people add a dash of salt. I prefer to leave it out & nobody has ever complained. Lightly whip the ingredients until the spices are evenly distributed.

Whisking egg & milk mixture for French toast.

Cracked eggs in bowl

Pour the mix into a shallow container. Place a slice of the bread in the egg mixture & gently push it down until the mix flows over the top. Using a fork, I lift the bread up & turn it over so both sides are well coated. Lift it up using the fork & let the excess mix drip back into the container. Gently drop the coated bread into the hot skillet. After it has cooked for 3-4 minutes & is toasted on the bottom, use a pancake turner to flip it over. Let the other side cook until it is grilled to your satisfaction. Using the pancake turner, slip the piece of French toast onto a plate.

French toast cooking in iron skillet.

Depending on your family’s taste, the French toast can be served with a sprinkling of powdered sugar, syrup, applesauce or a warm fruit puree. After fixing however many pieces I need, I store the leftover mix in the refrigerator. I would not suggest keeping it more than a couple of days before using it.

Finished French toast with an egg

After we got him back home, it was a struggle to get him to eat anything. He had no appetite. Nothing tasted right. Even foods that he’s always loved tasted funny to him. I did have pretty good luck getting him to eat breakfast. So we started having eggs for breakfast 97% of the time.

I started off scrambling the eggs out of sneakiness. Breakfast was the only meal I could get down him & he was woefully underweight. He would ask me for 2 eggs every morning so I would scramble them. I scrambled them because that way he couldn’t tell how many eggs he got. I took advantage of that to fix him 3 eggs every morning. During much of this time, he would only eat breakfast so it was vital to get quite a bit of nutrition into him.

Then came the morning he admitted he would rather have his eggs fried! Oh oh, I was in a mess. He still wasn’t eating that well but there was no way I could sneak 3 fried eggs on his plate and him not know it. I did the only thing I could think to do. I confessed. He looked at me like I was crazy, laughed & said “Then I guess I want 3 fried eggs. That’s been working good! Let’s not change it.” Sometimes you get off easy when you’ve been sneaky!

Freshly cracked egg is cooking in iron skillet. Notice the translucency of the while.

Sunny side-up egg is ready to be slipped on the plate. Notice how opague the egg white is.

Both of us like our eggs sunny side-up. There’s not an easier egg to fry than a sunny side-up egg. Heat your skillet up to a low-medium heat. I always use my medium sized iron skillet for eggs. Carefully tap the egg on the side of the skillet and when it cracks open, slip the egg into the melted butter. I find a teaspoonful of butter will cook 3-4 eggs in a well seasoned iron skillet so you’re not using much fat. Cook the egg over the low-medium heat until the whites are completely set & opaque. Slide the flexible pancake turner under the egg and carefully slip the egg onto the waiting plate.

Three sunny side-up eggs & ham

It only takes a couple of minutes per egg. In no time, you have a plateful of eggs. Add toast, biscuit or a bagel and you have a delicious breakfast. About half of the time, I’ll fix some kind of a meat but the rest of the time we just eat the eggs & bread. Occasionally, for a treat, I’ll cook some hashbrowns and add them to our plate. As you can see, it’s not at all time consuming to fix a solid breakfast.

If you’re not familiar with buckwheat flour, I suggest checking out http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-buckwheat-flour.htm; This site gives a nicely detailed explanation about buckwheat.

As you can see, buckwheat pancake batter is darker than the usual pancake batter.

In response to her request, I got the bacon started in the iron skillet. When the bacon was almost done, I mixed up the pancake batter using the the buckwheat flour. There’s no need for a special recipe. Any recipe you have for pancakes can be used. All you do is substitute buckwheat flour for the flour or part of the flour in the recipe. Straight buckwheat is too heavy for my taste so I always substitute half of the flour for buckwheat flour.

After that, all you do is fix your buckwheat pancakes just as you would any other pancake. If you haven’t fixed pancakes before, be careful when pouring the batter into the skillet to allow for the batter to spread. Have your heat on medium heat & heat your skillet before pouring any batter into it. Watch carefully for the edges to turn slightly brown & the hot batter to have lots of air bubbles in it. This is your sign to turn the pancake.

Look carefully and you can see the bubbles you will look for as 1 of the signs your pancake is ready to be turned.

Pancakes will get tough if you flip them multiple times so they are one of the foods that you only want to turn once. This makes it important to learn the proper moment to turn them.

The finished buckwheat pancake with butter is waiting for syrup to be poured.

Ground Sirloin

Hamburger steak is one of those comfort foods that Jim really likes. It’s also a very simple food item to fix that doesn’t require being accurate in measurements.

I always start with at least 1 pound of ground chuck. If I can find it reasonably priced, I go for ground sirloin for more taste with less fat content. Add salt & pepper to your taste. Those are the basics. Then I add chopped onion; how much onion depends on the mood I’m in. Some nights I add just a couple of tablespoons of onion for just a hint of onion. If I’m really in the mood for onion I’ll add ½ cup of onions. You don’t want the taste of onion to be overwhelming so I don’t suggest more than that amount. If your ground meat doesn’t seem to want to stick together to make a patty, add 1 egg. Then divide into 2 to 4 patties depending on the number of patties you want. Lightly pat the ground steak together into an oblong shape. Place in a heated iron skillet on medium & cook to your preferred degree of done. Jim likes his more well done than I do so I always start cooking his before mine. That way both patties finish cooking at the same time & we both get our hamburger steak fixed to our taste.

Jim

If you want to add toppings, it’s a simple thing to saute a mixture of onions & green peppers, onions & mushrooms or just mushrooms while the hamburger steaks cook. After the hamburger steaks have cooked, use the drippings to make gravy to top them with if you’re a gravy fan. As you can see, it’s easy to dress this comfort food up several different ways to suit anybody’s taste.

Hamburger steak ready to serve, just add vegetables.

However, today, I did get all the pears sorted out & pulled all the ripe ones out. We had our production line going again this evening long enough to do another batch of canned pears. Another batch of 4 beautiful quarts of pears just ready to be put up.

Once the jars were sitting in the water bath, I started supper. Fixed pork chops. As I put them in the skillet, I got to wishing I had some apples to cut up. I love fried apples with pork chops! Next thing I knew, I was convincing myself that there was NO reason I couldn’t cook pears the same way. So I cored & cut a handful of pears. Once my iron skillet was hot, I added a couple of tablespoons of butter to it, poured some honey in there & let it all mix up good. Then I added the pears that were cut into the melted sweet butter simmering in the skillet. Shook a little cinnamon over the pears & stirred them as they cooked for a few minutes. Jim & Sarah were both intrigued with the idea of fried pears when I was cooking them.

We were all agreed they were really good. In fact, Sarah fussed at me for not fixing a bigger batch of fried pears. I reckon while they last, we’ll be eating quite a few of the pears that way. A sense of adventure is all you need to discover new favorite foods for your family.

The only ingredients in this preserve recipe are pears & sugar. I added about 1 tablespoon of FruitFresh to keep the preseves light in color.

After supper, I peeled and sliced 6 cups of pears. Tossed them with some Fruit Fresh and 3 3/4 cups of sugar. Covered the bowl with Saran Wrap. Now it sits in a cool spot until in the morning when I’ll finish making the pear preserves. I love the recipe because there’s nothing in it but pears & sugar. This year I wanted it to be a lighter color so I added some Fruit Fresh so the pears wouldn’t darken as much. I’ve had this recipe for pear preserves so long, I can’t remember exactly where I got it. Probably came from my mother or grandmother on my father’s side as I can remember making preserves with Mother years ago. Grandmother always had the best pear preserves to eat. My great-grandmother, Mama Bobo had a big old pear tree that everybody in the family would get pears from to make preserves. Wonderful memories.

Here's the corn shucked & silked; ready to be cut.

Luckily, I came to my senses & decided to take care of that. We have a wonderful produce stand just a few blocks away so off I went to gather corn. Not any corn will do. A field corn is needed;  Hickory Cane & Silver Queen are my favorites.  Sorted through the corn until I found the dozen ears I wanted. Got home with it & asked Jim if he’d help me shuck it. So we settled on the back deck with Sarah as voluntary labor & we shucked & silked the corn. (For those of you who have never enjoyed fresh corn, removing the strands of fine thread from the corn is called silking.)

Into the kitchen I went & proceeded to cut the corn off the cob while letting my skillet heat. Stand the corn up & with the sharp side of the blade, make a straight cut down. Corn is likely to fly everywhere until you get some practice at it so be warned. After the corn is cut off, turn the blade of the knife the other way & pulled it down the cob. This will release the sticky juices from the cob. When the corn is almost cut, measure a couple of tablespoons of bacon grease in your skillet & heat it. Naturally, you’ll use an iron skillet. Once your grease is hot, add the corn & juices & cook it. Season the corn with salt & pepper to taste as you cook it. Cook the corn for about 10 to 15 minutes until it’s tender. Fixing the full dozen ears, required 2 iron skillets.

Seasoned cut corn in skillet cooking.

Next, add @ 1/2 cup milk adding it slowly. Then slowly add the same amount of water. Turn the skillet down to a medium low setting & cook until it thickens up. The more juice you obtained from the cob, the faster the corn will thicken. Then it’s just a matter of serving it up & trying not to eat like a pig.

I will be honest; it is messy preparing the corn & cooking it. You’re not likely to resent all the cleanup that’s needed of your counter & stove top though once you’ve tasted the corn. I certainly didn’t! Fried corn ready to be served.

Fried corn simmering in the iron skillet.Fried corn ready to be served.