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

Drained macaroni

With all of Jim’s health problems, it’s no wonder I’ve been craving all kinds of comfort foods. Sarah’s been wanting me to fix some macaroni & cheese for awhile now so I’ve decided to get to it. I have several macaroni & cheese recipes I use depending on the cheeses I have onhand & which one I feel will suit my tastes better at the time. Some of them are very simple & easy with only 1 cheese involved; some are more complicated & use several cheeses. Today, I don’t want to have to pick up more cheese & just want a simple basic macaroni & cheese. As usual, I have cheddar cheese onhand.

Layered macaroni, cheese, & cracker crumbs just needing milk poured over them.

That’s why I went with the simplest & most basic one I have. Once again, I’m using one of my great-grandmother’s, Mama Bobo. Cook 2 cups of macaroni in boiling, salted water until it’s tender. Drain the macaroni. Grease a 2-quart casserole dish. Place 1/4 of the macaroni in the casserole dish  & pepper it to taste. Taking 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese & 2 cups of crushed cracker crumbs, layer a 1/4 of the cheese over the macaroni & cover with 1/4 of the cracker crumbs. Continue this until all ingredients have been used. Then pour 2 1/2 cups of milk over the layers in the casserole dish. Place in a 350 oven, uncovered & bake for 50 minutes. Try to refrain from eating it until it has cooled enough you won’t burn your tongue!

Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers with parmesan cheese

Tonight I did something different. I usually use the whole wheat Ritz crackers for the cracker crumbs. We have some Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers that are made with parmesan cheese. Nobody in the family has liked them that much. Not wanting to waste them, I decided to use them for making the macaroni & cheese. You wouldn’t think such a small detail would matter, but frankly, we liked it even better than usual. I have some more of those crackers left so will try it again & see if they do work better or if it was just we were so hungary.

Oops. Somebody has already been in the mac & cheese!

Mama owned the boarding house in town & ran it for years. In 1908  she & her husband, Jack (Lacy Jackson) bought & opened the Bobo Hotel. As far back as I can remember, it was always referred to as the Hotel, but it was a boarding house not a hotel. For many years, Mama fed guests of Jack Daniel’s Distillery there at dinner time. The dinner bell would be rung & everybody that was eating would go in to sit down. The tables of distillery guests always had a woman from Lynchburg as their hostess. She would encourage talk, answer questions, make sure everybody had plenty to eat & make it a pleasant experience. Meals were served family style with a waiter keeping full dishes on the table. The food was excellent and in the summer the vegetables came from a garden for the hotel.

We always sat at a round table in the corner in the dining room closest to the kitchen. Quite simply, it was called the family table. The only way you were seated there was if you were a relative, friend or invited guest of Mama’s. Quite simply, us kids loved it. When we finished eating, we would run into the kitchen to tell Mary Lou, Dill & the other cooks that it was good & off we would run. A favorite spot of mine was Mama’s private quarters “playing the piano”. I put that in quotes because I didn’t & don’t now play the piano. In actuality, I banged away on it. But it was grand fun.

Lynchburg Courthouse

Brown Foreman, the current owner of both Jack Daniel’s Distillery & Mama’s boarding house, just finished restoring the boarding house. That was one of things I wanted to see. First, I parked downtown & Sarah & I walked around the town square & wandered in a few shops. It has changed so much from when I was young & was allowed to walk to town by myself on visits. In fact, the only thing on the square that is still there besides the courthouse is Farmer’s Bank! Nothing else remains from my childhood.

The Bobo Hotel as it has been restored by Brown Foreman.

After that, due to the cold, we got back into the van & drove to the hotel. From the outside, I can only say they did a beautiful job. It looks grand. It was open so we wandered inside. I was overwhelmed with memories. However, I will admit that I was very upset to find Mama Bobo’s private living quarters a gift shop. I have to admit that business-wise it made good sense, but it did make me a bit sorry I had gone inside. That’s what’s wrong with going back to important places from our past. What is important to us, probably isn’t to others & may well be totally changed or changed in ways we don’t like. I have to say though that I am grateful to Brown Foreman for restoring the hotel.

My grandparent's home & I have many happy memories of it.

That worked acceptably, but the texture of the final product would have been smoother if they had been shredded. Taste-wise though, we have a winner. Made a moist tender muffin. This made a wonderful treat for fall. The delightful blend of spices & fruit fits well with the crisp fall mornings we are beginning to have. Will definitely make these again.

I made the muffins as I’m beginning to be partial to muffins instead of loaves of bread. They are easier to deal with serving. If you freeze some from each batch of muffins you make, then later you can serve a variety of muffins without cooking. Will come in handy for unexpected company, laid back days, or just too busy to cook days, We all have days like that. The key to not breaking the piggy bank by eating out every time we have one of those days to freeze some of our goodies from days we do cook.

That was it today in spite of all the pears to still bake, cook or whatever. Today is my anniversay. Having been married for one month now, I called it a day early & we popped a bottle of champagne instead of cooking.

So I start with preparing pears to can. Even though it’s only a matter of asthetics, I have decided I don’t much care for the color of the pears so these canned pears sat in water with about 2 teaspoonsful of FruitFresh in it while getting them ready to cook. As I add them to the jars & put in them in the water bath, I’m quite pleased with the color. Make a note to myself to pick up more FruitFresh.

While the pears sit in the water bath, I peel & cut pears for the dehydrator. For this process I deliberately pick the very firm pears as they will dry better. Too soft a fruit will be hard to get dried enough to keep without molding. Lay them in the dehydrator & go downstairs to check out the shelves. They look good. Each shelf will hold 44 quart jars and I have 3 shelves for them. There’s a smaller shelf on top for pint jars. He’s left a large space in the bottom where I can keep my water bath pan & pressure canner if I want. He offers to put in another shelf if I want, but I like the idea of being able to keep my equipment there.

This dehydrator works really well. I like it so much better than the last one I had. The fan makes a lot of difference in how quickly things dry. In about 4 hours the majority of the pears are dried properly. Pull them off & put them in a small bowl to cool off. Once they’re cool, I bag them in a ziplock bag. Of course, that’s minus the few we ate testing them out. After all, we have to know if we want to dry any more or not. Oh yes we do.

Pears ready to be cooked. If you look closely, you can see the juices from the pears.

My cut up pears were waiting on me this morning. After sitting all night, the sugar has drawn out the juices from the pears. Dumped them into a large pot, put them on a stove burner & turned the heat on high. When they started bubbling, I turned the heat down to medium. Then it was just a matter of letting them cook while occasionally stirring them. The mixture needed to be cooked until the pears were translucent & the liquid thickened. It takes at least 45 minutes to reach that stage.

Then it was just a matter of pouring the preserves into jars then placing the lids & rings on the jars. At that point, I put them in a water bath for 10 minutes. I heard 4 out of 5 jars pop just as soon as the jars hit the air. Some of these will be given away as gifts so I poured some of the preserves into jelly jars. Now I just need to decide if I want to make another batch of pear preserves or not.

The finished jars of pear preserves. All they need now is a label.

Where I was so fortunate to have so many pears, I spent part of yesterday evening looking for new recipes for pears. I found cakes, breads, fruit spreads, pies and even mincemeat recipes. Getting a  little bit tired of cake at the moment, I decided to try one of the pie recipes today.

The recipe I used was Pear Crumb Pie from allrecipes.com. As soon as the preserves were done, I started on the pie. I had a couple of pie crusts in the freezer so I cheated & used one of them for the pie. Naturally, the most time consuming thing about preparing the pie was peeling & slicing 6 cups of pears. Jim offered to peel them for me, but I knew he was anxious to get downstairs & piddle around in his workshop so I told him no thanks. Sarah’s boyfriend was over for the afternoon so naturally, she had no interest in helping.

Because my crust was already made, it only took about five minutes to mix the filling for the pie once the pears were cut. It smelled wonderful when baking. The pie browned nicely & was an attractive dish when it came out of the oven.

The freshly baked Pear Crumb Pie cooling off.

Once it had time to cool down, Jim & I had to check it out! I was quite pleased with it. I am sure I’ll make that pie again sometime. Jim told me he thought it tasted just like an apple pie. That wasn’t quite so, but the truth is that if you didn’t tell someone what type of pie it was, they could easily mistake it for an apple pie. A person has to be paying very close attention to the taste of the fruit to notice that it’s definitely pear and not apple.

Sarah has been anxious for me to make some apple turnovers so I think I’ll try making some pear ones in a few days. I think an apple turnover recipe would work fine.

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.

Some of our quart jars of pears ready to go in the cabinet.

It’s pear time at the Spears house! I got started peeling, coring & putting up the pears. Almost had one batch completely finished when Jim asked if there was anything he could do to help. He offered to peel & that sounded good to me. He asked about the apple peeler so I got it out for him. He fooled with it & got it to working. So then he was off peeling pears. Then he would give them to Sarah & she would do the touch up peeling. When I got them, I cut them in half & cored them.

Kept the syrup going to cook the pears in as we got a batch ready. Personally, I like to use the light syrup so they aren’t so sweet. We did 3 batches of pears & then it was time to take Sarah to her piano lesson. Not bad at all. We now have 12 quarts of pears sitting on the table ready for us to find someplace to put them up until they’re wanted.

Here are part of the bags of pears in the back of the van. The ladder was very handy in getting the pears picked

After we had grabbed a bite of lunch at home, we set off in the van. We left a bucket of pears with my good friend, Shannon & then headed over to my other daughter’s place. She doesn’t can or put up jams so we only gave her a bagful of pears. Then it was back home again.

i hunted up Fannie Farmer & opened the book to the section that gave the times for fixing pears in a water bath. Sorted out some of the pears so I could do something with the ripest ones first. Washed them & decided to get started working the pears in the morning.

So this evening I was down in the basement dragging out the storage containers with mason jars in them. Hunted around until I found several bags of rings. Dragged it all upstairs so I can be ready tomorrow. Baring a major diaster I’m picking pears tomorrow. Love to can pears, pear preserves are nice. I have a lovely recipe for pear cobbler. Hmm Tomorrow will be a fun day!