When I went off into the world after high school, my mom sent with me the recipe for Bisquick Impossible Quiche which used to be printed on Bisquick boxes back in the 1970s. It was easy to put together, inexpensive and tasted great.
I altered the ingredients to suit my tastes and made it a lot, but then somehow forgot about it until I’d long lost the recipe and Bisquick no longer printed it on their boxes.
Flash forward, and there are now many, many recipes on the internet. This one’s mine. Everybody needs a few recipes that are quick and easy to put together. The ingredients just have to be mixed together and the Bisquick falls to the bottom to form a crust while in the oven. Pretty ingenious.
Ingredients:
12 oz. (2 cups) Cubed Ham
1 cup Shredded Cheese
⅓ cup diced onion
4 Large Eggs
½ tsp Salt
½ tsp Black Pepper
1 tsp Herbs de Provence (optional)
2 cups Milk
1 cup Bisquick
Directions:
Step One: Preheat oven to 400°F. Spray an 8×8 or 9×9 deep dish pan with cooking spray. Sprinkle the ham, cheese and onion mixture over the bottom of the pan.
Ham, Onion and Cheese Layer
Step Two: Beat eggs. Add salt, pepper, herbs and milk. Mix in Bisquick and mix until fairly smooth. There will always be some tiny lumps.
Bisquick Quiche Mixture Ready for the Oven
Step Three: Pour the liquid mixture over the meat and cheese. Bake for 50 minutes until there is a golden brown topping.
October is National Pork Month, and I’m always able to buy large pork shoulders at the best prices of the year. I buy at least two of the largest pork shoulders I can and turn them into pulled pork. I then vacuum-seal them in eight-ounce portions and freeze. The vacuum-sealed packages can stay good for years and be reheated with a little chicken stock or microwaved.
My favorite way of serving pulled pork is on top of a baked sweet potato with black beans and sour cream. If I am serving pulled pork on a bun, I only want pickled red onions as a topping. A thick barbecue sauce drowns out the flavor.
Traditional low-and-slow barbecue means you can be looking at 12-hour cook times or longer for pork shoulders. I find that kind of cook time frustrating and had all but given up when a piece of information given to me by a guy who did competition barbecue suddenly clicked for me.
My friend told me that meat only takes on flavor from the smoke until it gets to about 140°F., which is usually somewhere around the four-hour mark for pork shoulders if your smoker temperature is in the 250°- 300°F. range. After that the cook time is about breaking down the proteins so that the meat becomes tender and so that bark builds up on the surface and contributes its own kind of flavor.
I now cook pork shoulder on a smoker for four hours and finish it by steaming in a pressure cooker for 50 minutes. The result is fall-apart tender pulled pork. The pressure cooker has turned a day-long commitment into a reasonable cooking event.
I get pork shoulders that are close to nine pounds and cut them in at least two smaller chunks. I sprinkle them with kosher sea salt and liberally apply the Memphis Dust Rub recipe from the Amazing Ribs website. I steam the chunks in a pressure cooker with about a cup of water. After cooling a bit, I pull apart the chunks and get rid of the excess fat and cartilage. I then add one tablespoon of Stubbs Pork Marinade for each pound of finished pulled pork. Adding this last bit of marinade is like adding finishing salt to a salad; it just gives it a little something extra.
Count on getting about a 55% yield of finished pulled pork for each pound of pork shoulder. A nine pound pork shoulder will yield about 4.5 pounds of pulled pork.
Memphis Dust Rub Recipe
¾ cup Brown Sugar
¾ cup White Sugar
½ cup Paprika
¼ cup Garlic Powder
2 tbsp. Ground Black Pepper
2 tbsp. Ground Ginger Powder
2 tbsp. Onion Powder
1 tbsp. Ground Rosemary
The Method:
Step 1: Cut down a pork shoulder into two or three chunks, sprinkle with kosher sea salt and coat liberally with the Memphis Dust Rub.
Step 2: Fire up your smoker and put the pork on for a good four hours.
Step 3: Cook the pork in a pressure cooker on high with about one cup of water for 50 minutes. You’re essentially steaming the pork tender.
Step 4: Remove from the liquid and pull apart or chop up the pork. Add Stubb’s Pork Marinade at a rate of one tablespoon per pound of finished pork.
This recipe appears in the King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook, yet it does not appear in the recipe section of their website. I haven’t had luck finding it on other websites either.
This description is found in the book:
This entry came, via a friend of the Sands, from an English war bride whose husband flew for the Royal Air Force during World War II. They are light and delicious, the perfect Cream Tea Scone.
King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook
The original recipe calls for ½ tsp. baking soda along with 2 tsp. baking powder, but that resulted in a scone that had too much of the sharp taste of baking soda. After some research, I decided the recipe does not need the additional baking soda so I have eliminated it here. Also, a little water is needed to make the mix hold together and I use a spray bottle to spritz it just enough to accomplish that.
Ingredients:
180 grams (1 ½ cups) All-Purpose or Bread Flour
2 tsp. Baking Powder
½ tsp. Salt
20 grams (¼ cup) Granulated White Sugar
227 grams (1 cup) Sour Cream
Directions:
Step 1: Preheat oven to 450°F. In a mixing bowl, blend the dry ingredients thoroughly. Scoop in the sour cream all at once and stir together for 20 seconds or until the dry ingredients are damp.
I spritz lightly with a little water to get the dough to hold together.
Step 2: Turn out onto a floured surface and knead, very gently, 8 to 10 times. This dough is very light. Roll into a round shape that is ½ to ¾ inch thick. Flour a knife or spatula well and cut into quarters.
Shaped into a round
Cut into quarters
Gently lift each scone onto a baking sheet that has either been lightly greased or covered with a silicone mat or parchment paper.
I bought a nifty little kit for fermenting foods in a wide-mouthed quart jar at a health food store around 2019 or ’20. It was made by a company called Ferment’n and it looks like the company is no longer in business, but there are probably other kits like it on the market.
At the time I was making kimchi and sauerkraut in a gallon-sized crock. I gradually fell out of the habit because four quarts were taking up a lot of space in the fridge. Making a quart at a time will be quite handy so I cut down my recipes by a fourth and they fit quite nicely.
Ingredients:
1 lb. Napa Cabbage, chopped
¼ lb. Carrots, shredded
¼ lb. Radishes, shredded
2 Spring Onions, chopped
2 cloves Garlic, chopped
2 ½ tsp. Sea Salt
1 tsp. Sugar
1 tbs. Gochujang Paste
1 tbsp. Vinegar
Directions:
Combine all the ingredients. It will take 10-15 minutes for the salt to wilt down the vegetables to allow for packing into the jar. Once packed into the jar, place the weight on top and press down a bit. Apply the fermentation lock as directed and let sit at room temperature for one to two weeks.
I prefer to transfer it to a new jar and refrigerate. The mixture will continue to ferment and develop flavor.
Barn Cookie made by Miriam Neessen and Marie Schildroth
I started writing for a magazine put out by a nonprofit called the Iowa Barn Foundation. The foundation is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to preserving Iowa’s iconic rural buildings. It raises money to provide matching grants to help property owners restore their barns and educates the public through the magazine and barn tours.
For the Fall 2025 tour, I visited the Platz Barn north of Waterloo, Iowa. The barn is a commanding presence on the wide-open landscape with its white paint, green trim and a uniquely angled roof that was the result of a sawmill apprentice error when the barn was built in 1894.
Platz Barn photo by David Austin
I had a delightful visit with Miriam Neessen and Marie Schildroth who are twin sisters who grew up in a giant house on the farm with their grandparents Levi and Elizabeth Platz, parents Clarence and Blossom, Aunt Edith and Uncle Ray. Their grandparents purchased the farm in the heart of the Great Depression in 1932 and raised crops, dairy cattle, hogs and chickens.
The family had a smokehouse to smoke hams and grew produce in three large gardens along with an apple and cherry orchard. Miriam recalls, ”We raised raspberries and strawberries and we shucked peas until you thought you couldn’t shuck anymore. We canned a lot of apple sauce and Aunt Edie canned cherries and made pies from them.”
Aunt Edith was the last remaining sibling and she continued living on the farm until she passed away in 1999 at the age of 97. For the tour, Marie and Miriam made Aunt Edie’s recipe for sugar cookies in the shape of a barn and decorated them in the white with green trim color scheme their farm is famous for.
The cookies had a good buttercream frosting, but since I don’t have the family recipe I did not include one here.
Ingredients:
3 ½ cups (420 grams) All-purpose Flour
1 ½ cups (297 grams) Granulated White Sugar
2 tsp. Baking Powder
1 tsp. Cream of Tartar
1 tsp. Vanilla
3 large Eggs
1 cup (226 grams) Butter
Directions:
Mix flour, sugar, baking powder and cream of tartar. Add vanilla and eggs. Cream in butter until well mixed. Chill. Roll into small balls and flatten. Bake at 350° for 8-10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the cookie.
The original owner of our house made wine as a hobby and was an avid gardener who planted Marechal Foch grapes back in the 1970s. We’ve built on his legacy by converting a significant amount of the lawn into a haven for pollinators and wildlife of all kinds with prairie grasses and perennial flowers.
Lawn converted to Perennial Garden
We’ve kept his original produce garden going and enjoy the rewards from it all year long, not only the fresh fruits and veggies in season, but also preserving them through canning and freezing to make use throughout the winter. Grape jam and grape juice have been my favorite way to preserve the strong cherry flavor of the Marechal Foch grape.
Marechal Foch Grape Blossom
I love canning the juice and enjoying it mixed with sparkling water or baking it into a bread called Mosbolletjies. Homemade grape jam goes well with it.
Mosbolletjies Bread
We’re pleased to build on the foundation started by the previous owners of our house and expand on it because I think the suburban landscape has incredible potential to create biodiverse ecosystems on a small scale that can add up to having a big impact.
I went back to the rural area I grew up in to scatter the ashes of one of my brothers by the creek that ran through our old farm. As I gazed across the landscape, I was struck by the distinct lack of plant diversity. It was all row crops producing corn and soybeans. It’s a utilitarian landscape geared to maximizing the return on investment of very expensive land through the production of commodities.
I’m not knocking it. Modern agriculture has created an abundance of food the likes of which civilization has never known. But climate change is real and pollinator wildlife is under severe threat. The modern production of commodity agriculture shows no real signs of adjusting.
I think a more productive route is to promote a culture that embraces gardening of all kinds as a lifestyle in urban and suburban areas. The urban and suburban landscape can be a canvas to create a new kind of living art that satisfies the soul, promotes physical activity and fosters a sense of connection to one’s surroundings and nourishment.
Marechal Foch Grapes
Ingredients:
This is a basic ratio of ingredients that should be used for any quantity of juice you may have.
1½ cups Grape Juice
2 tbsp. Ball Classic Pectin
1 cup Sugar
***Add ¼ tsp. Citric Acid per cup
Directions:
Step 1: Bring your grapes to a low boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Strain through fine cheesecloth or a chinois.
Avoid the temptation to strain twice to make the juice clearer. It removes too much of the natural pectin and makes for a loose jam.
Step 2: Add the juice and pectin to a large pot and bring to a rolling boil.
Step 3: Boil the juice and pectin for one minute.
Step 4: Add sugar and continue boiling and stirring until the sugar completely dissolves. Boil hard for one minute.
The sugar must be added last or the jam won’t set.
Step 5: Ladle the hot liquid into canning jars and process using the water bath canning method for 10 minutes.
If using a pressure canner, process at 6 lbs. for 10 minutes. Allow the canner to completely depressurize naturally before removing the jars.
According to History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, the ancient Greeks and Romans positively hated rye flour. Throughout the recorded history of the early civilized world, the rye plant seems to have been universally despised.
Somewhere in the Middle Ages, for reasons unexplained, people in Central Europe and Scandinavia spontaneously started liking the flavor of rye. These are my people.
Peasants in Central and Northern Europe grew rye and wheat plants together for sound agricultural reasons. While wheat was the staple grain in the warm climates of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Southern Europe, it grew less well in the colder northern regions. The rye plant thrived in cooler temperatures. Growing both plants together reduced the risk of a bad harvest for people in the North.
The harvested grain was called maslin. Rye flour has a low gluten content and produces tough, dense breads on its own. Breads made with rye flour benefit from the high gluten content of wheat flour. This combination of rye and wheat formed the basis of all the rye breads to come from Central Europe and Scandinavia, from light Lithuanian Lietuvaitė, to dense Scandinavian Rugbrød, to hearty German Pumpernickel and Russian Black Bread.
This recipe is definitely on the darker, heartier end of the spectrum and has gone through many variations over the years. The addition of unsweetened cocoa was the final touch of perfection. It is a staple bread in our household, drawing on the Eastern European heritage of our ancestors which I’m convinced is somehow tied up in our food craving DNA.
Peasant Dinner during Harvesting, Konstantin Makovsky, 1871
Ingredients:
327 grams (2⅓ cups) White Bread Flour
218 grams (1⅔ cups) Fine Dark Rye Flour
2 tsp. (1 packet) Active or Quick-Rise Dry Yeast
2 tsp. Sea Salt
1 tbsp. Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
4 tsp. Caraway Seeds, plus extra for sprinkling
2 tsp. Charnushka Seeds, plus extra for sprinkling
2 tsp. Dill Seeds, plus extra for sprinkling
1 Egg
3 tbsp. Molasses
375 grams (1⅔ cups) Warm Water
Directions:
Step 1: Combine dry ingredients and mix well. Add egg, molasses, and warm water. Knead for 8-10 minutes. This is a wet dough and rye flour is notoriously sticky; using the dough hook on a stand mixer is highly recommended.
Step 2: Set aside in an oiled bowled and let proof until doubled in size – usually about an hour.
Step 3: Knock back the dough and knead for several minutes on a floured surface. Form the dough into a smooth ball and place on a baking sheet covered with a silicone mat or parchment paper. Use a spray bottle to lightly mist the dough with water and sprinkle with more caraway, dill and charnushka seeds. Let rise for about another hour. Misting the loaf with water about half-way through helps prevent it from drying out.
Step 4: Preheat the oven to 450°F. Bake for 40 minutes. Use a spray bottle to mist the dough with 10-15 sprays every ten minutes to replicate the steam injection of commercial ovens. This helps develop a chewy crust. Turn the loaf around in the oven at the half-way point to ensure even baking. Let cool on a wire rack when baking is finished.
In honor of the opening night of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, I made a bread that has its origins in France and makes use of the French wine grapes that grow in our back yard here in Iowa and are ripening nicely at this time of year.
Mosbolletjies (moss – BALL – uh – keez) is a brioche-style bread featuring the juice of newly-harvested grapes and anise seed. It comes from South Africa but has its roots in France. The Dutch colonizers in South Africa recruited French Huguenots to start the wine industry there and the Huguenots brought this bread with them.
I’m using the juice of Marechal Foch grapes that were planted by the previous owner of our house back in the 1970s. The flavor of Marechal Foch grape juice has strong hints of cherries. The variety was developed as a wine grape in the early 1900s in France and is hearty in cold regions. It’s a common grape in the Upper Midwest and Canada.
Marechal Foch Grapes
This bread is traditionally made with butter, but I do sometimes like to substitute olive oil because it is lighter and more heart-healthy.
Ingredients:
540 grams (4 ½ cups) Bread Flour
66 grams (⅓ cup) Sugar
28 grams (4 tbsp.) Dry Milk Powder
4 tsp. (2 packets) Active Dry Yeast
2 tsp. Sea Salt
3 tbsp. Anise Seeds
1 large Egg
7 tbsp. (3.5 oz.) Unsalted Butter, melted. Olive Oil can be substituted.
1 ¼ cups Grape Juice
1 Tbsp. Unsalted Butter for brushing, melted
Simple Syrup:
1 tbsp. Sugar
1 tbsp. Water
Directions:
Step 1: Combine flour, sugar, milk powder, yeast, salt and anise seeds. Mix in egg, melted butter and grape juice to form a dough and knead for 8-10 minutes. Set aside in an oiled bowl and cover. Let rise until about doubled in size.
This is a dense dough and it’s a good idea to let this proof in a slightly warm oven. I like to turn the oven on for one minute and turn it off. That warms it up just enough.
Step 2: Weigh out eight equal-sized portions of dough and form them into balls. Arrange them in an 8½” x 4½” standard-sized bread loaf pan that has been coated with a little oil or non-stick cooking spray. Place the dough balls in the pan two deep and four across and let rise until they come up to the top of the pan.
Mosbolletjies after rising
Step 3: Preheat the oven to 350°F. and bake for 45 minutes, tenting the bread with aluminum foil half-way through the baking time and rotating the pan. This prevents the bread from browning too much.
Tent with Aluminum Foil
Step 4: Brush the baked bread with melted butter while still warm in the pan and let cool before removing. When cooled, brush the bread with simple syrup.
Rhubarb is the first produce in the garden to poke its head out of the snow after a long winter. While a few other signs of green life may be visible, it’s the emergence of rhubarb that truly signals that Spring is arriving.
The flavor of those first stalks of Spring need to be showcased. The preparation should be simple and the other ingredients should support without drawing attention. For me, the best way to serve new rhubarb is in Rhubarb Crumble, sometimes called Rhubarb Crunch.
The ingredient list for this recipe appears almost verbatim in church cookbooks throughout the Midwest. It can be found on the internet under titles that reference various people’s grandmas. It is time-tested and true. Any attempt to fancy it up will bring in flavors that just get in the way.
Rhubarb Crunch Recipe submitted by Mrs. Jerry Huettl
So many church cookbook recipes came from sources like Ladies Home Journal that it is almost impossible to say what the true origin of a popular old recipe really is. The fact that a recipe like this filters its way through so many local cultures so as to be enshrined in a church cookbook as a certain family’s favorite strikes me as being very democratic. A mass market publication may have been the source, but people, in effect, voted for what they liked and the recipe was adopted into a community through the localized social media influencers of their day working with the medium they had available – the local church cookbook.
This particular recipe was submitted by Mrs. Jerry Huettl in the Saints Peter and Paul’s Parish Cookbook in Mankato, Minnesota published in 1976 featuring artwork by Grades 4, 5, and 6 of the Saints Peter and Paul’s Grade School. I think their artwork is utterly charming.
Saints Peter and Paul’s Parish Cookbook, 1976
Saints Peter and Paul’s Cookbook Credits
Charming Artwork by Steve Nusbaum
Ingredients:
4 cups Rhubarb, cut into one-inch pieces
The Filling:
1 cup Granulated Sugar
2 tbsp. Corn Starch
1 cup Water
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
The Crumble:
1 cup All-Purpose Flour
¾ cup Regular Rolled Oats
1 cup Brown Sugar
1 tsp. Cinnamon
½ cup Melted Butter
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350° F.
For the filling, combine 1 cup granulated sugar and 2 tbsp. cornstarch in a sauce pan, add 1 cup water and stir until smooth. Cook mixture over medium-high heat and bring to a boil while stirring constantly to avoid burning. Continue stirring while simmering for about two minutes until the mixture thickens. Remove from heat and stir in 1 tsp. vanilla extract.
For the crumble, combine 1 cup flour, ¾ cup rolled oats, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon and ½ cup melted butter.
Crumble Mixture
Press half of the mixture into a two-quart baking dish.
Crumble base pressed into baking dish
Cover the base with the four cups of diced rhubarb. Pour the thickened filling mixture over the rhubarb.
There will be an update to this post coming after the holiday season of 2024. In future, I will not be cooking the pork and bacon in advance of baking all the ingredients together in the pie shell, which is more traditional anyway. I’d always been a little freaked out about this but shouldn’t have. I still think it’s a good idea to cook the chicken in advance of the bake in order to reduce some of the moisture. We’ll see…
Yorkshire Christmas Pie gives me a warm, Charles Dickens kind of Christmas feeling. It features sausage, chicken, chestnuts, dried apricots, cranberries and spices like nutmeg, mace and ginger. The pie has been an annual tradition for Deb and I ever since a massive Christmas Eve blizzard changed our holiday travel plans in 2017. Since we couldn’t go anywhere, we decided to try a new cooking experience in the spirit of “A Christmas Carol.”
Yorkshire Christmas Pies have their roots in the gigantic wild game pies of the middle ages. Large birds, like geese, would be stuffed with consecutively smaller birds along with other wild game and baked with fruit and spices in a pastry crust.
Royal Christmas: an 1857 print of the arrival of Queen Victoria’s Christmas banquet including the stuffed wild boar’s head and gigantic game pie.
The basis for this pie comes from the recipe on the BBC Good Food website. I’ve tweaked it in several ways. The BBC recipe calls for sausage, but does not specify what kind. I used my recipe for homemade English Banger Sausage. I cut the chicken breast into bite-sized pieces to make serving easier and I’ve increased the amount of dried apricots and roasted chestnuts and added an egg to help as a binder.
This is wonderful heritage food that deserves to be kept alive. It’s not fast, convenience food but it’s not fussy to make either. Only a modest skill level is needed to make an explosion of holiday flavor. Skilled bakers can make a pie much prettier than I and there is room for experimentation with ingredients. Some versions of Yorkshire Christmas Pie are solidly dense with ground pork and would make serving very convenient. I don’t mind a bit of crumble because of the jumble of flavors.
Use ⅔ of a double-sized shortcrust pastry dough for the shell of the pie and ⅓ for the cover.
Double Crust Pie Dough
Filling:
1 lb. Chicken Breast, cooked and cubed
1 Medium Onion, finely chopped and sautéed
1 ½ lbs. Ground Pork
¼ lb. Bacon, finely chopped
1 cup Dried Bread Crumbs
1 cup Cranberries, chopped
⅔ cup Dried Apricots, course chop
⅔ cup Chestnuts, roasted, peeled, and chopped
3 tsp. Sea Salt
1 tsp. Ground Black Pepper
1 tsp. Ground White Pepper
1 tsp. Mace Threads, freshly ground
½ tsp. Nutmeg, freshly ground
½ tsp. Ground Ginger
1 tsp. Dried Sage
1 tsp. Dried Thyme
Zest and Juice of 1 Lemon
1 Large Egg, whisked for the filling
1 Large Egg and a dash of milk for egg wash
Directions:
Step 1: Cook chicken, allow to cool and cut up into bite-sized pieces. Sauté onion and set aside.
Step 2: Coat a 10-inch diameter x 2.27-inch springform pan with oil or non-stick spray. Roll out ⅔ of a double crust pie dough and line the pan with the dough. Put the pan into a freezer for at least 15 minutes.
Step 3: Preheat oven to 375°F. In a large bowl, combine cooked chicken, ground pork, bacon, sautéed onions, chestnuts, dried apricots, cranberries, dried bread crumbs, spices, lemon zest, lemon juice and whisked egg.
Roll out the remaining pie dough for the pie’s lid.
Step 4: Fill the pie shell with the mixture. Press the contents down in order to get the mixture to hold together when baked. Place the pie dough lid on top of the pie shell and mixture. Seal the edges around the rim of the pie. Cut an “X” shape in the middle of the pie to act as a vent. Brush generously with egg wash.
Christmas Pie Ingredients in Shell
Christmas Pie with Egg Wash
Step 5: Place the pie tin on a baking sheet and bake for 60-65 minutes.
***Do yourself a favor and make this one or two days before serving. The flavors are much more pronounced and full when they have a chance to meld. Traditionally, this is meant to be served cold, but I like to reheat slices of the pie in an oven before serving.***
