Category: Desserts

Jerri’s Pumpkin Nut Cookies

Halloween trick or treating can be a lot of fun. Mothers and fathers know it, even though they may not be the ones greeting folks at their doors with shouts of “Trick or treat!!” Even a shy three-year old Tinkerbell or Dracula soon starts running up sidewalks and holding out a plastic pumpkin or paper bag to collect the loot and hurry back giggling to mom or dad ready to move on to the next house.

Jerri and I look forward to Halloween every year. We enjoy the little kids, though sometimes we have to lean down close to hear the whispered “Trick or treat” and we certainly get a kick out of seeing older children participating, especially when they are shepherding a litter of little ones. When Jerri was giving piano lessons, one of the special treats was seeing some of her students in costumes and smiles.

My first few years as a trick or treater involved visiting the neighbors when we lived in Hayward, but we moved into the country when I was seven, and neighbors were far apart. There were only three houses besides ours in the first mile of the town road in front of our house, but they were all in the first quarter mile, so we made them our first stop of the evening. Then Mom and Dad would drive us into town. They would visit with friends for an hour or so while my sisters and I walked the streets on the north side of Hayward.

By the time I entered high school, however, I was feeling a little odd about trick or treating. Teen anxiety, perhaps, but a more sophisticated friend than I suggested that we might have some fun collecting money for UNICEF. To be honest, I don’t think that I knew what UNICEF was when she mentioned it. Once I understood that we would be collecting money for the United Nations Children’s Fund, however, I was all for the project and helped recruit a team.

There were six of us, and we worked in pairs, a guy and a girl, each of us carrying a can with orange construction paper taped around it. My partner and I were doing pretty well collecting nickels and dimes from homeowners happy to help children in need.

When we came to the Twin Gables bar at the end of Beal Avenue we saw quite a few cars in front, which prompted me to suggest that we try our luck for UNICEF inside. Since my parents were good friends of Fritz and Irma who owned the place, I knew them both and was confident that they would give us a chance to explain our reason for coming in.

Collecting for UNICEF in a bar was a brilliant idea. Irma started it off with a dollar bill and explained to the patrons what we were doing. My partner and I set up a squeeze play: She began at the south end of the bar and I took the north. We may have been lucky, but the first two people wiped their change from the bar and dropped it into our little orange cans, then proceeded to bully everyone else into doing the same.

As we walked behind the row of stools, the person who had just contributed encouraged his or her neighbor. The advice was blunt but good-natured. “Jake, Lois is wondering where you are. Just give ‘em the money and go home. You’ve had enough.” and “You missed a quarter, Phil, dump it in.” I think that we collected ten dollars from that one stop. That’s about $75 in today’s money.

When we rendezvoused with the other two teams, we told them what we had done. They had skipped the bars, which were downtown and away from the houses they had called on, so we split up and covered the Karibalis’, Anglers and Moccasin bars in just a few minutes with similar success. It was a fun night that we repeated for the next three years until I headed for the university at Madison. UNICEF did well.

Though we no longer walk the streets on Halloween, Jerri and I still look forward to greeting the trick or treaters who come to our door. We usually have a pretty good turnout. Perhaps they are attracted by the Jack O’ Lantern that I carve each year. While not as artistic as many in our neighborhood, I do think that trick or treaters appreciate the sight of a truly primitive carving. At least, they are often laughing when I open the door.

One extra benefit of carving a Jack O’ Lantern for Halloween is that you can turn it into pumpkin pies, breads and cookies. We used to do that. Today I just break our Jack O’ Lantern into pieces in front of my deer stand, but years ago I cleaned and peeled my work of art so Jerri could make mashed pumpkin.

She found this recipe when we were living in Kentucky and modified it to make cookies that were healthful as well as tasty. Hence the whole wheat flour, mashed pumpkin, raisins AND nuts. It’s a cookie that is almost a balanced diet by itself with dairy products (eggs), whole grains (whole wheat flour) fruits (raisins and pumpkin) and nuts. If, like many of us, you think pumpkins are really vegetables, you will feel even better about eating these cookies.

Since you simply stir stuff together to make a soft dough and drop globs of it on cookie sheets, these cookies are very easy to make. We use canned pumpkin today, but if you are cooking a couple of pumpkins for pies, save a cup of mashed pumpkin for a batch of pumpkin cookies to share with your family and friends this fall.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup mashed pumpkin
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ginger
1 cup raisins
1 cup chopped nuts

PROCEDURE:

Cream the shortening and sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the eggs and pumpkin and mix thoroughly until you have a smooth batter. Put the flours, salt and spices into a sifter and sift the dry ingredients into the batter by thirds, stirring well after each addition. Fold in the raisins and nuts.

Preheat the oven to 350º and grease the cookie sheets.

Drop rounded teaspoonfuls of batter onto the cookie sheets and bake the cookies for about fifteen to eighteen minutes until the edges begin to brown. You should end up with about four dozen cookies.

NOTE: Depending on the moisture content of the pumpkin and flour, you may need to add a small amount of water or flour to the batter. It should be stiff but not dry.

Jim’s Raw Apple Bread

Kahil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, is a book that draws me back every few weeks. It is a poetic work of philosophy, much like another of my favorites, Ecclesiastes, in the Old Testament. The book is structured as a series of requests asked of the prophet by the people of the city when they learn that he is leaving to return to his homeland.

Almustafa, the prophet, has been waiting twelve years for a ship to come for him, and the people have come to respect his wisdom. Knowing that he is about to leave them, they ask for guidance about birth, death and everything in between. One old man, an innkeeper, asks about eating and drinking. After saying that he wishes that one did not need to live off other creatures, the prophet explains that one should eat and drink reverently. Here is part of his answer:

‘….And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
“Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”’

I was in college when I first encountered Gibran, but his reference to the fragrance of apples took me back to my childhood. I can still remember how wonderful our basement smelled after we stored the apples from our annual trip to Bayfield every fall.

There were a few farmsteads with an apple tree or two near Hayward, and my grandmother Hopp had a big crabapple tree that usually bore a good crop of “pickling crabs,” but the climate in northern Wisconsin then was not very hospitable to apple trees. That didn’t stop my mother from planting apple trees she ordered from various catalogs and magazine ads. Long after I had left home, she found a couple of varieties that gave her enough apples for a few pies and various other apple desserts.

I’m sure that she made apple bread, but this recipe is from James Beard’s Beard on Bread. I call it Jim’s Raw Apple Bread for two reasons. First, James Beard was Jim to his close friends. I cannot claim any right to such familiarity, but, second, I do know other men named Jim, and one of them supplied the apples for our apple bread this year.

I enjoy walking in New Richmond. Walking is good exercise, and it also provides one with a leisurely opportunity to see things that are not always apparent while hurrying through the city in a car or even on a bicycle. Some of my more interesting encounters have involved an eagle, deer (several does and one time a magnificent ten point buck) and a black bear.

On a walk a few years ago I noticed some beautiful apples on a tree overhanging an alley not far from our house. This year I gathered the courage to knock on the front door of house with the apples which looked prime for picking. When the householder answered the door I introduced myself and asked if he would mind if I picked a few of his apples. He told me to pick all I needed and said that he picked them mostly to take to his mother-in-law. “I fill a pie plate with apples and take it to her. In a few hours the plate comes back filled with a delicious apple pie.” He also told me his name was Jim.

So here is the recipe for Jim’s Raw Apple Bread. It is particularly easy to make, since you don’t even peel the apples, and it’s not as sweet as some other apple breads. If you use nice red apples like the ones from Jim’s apple tree, you will end up with a particularly lovely bread to share with family and friends.

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
2 T buttermilk
1 cup coarsely chopped unpeeled apples
1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
1 tsp. vanilla

PROCEDURE:

An hour or so before you begin making this cake, bring a stick of butter to room temperature. While the butter is softening, you can wash and chop a cup of apples. Remove the seeds and cores, but leave the peels. You can also mix the salt, soda and baking powder with the flour while the butter softens.

Preheat the oven to 350º and grease a nine by five-inch loaf pan.

Cream the softened butter. Slowly cream in the sugar and then beat in the eggs. Sift about a third of the dry ingredients into the sugar mixture and beat well. Beat in a tablespoon of buttermilk, then another third of the flour, then the second tablespoon of buttermilk. Beat in the remainder of the flour followed by the vanilla. Fold in the apples and nuts.

Put the batter into the pan and bake on a center shelf for fifty to sixty minutes. Test for doneness at fifty minutes. A toothpick inserted near the center of the loaf will come out clean when the bread is done.

Let the bread cool in the pan for five or six minutes, then loosen it and carefully transfer the bread to a rack. Let it cool completely before slicing.

NOTES: If you don’t have any buttermilk in your refrigerator, you can substitute sour milk. To make it, put two scant tablespoons of milk in a cup and stir in a half teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice. Let the mixture sit for a few minutes, then use it like the buttermilk.

James Beard says you can use either walnuts or pecans. We prefer walnuts for this bread.