Category: Vegetarian Dishes

Miss Diane’s Cranberry Raisin Pie

In November our cabin turns into a hunting shack with blaze orange coats, hats and pants hung in the hallway or piled on cots in the main room. If I close my eyes, the fragrance of gun oil and Hoppe’s #9 combines with the smell of boots and wool socks drying next to the stove to take me back to the hunting shacks I remember as a boy.

Back then the men didn’t shave or shower in camp but they usually washed their hands in a washbasin before devouring huge sandwiches and vast amounts of soup or chili washed down with plenty of beer that was kept outside the door next to their rifles. When it was really cold the beer was brought inside to keep it from freezing and breaking the bottles. The rifles stayed outside.

Hunting shacks attracted mediocre card players and great story tellers. They were like repertory theaters where dramatic presentations were repeated annually, and some particularly popular acts were shared multiple times in one nine-day season, depending on the amount of beer, brandy and bourbon consumed by the gang. Even the card players sometimes stopped to listen.

Antlers became larger, the deer more elusive and the hunters more crafty, until some grizzled old man with white fuzz sprouting on his cheeks would put a halt to the chatter with a story about a gigantic buck that ran a mile shot through the heart and tumbled down a hill so steep that it took four men to drag him back to the shack.

There was always a camp cook and one or two good stories about him. My favorite was the one about the cook who was left with a pile of dishes on opening morning. He had the stand nearest the cabin so he could clean up, put the stew on and be in the woods shortly after daylight. Kept awake by snores the night before, however, he decided to crawl back into his bunk for a nap before tackling the kitchen chores.

It was broad daylight when he awoke. There was hot water on the barrel stove, so he stoked the cookstove, put on a new pot of coffee and the stew and began washing dishes. As he was getting ready to throw out the dishwater, a ten point buck walked into the clearing. “I backed away from the window real careful and loaded the 30-30,” he explained. “When I looked out the window, he was gone.” The suspense built.

“So I opened the door real quiet, and there he was, walking down the road, so I pulled down on him and dropped him with one shot.” By the time the gang got back for lunch, the buck was hanging from the deer pole, their cook was half sloshed and the stew was scorched a little. I think every hunting shack has echoed with a story like this.

We have a camp cook who doesn’t hunt. Chris does hike through the woods to drive deer to the rest of us and helps drag them out when necessary. He reminds us that he once spotted a buck for us.

While we were enjoying our midmorning snack of doughnuts and coffee at the table and Chris was sitting in the easy chair working on his Christmas letter, he suddenly remarked, “That’s a nice eight point buck for you guys.” Unfortunately our rifles were leaning against the cabin in full view of the deer who left rapidly when we opened the door. Wiser now, one of us leaves a rifle at the back door, but another buck has yet to appear.

Besides spotting that buck for us, Chris makes great chili and cornbread and has a wonderful recipe for cranberry raisin pie. Here is his introduction to that recipe.

“Speaking of pies, here is a recipe that I inherited from my sister-in-law. It has been a staple of their annual Thanksgiving pie breakfast. The breakfast had its origins in the family logging camp where annually they served as much pie as you could eat in honor of Thanksgiving. It is easy to make and delicious.”

INGREDIENTS:

2 T flour
2 cups sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
3 cups cranberries
1 cup raisins
2 T butter
1 egg
2/3 cup boiling water
Zest from one lemon
2 pie crusts

PROCEDURE:

First, make enough pie dough for a nine-inch double crust pie. You will find a simple pie crust recipe here.

Mix the flour, sugar and salt in a two to three quart saucepan. Wash and dry a lemon and scrape the outer layer off the rind with a zester or the smallest holes on a kitchen grater. Stir the cranberries, raisins and lemon zest into the dry ingredients.

To make the filling, stir in the boiling water and cook the cranberry mixture over low to medium heat, stirring a couple of times, until the cranberry skins start popping.

Preheat the oven to 400º.

Remove the filling from the heat, stir in the butter and allow the filling to cool about five minutes.

Roll out a bottom crust and line a nine-inch pie plate. Pour the filling into the crust. Roll out the rest of the dough, cut it in half inch strips and make a lattice by laying strips in alternate directions at ninety degrees to each other. Moisten the edge of the bottom crust before laying on the lattice strips to help glue the lattice to the bottom crust. Trim the crust and make a decorative edge with your fingers or a fork.

Beat the egg and a teaspoon of cold water in a small bowl or cup until it is lemon colored. Use a pastry brush to paint the lattice with the egg wash.

Bake the pie for 40 to 45 minutes until the crust is a golden brown and the filling is bubbling.

Cool the pie thoroughly on a wire rack. Once cool, the filling will jell and the pie will be ready to eat, but it tastes even better if you make it a day ahead of time.

NOTES: Chris included the following words of wisdom: “After cleaning the oven once, I also put a pan under the pie to catch drippings.” He also noted that he tried golden raisins once, but the result was “not so good.”

This is not a low carb pie, but it is wonderful. If you count carbs, eat a smaller piece.

Jerri’s Cracked Wheat Bread

Once upon a time there was a young woman named Jerri who lived in Kentucky. One day she decided to bake a bread that was different from the white bread she had been baking, so she went to the library and found a recipe for cracked wheat bread in a book called A World of Breads by Dolores Casella.

She followed the recipe very carefully and soon had a sticky mess in the bowl. “It was like cake batter when I scraped it out on the bread board,” she explained, “but I just kept adding more flour.” Her perseverance was rewarded, and the bread turned out so good that she is still making it. The recipe (now on a card) has a place of honor in one of her recipe boxes with a note that this bread is “chewy but good.”

Compared to commercial cracked wheat breads, this loaf that has some texture and a delightful flavor of whole wheat. Jerri sometimes makes it with wheat berries from Kansas that she grinds in a coffee grinder, but you can buy coarsely cracked wheat in many supermarkets and most food co-ops.

Having made this bread dozens of times, Jerri now knows why her first attempt was such a challenge. Some kinds of cracked wheat are finer than others, flours differ and even the humidity in the kitchen can affect the proportion of water and flour needed to make a good dough. Just add enough flour to make a soft but workable dough, and don’t worry. Your bread will turn out just fine.

INGREDIENTS:

2 2/3 cups water (divided)
1 1/4 cups cracked wheat
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 1/2 tsp. salt
2 T butter plus extra to grease a bowl
1 1/2 T yeast
About 5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour

PROCEDURE:

Dissolve a tablespoon of granulated sugar in two-thirds cup of lukewarm water (about 100 to 105º). Stir in the yeast and allow it to proof. While the yeast is proofing, boil two cups of water and and pour them over the cracked wheat in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the brown sugar, salt and butter and allow the mixture to cool to lukewarm.

Stir the yeast into the cracked wheat mixture when it is cool enough. Add the flour a cup at a time, beating well between additions. When the dough begins to pull away from the sides of the bowl, turn it out on a floured surface. You will have added between four and a half and five and a half cups of flour when you turn it out.

Use a spatula or baker’s scraper to coat the dough with flour and let the dough rest a couple of minutes. Then knead until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Grease a large bowl with butter. Form the dough into a ball and put it in the bowl, turning the ball to make sure the entire surface is covered lightly with butter. Cover the bowl with a damp towel for about an hour in a warm place until the dough is nearly doubled in bulk.

Punch it down and let it rise for another half hour. Then punch it down and turn it out onto a floured board. Let it rest for a minute while you butter two bread loaf pans. Divide the dough in half and shape each half into a loaf. Place the loaves in the pans, cover them with a damp towel and allow the loaves to rise in a warm place until the dough reaches the tops of the pans.

While the dough is rising preheat the oven to 350º. Bake for about an hour and fifteen minutes. After an hour if the bread is a rich golden brown, turn the loaves out and test for doneness by tapping on the tops and bottoms. If the loaves sound hollow, the bread is done. If not, let them bake another few minutes on the oven rack and test again. Cool the loaves on a rack before slicing.

NOTES: Our standard bread loaf pans measure 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches and hold six cups. Jerri sometimes substitutes a cup of whole wheat flour for all-purpose flour and has even used a little rye flour, but follow the recipe the first time you make this bread.

Jerri has a neat way of forming loaves that she learned from her mother. Instead of trying to make neatly shaped oblong loaves, she divides the dough into four parts, makes balls of dough and puts two balls in each pan. One of these days I will begin doing this, as her loaves always turn out, and it makes it easy to share a half loaf with a friend.

It’s good toasted too, smothered with butter and jam.