Category: Vegetarian Dishes

Kandy & Ginny’s Pumpkin Pie Squares

A few weeks ago I was tempted by some custardy-looking bars on the table after the first service at church. When I asked Pat, who had volunteered to host the coffee and snack table that day, she told me that they were pumpkin pie squares. I bit into a bar and was pleasantly surprised to discover that one could enjoy a piece of pumpkin pie while watching one’s diet. Pat had cut her squares into inch and a half pieces, so I assumed that each piece had only a few calories.

Since Jerri and I usually sit near the front of the sanctuary, we are nearly always among the last people to shake hands with the pastor and head to the coffee table. Looking around, I did not see anyone heading for the snacks, so I asked if I might take another of the half dozen remaining bars. I’m sure that the two bars still had a lot fewer calories than a piece of pie with whipped cream.

I was hooked by those tasty morsels and asked Pat for the recipe. “It’s in the church cookbook,” she told me. “It’s Kandy Schaffer and Ginny Hoogheem’s recipe, and we like it a lot. You must have a copy.”

So I went home, found A Little Taste of Heaven, published in 1990 by the United Methodist Women of our church, and made Pumpkin Pie Squares. Unless you hate pumpkin pie, this is a recipe you will want to add to your repertoire of desserts.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup old-fashioned oatmeal
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 (15 oz.) can pumpkin
1 can (12 to 13 oz.) evaporated milk
2 large eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 T softened butter

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 350º and lightly grease a nine by thirteen-inch baking pan. Use a fork to mix the flour, oatmeal and brown sugar in a mixing bowl. Soften the butter and cut it into the dry ingredients. Pat this crust mixture into the bottom of the pan and bake for fifteen minutes.

While the crust is baking, beat together the pumpkin, milk, eggs, sugar, salt and spices with an electric mixer. Pour the pumpkin batter into the crust and return the pan to the oven. Bake for twenty minutes.

Stir the pecans, brown sugar and softened butter together in a small bowl. Sprinkle the nut mixture over the partially cooked pumpkin and continue baking for about thirty to thirty-five minutes or until done. Check for doneness with a table knife inserted near the center of the pan. If the knife comes out clean, the bars are done. If not, bake another five minutes and check again.

NOTE: Kandy and Ginny both died within the last few years and the list of those who contributed recipes to A Little Taste of Heaven when it was published in 1990 includes many more who have passed away. I think this little cookbook is a memorial to those women (and a few men) who cooked and loved their families, church and God. Every time we follow one of their recipes, we affirm that those who are gone are not forgotten.

Virginia Waffles

I found this recipe in a cookbook that makes me uncomfortable. The Southern Cook Book of Fine Old Dixie Recipes was published in 1935 by Lillie S. Lustig, S. Claire Sondheim and Sarah Rensel. Chances are good that I would have enjoyed meeting these ladies and tasting some of the dishes they cooked from recipes in this little book.

If our meeting had occurred in the 1930’s I doubt that I would have thought the authors were prejudiced against blacks or that the drawings and snippets of poetry that accompany the recipes were racist. However, when I read

“There was a little Alabamy coon
An’ he ain’t been born very long:”

illustrated by a sketch of a black baby held by his mother, I think that most Americans today would agree that calling a human being a coon is disgusting.

I have met and interacted with people in states formerly part of the Confederacy who were racists, but I also know southerners who sent their children to public schools rather than Segregation Academies. We have elected Presidents who fought for civil rights for all citizens and used their bully pulpit to denounce racism. Four of them were from states that fought to preserve slavery—Missouri, Texas, Georgia and Arkansas.

Our country is a better place today than it was eighty years ago because thousands of brave people have risked their lives to fight racial injustice. I have known one of them personally. Ed Ketcham, a former minister at our church in New Richmond, was one of the freedom riders in Alabama. Before our evenings of duplicate bridge in Woodbury, Ed shared some of his memories of that summer in 1965.

There are people like Ed still fighting to make our country even better. They are women like Heather Heyer, who was killed in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer. They are young athletes like fifteen-year-old Anthony Borges who was shot five times while blocking the door to a classroom at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They are the thousands of students demonstrating to make our schools and country safer in spite of the insults and threats from people who disagree with them. Fifty years from now, our great grandchildren will shake their heads when they learn about the things we think are important today.

We are all part of the times we live in. Understanding this, I can appreciate the genius of the founders of our country, even though many of them owned slaves; the courage of the pioneers who settled the wilderness, though they stole the land from its native inhabitants; and the poetry of T.S. Eliot in spite of his anti-Semitism.

Thus, I think that we need to recognize the contributions of all Americans, even those from people whose prejudices we find objectionable. Blacks, whites, reds, browns and people of every shade between have enriched our country and our lives, and that includes the ladies who compiled the Southern Cook Book of Fine Old Dixie Recipes. Here is a tasty variation on waffles from their book.

INGREDIENTS:

2 1/4 cups boiling water
1/2 cup white corn meal
1 1/2 cups milk
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 T sugar
3 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
4 T melted butter

PROCEDURE:

Bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan and stir the corn meal in gradually. Cook it for about fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally.

Bring the eggs and milk to room temperature while the corn meal is cooking, and melt the butter. Preheat the waffle iron.

Transfer the cooked corn meal to a mixing bowl and stir in the milk. Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt into the liquid ingredients by thirds, stirring well between each addition. You can add a little extra milk if the batter is too thick.

Separate the eggs. Stir the yolks and butter into the batter and beat the whites to stiff peaks in a medium-sized mixing bowl. Fold the beaten egg whites into the batter.

Bake the batter in your waffle iron until each waffle is puffed and golden brown.

Serve with butter and maple syrup.

NOTE: If you are looking for a waffle recipe that doesn’t include corn meal, here is one for Mennonite Waffles.