Tag: casserole

Simple Scalloped Potatoes

Eight people stand in front of a car in a field with trees in the background. In the back row, the dapper man on the left with the mustache is my grandfather. He is wearing a three piece suit, tie and a golf-style cap. At the far right is my grandmother in a dress decorated with what appears to be satin. White stockings contrast with her sensible shoes.

Between Grandpa and Grandma stand their three oldest children—George, Margaret and Harry, my father. The three younger children are in front. Like her older sister, Laura is outfitted in her Sunday best complete with a hat and handbag. The naughty one hiding her face with a scarf is Hilda, but her little brother Harold stares directly into the camera.

Fred Rang familyThe Rang family was having their photo taken with their new 1929 Ford. It was the last car Grandpa bought, a black Model A Fordor with room enough for the entire family. The price was $613. My father told me that the car was paid for with the money Grandpa got for the potatoes they sold that year from the small field between the house and the road.

Though Grandpa and Grandma Rang had dairy cows and flocks of chickens and ducks and grew oats and hay, potatoes were the cash crop. When my father was growing up, Wisconsin ranked in the top three or four states for potato production. Grandpa was proud of his potatoes, and they gave him some extra money to put into a savings account at the bank in Hayward.

He was lucky to have bought the car before the bank failed. All the savings the family had earned from their hard work in the fields disappeared. A few months before the Crash, Grandpa had started putting the cream checks into a bank in Stone Lake, Wisconsin, which survived the depression, so he had a little cash. They didn’t have much money, but at least they had a new car.

My father told me that the Ford replaced the Overland he had learned to drive when he was about ten years old. He would drive it from the farm to the north side of Hayward, where Grandpa would take over the controls. Grandpa never liked to drive a car, but he felt that it was his responsibility to drive in town.

I don’t think that I have ever seen an Overland except in photos, but I have wonderful memories of Grandpa’s Model A. Dad and his younger brother, Uncle Harold, used it to hunt ruffed grouse, which we called partridges. The Model A was designed to be driven on the roads of the time, complete with rocks, ruts and mud holes. It sat high above the ground on its twenty-one inch wheels and was perfect for negotiating logging roads and fire lanes in northern Wisconsin.

My father was a mechanic and I was interested in cars, so I soon learned that Grandpa’s Model A went about twenty miles on a gallon of gas, that it had mechanical brakes and a three speed transmission. It also had a heater that was adjusted by sliding a metal cover off a hole in the floor behind the engine and a windshield that could be cranked up to let cool air in.

The crank out windshield made it an ideal “bird hunter’s” car. Once we left the highway and were on a gravel road or dirt track through the woods, the windshield would be cranked up and Dad would load his double-barreled shotgun. It was a twelve gauge with big hammers. Uncle Harold drove and I watched from the back seat.

“There’s one!” Dad would say. Uncle Harold would stop or slow down to get closer to the partridge as my father aimed the gun through the open windshield. And then, “Boom!!” My ears would still be ringing as my father brought the partridge back to the car and laid it on a gunny sack on the floor boards next to me in the back.

Not very good for one’s hearing, not very sporting either, but we had lots of partridges for supper when I was growing up.

Scalloped potatoes go pretty well with fried partridge. You can make your own like this.

INGREDIENTS:

5 to 6 cups potatoes
2 to 3 T minced onion
3 T butter
2 T all-purpose flour
2 to 3 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 cups milk

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 350º while you mince the onion and peel and thinly slice the potatoes. A mandoline or the slicing side of a kitchen grater makes this job easy. Heat the milk to steaming.

Melt the butter in a saucepan and stir in the flour, salt and pepper to make a roux. Cook the mixture for a minute or two, but be careful not to brown it. Add the hot milk. Stir continuously until the mixture bubbles and you have a smooth sauce. In case you are interested, what you will have made is a white or Béchamel sauce.

Mix the onion with the potatoes and spread them in a nine by nine or eight by twelve-inch baking dish. Pour the sauce over the potatoes. You should be able to see the sauce in the top layer. If you can’t, add a little extra milk. Put the dish on a center shelf in the oven and bake uncovered for about an hour.

NOTES: If you are using reduced fat milk, use an extra tablespoon of butter to make the sauce. Be careful with the salt. Two teaspoons is enough for our taste, but you may want a little more. Remember, you can always add salt at the table, but it is extremely difficult to get those little salt crystals separated from the milk and potatoes after the dish is cooked.

For best results, use waxy potatoes like reds or golds instead of russets. If all you have are russets, however, they will taste fine, though they tend to become mushy,

Aunt Dorothy’s Cabbage Hotdish

Before my mother met and married my father, she played guitar and sang with her brother Basil (nicknamed Blackie) in a small band that played at taverns and supper clubs around Hayward in the late 1930’s and early 40’s. When I asked her how she learned to play, she told me that a neighbor had taught her the basics. Then she had practiced with Blackie and the other musicians who formed their band. She would listen to the radio, write down the lyrics, learn the melodies, and work out the chords, then teach new songs to the band.

In going through old photos I found this one of Mom and Uncle Blackie with their guitars when she was a teenager.

Mom-Blackie-guitars

I remember her playing and singing on the front porch when I was a kid. She could yodel too, which really impressed me. I loved her singing and yodeling in “Cattle Call” and “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.” “Red River Valley” and “Old Shep” were two more of my favorites.

The closest I came to musical stardom was my rendition of “Old Shep” at one of the PTA evenings at Blair School. It’s a wonderful tearjerker. I still sing it to irritate my wife. It opens with “When I was a lad and old Shep was a pup” and concludes, “If there’s a dog heaven, there’s one thing I know, Old Shep has a wonderful home.” To get the right audience reaction, you have to drag out the last few syllables.

Mom had taught me the song and coached my performance. There was no prize, but everyone clapped. Elvis Presley won $5 when he sang the song. Years later, when I learned that, it made me feel proud to have shared something with one of my early heroes.

Dad didn’t sing very much, but he did play the harmonica. On hot evenings in the summer, he would go in the bedroom, bring out the box with the harmonica and say, “Let’s make some music.” Mom would get her guitar and notebook with the words to the songs she knew, and we would all go out on the porch.

One of my favorites was “Little Red Wing” with Dad playing the harmonica and Mom on guitar with the vocal. I can still almost hear those words about the Indian maiden who lost her warrior lover:

“Now the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing,
The breeze is sighing, the night bird’s crying….”

Sometimes my sisters and I would join in on the choruses. More often we just listened to music we liked a lot more than anything on the radio.

I don’t remember hearing Uncle Blackie play music with my mother, but I wish I had. When he came back from the war in Europe, he married Aunt Dorothy and they settled down at Hayward. They had a family like ours with kids that she needed to cook for. She still cooks and bakes a lot, and she obliged when I asked for some of her recipes. Here is one of them. Vegetables, hamburger, and starch in one dish. Very tasty too. Try it.

INGREDIENTS:

4 or 5 cups of coarsely chopped cabbage
1/3 cup rice
2/3 cup water
1 lb. hamburger
1 medium onion (2 1/2 inch diameter)
2 or 3 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 cans tomato soup
1/4 cup water
1/2 tsp. sugar

PROCEDURE:

Remove any damaged leaves and rinse the cabbage. Chop about half a medium head into a two-inch dice. You can parboil it in a pot of boiling water for three minutes or steam it for about four minutes. Drain any liquid from the pan and put the cabbage into a large mixing bowl.

Rinse a third cup of rice, then put it in a small covered saucepan with two-thirds cup of water, cover the pan and bring it to a boil. Reduce the heat to very low and cook until all the water has been absorbed, about fifteen minutes. Turn off the heat and put the rice into the mixing bowl with the cabbage.

Preheat the oven to 350º.

Peel a medium onion and chop it into a quarter to half-inch dice. Wash and remove the seeds and white membrane from about half a medium green bell pepper. Chop it into a half-inch dice. Peel the paper from two or three cloves of garlic and mince them.

Brown the hamburger over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until it is translucent. Season the meat and onion with the salt and pepper, then stir in the garlic and green pepper and add the meat mixture to the bowl of cabbage and rice.

Pour two cans of condensed tomato soup and a quarter cup of water into the bowl, add a half teaspoon of sugar and mix everything together. Spoon the mixture into a three quart casserole and bake it covered for an hour.

NOTES: You can use two or three extra cups of cabbage and a full cup of green pepper to make the hamburger go farther. If you do that, add a little extra salt and pepper.

This is a good dish to bring to a potluck.