cheese – Page 8 – Courage in the Kitchen

This is a recipe from Kansas, a statement which you might want to interpret as a gourmet alert. The ingredients include Velveeta. But though I hate to admit it, in spite of that this recipe makes a delicious side dish.

Rhonda, the wife of one of Jerri’s cousins, contributed the recipe to a cookbook compiled by the Farm Bureau Women of Butler County, Kansas. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my mother-in-law gave us the cookbook for Christmas many years ago, and Jerri has made many of the recipes. Some have become favorites, like and this one from Rhonda is going to be added to the list.

When I warmed up the leftover casserole to go with the hot dogs and pasta salad we set out to feed my brother-in-law and his work crew at the cabin, he remarked how well the broccoli went with the rice as he took a second helping. It is indeed a tasty combination.

When I confessed that the sauce was made with canned soups and Velveeta, he guffawed and asked me if I finally was abandoning my purist policies.

One of his grandsons and a member of the work crew looked puzzled. “What’s Velveeta?” he asked.

“It’s like American cheese, like the single slices you get on cheeseburgers,” I said, “but it comes in a box.” I got the box out to show him.

“It’s a brand name,” my brother-in-law explained to him.

“OK,” said he, and took a serving.

I can remember the box of Velveeta in the refrigerator at home. Like Rhonda, Mom used it in cooking because it made really smooth sauces. Velveeta was invented in 1923 in Monroe, New York, and was named for its velvety smooth texture. It is a dairy product, so even Wisconsinites can admit to using it without shame. It is not, however, to be confused with a good Wisconsin brick, Cheddar or Colby.

When Jerri and I were first married, most Kansas supermarkets offered Velveeta, ground Parmesan, and a handful of other cheeses, nearly all from Kraft. Last summer, when we stopped at Emporia, Kansas, to stock up on the best flour I know (Hudson Cream), I made a point of inspecting the cheese case.

There were probably a hundred different varieties and brands of cheese made by cheese makers from Oregon to Vermont as well as Wisconsin, an enormous improvement in the last four decades. I almost felt like I had wandered into a good Wisconsin supermarket.

Velveeta was still in the cheese case, but my attitude towards it had changed. Even the ancient Romans used some processed foods including fish sauces and cheeses flavored with garlic or sweetened with honey as well as salted cheeses shipped to Rome from across the empire, perhaps to be eaten with the hams imported from Belgium. We have chemists today to make fancier processed foods, but maybe that’s just progress.

Even without scientists, our ancestors were pretty clever when it came to inventing new foods. For instance, yogurt, tofu and most of the cheeses we enjoy today have been around for thousands of years. What I finally have come to understand is that Velveeta is really just another in the long list of foods that start with milk. Not my favorite to eat on crackers, but a good ingredient in some recipes.

Like Rhonda’s Rice and Broccoli Casserole which makes six to eight servings of a delicious side dish.

INGREDIENTS:

3/4 cup white rice
1 1/2 cups water
Scant 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 lbs. broccoli crowns
4 T butter
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/3 cup chopped onion
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1/2 lb. Velveeta cheese

PROCEDURE:

Rinse the rice, then put it in a saucepan with the water and salt. Bring to a boil, then stir and reduce the heat to a low simmer. Cook the rice covered for fifteen to twenty minutes until the water is absorbed. Remove the pan from the heat.

Prepare the vegetables while the rice is cooking. Wash the broccoli, discard the tough bottom part of the stems and divide the crowns into bite-sized pieces. Clean and chop the celery and onion into a quarter to half-inch dice.

Preheat the oven to 350º.

Blanch the broccoli in a microwave oven or covered saucepan with a little water for four or five minutes until it is crisp but tender. Drain and set aside the broccoli. Cut the Velveeta into half inch cubes.

Melt the butter in a two quart saucepan over low heat. Add the celery and onion and cook them for about four minutes until they are soft. Add the undiluted soups and Velveeta and stir until you have a smooth sauce. Remove the sauce from the heat.

Spread the cooked rice evenly over the bottom of a two quart baking dish. Spread the broccoli on the rice and spoon the sauce over the broccoli. Put the dish on a center shelf in the oven and bake the casserole for about thirty minutes until the rice is bubbling around the edges and the sauce is just beginning to brown.

NOTES: Rhonda’s recipe calls for two ten ounce packages of frozen broccoli spears and butter or margarine. I prefer butter and fresh broccoli when you can get it.

When gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon and our family Plymouth got over twenty miles per gallon, summer drives were an inexpensive way to make weekends special. Sometimes we drove to a lake with Dad’s canoe on top of the car and our cane poles tied next to it.

When wild berries were in season, we threaded narrow roads to berry patches and when the leaves began turning in the fall, Mom drove slowly on gravel roads through bright vistas while Dad rode shotgun and watched for grouse. Sometimes he even shot one as it stood on the edge of the road.

If I were to say that we kids always looked forward to those weekend jaunts, I would be stretching the truth, but we usually enjoyed them. Fishing or swimming in a lake we had never seen before was a treat and finding the site of an old lake cabin at the end of a grass-covered driveway was really special. As amateur archeologists, we explored the ruins and searched for artifacts. Every once in a while we would find an unbroken bottle or other treasure that we carried home to add to our collections.

Visits to lakes were also the expeditions that included a picnic. Besides letting us enjoy two of our favorite foods at the time (wieners and soft, store-bought buns), we learned the joy of cooking our own food.

Like our early ancestors we searched for the perfect toasting sticks under the watchful eye of our father. “No willow sticks,” he would say as we studied those beautiful straight stems crowded along the lakeshore. “They give wieners a bitter taste. Hazel brush is better.” When we were very young, my father cut the sticks we selected (offering more guidance as needed).

When I got my first jackknife, I was promoted to stick cutter. At first I was proud of my new position, but putting up with the indecisiveness and bossiness of two younger sisters moderated my enthusiasm. Still, it was fun to be an important part of a successful picnic. Dad built the fire and warmed the beans while Mom got out the wieners, buns, mustard and ketchup. I provided the tools for cooking the meat.

The best toasting sticks have a fork at the end, so the wiener is impaled on two points. This arrangement reduces the chance that the wiener will fall into the fire and of course prevents the sausage from rotating on the stick as you turn it to roast the wiener evenly. As I recall my sisters were impatient picnickers.

Despite (or perhaps because of) my frequent advice to hold their wieners over the coals and away from the flames, they ended up with burned or even occasionally flaming wieners. It does take some patience to set a wiener afire, but they managed it.

Speaking from experience I can confirm that it is much easier to set marshmallows afire. Today I hardly ever ignite a torch on the end of the toasting stick, but as even my father had to blow out flames from his marshmallow once in a while, so also I sometimes eat one that is “a little overdone.”

It seems a little more difficult today to toast a marshmallow properly. I do know that Campfire Marshmallows were made to be toasted. It said so on the box. If you are over sixty, you probably remember those little boxes. They were handy for storing crickets and small frogs after the marshmallows had been eaten.

Campfire marshmallows were made by a different process than is used today which produced a firmer marshmallow. They were made by the Redel Candy Corporation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You can still buy Campfire Marshmallows, but they are made by squeezing goo out of a tube like any other brand of marshmallow.

Incidentally, Campfire Marshmallows have their place in culinary history. The year was 1939, near the end of the the Great Depression. The Campfire Girls were looking for a way to raise funds. Mildred Day and Malitta Jensen, employees of the Kellogg Corporation, came to their rescue by inventing a new treat called Rice Krispies Marshmallow Treats. It was a win-win-win-win situation: Good for Kellogg and Redel corporations, a money maker for the Campfire girls and a new candy (cookie?) for millions of hungry people. Probably good for dentists too.

Not my favorite, as my mother-in-law used to say. However, the fact that they are sold in nearly every service station and supermarket in the country is pretty persuasive evidence that I am in the minority.

Rather than explaining how to make those sticky things, I suggest that you consider a vegetable dish that we would have enjoyed on our picnics if we had known how to make it. I’m sure that it would go great with wieners, hot dogs or brats. We were introduced to it by Lynne and Mike, one of Jerri’s nieces and her husband who live in Overland Park, Kansas. They took us out to Jack Stack’s Barbecue and insisted that we try the Cheesy Corn Bake as one of the sides with our barbecue.

Here is Lynne’s version of the recipe that she shared with us. She called it Smoke Stack’s Cheesy Corn Bake. It is superb with barbecued ribs or burnt ends. You might want to give it a try.

INGREDIENTS:

2 T butter
5 tsp. flour
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
3/4 cup milk
1 1/2 cups grated American cheese
3 oz. cream cheese
2 lbs. frozen whole kernel corn
3 oz. diced ham

Thaw and drain the corn and chop or grate the American cheese. Cube the cream cheese and dice the ham. Grease a two quart casserole and preheat the oven to 350º.

Melt the butter in a three quart saucepan over moderate heat. Stir in the flour and garlic powder. Keep stirring for about two minutes until you have a smooth roux. Add the milk all at once. Stir constantly until the sauce is thickened and bubbly. Stir in the cheeses and keep stirring until they are melted.

Stir the corn and ham into the cheese sauce. Bring the mixture to steaming, stirring frequently to prevent it from scorching. Pour it into the casserole and bake at 350º for 45 minutes.

NOTES: Some versions of this recipe call for using cheddar cheese. I used small pieces of ham left over from a baked ham. The extra smoky flavor was a plus.

A note on names. When Lynne first had Cheesy Corn Bake, it was at Smoke Stack Barbecue, the restaurant opened by Russ Fiorella. Russ’s son Jack first worked with his father, then opened his own barbecue restaurant which he called Fiorella’s Jack Stack of Martin City. When Jack assumed operation of his father’s restaurants, he changed the name of all of them to Jack Stack Barbecue.

Lynne noted that she has also made this recipe in a crockpot. It makes six to eight generous servings, and leftovers hold well.

And as Lynne ended her recipe to us, “Enjoy!”