I first discovered The Wednesday Chef sometime in early 2006. I had become an avid reader of blogs about a year before (they were a great way to keep my mind off my terrible day job) and was always on the hunt for new sites to add to my list of bookmarks. Luisa’s voice and perspective on food resonated with me immediately. I spent a morning engrossed in her archives and once caught up, tried never to miss a new post.
In fact, it’s fairly safe to say that I’ve read nearly everything that Luisa Weiss has ever posted to the internet (I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a stalker. I swear, I’m just a fan). And, when an advanced copy of My Berlin Kitchen arrived just before the mini-vacation that Scott and I took few weeks back, I tucked it into my travel bag and proceeded to read it in a single, giant gulp.
As I read, I dog-eared recipes I wanted to remember. I marked the Pizza Siciliana and the Poppy Seed Whirligig Buns. I’m hoping to make the Yeasted Plum Cake before their season is entirely gone and, come Christmas, I’m definitely planning on making the Fruit Bread on page 161. It sounds dense and divine.
As I read, there was one recipe that jumped out at me more insistently than the rest and cried out to be made immediately. The Pflaumenmus or Spiced Plum Butter on page 237 had my name written all over it (particularly since I had the necessary four pounds of Italian prune plums at home, thanks to the Washington State Fruit Commission and their Canbassador program).
Of course, I’ve made plum butters before, but never with this particular technique. Luisa has you quarter the plums, stir them together with a bit of sugar, a cinnamon stick, and a couple cloves and let them sit overnight. The next day, once they’re nice and juicy, you pop the pan into the oven and bake them them at moderate heat.
After their time in the heat, the plums are incredibly tender and fragrant. The liquid has thickened a great deal and the slumping fruit just smells incredible.
Once pureed, she has you funnel the prepared butter into sterilized jars and use the inversion method to seal. This is the only place where I diverged from the recipe as written and I chose to run my jars through a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Because this is a relatively low sugar preserve, I wanted to ensure that all bacteria was killed and the best way to do that is with a hot water bath.
Now, just a note about the yield. The recipe says that it makes four to five jars, but doesn’t specify the sizes of those jars. I found that after pureeing, I had exactly enough butter to fill three pint jars. I imagine the jars Luisa used were a bit smaller than a standard pint and so figure my yield was just about right (I did the math and found that had I used the 1/5 L Weck jars, I’d have filled exactly five jars).
I plan on applying this same overnight maceration and oven roasting to other fruits, because it made for such a nice finished product and filled my apartment with the most delicious smells.
Thanks to the nice folks at Viking, in addition to getting to share the plum butter recipe with you (it’s after the jump), I also have a copy of My Berlin Kitchen to give away. If you’d like a chance to win it, here’s what to do.
- Leave a comment on this post and share your favorite food memory.
- Comments will close at 11:59 pm east coast time on Friday, September 21, 2012. Winner will be chosen at random and will be posted to the blog over the weekend.
- Giveaway is open to US residents.
- One comment per person, please. Entries must be left via the comment form on the blog, I cannot accept submissions via email.
Disclosure: Viking sent me an advanced copy of My Berlin Kitchen and are providing the copy for this giveaway. However, I’ve not been paid to host this giveaway and my opinions are entirely my own.
Spiced Plum Butter
Ingredients
- 4 pounds Italian prune plums
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 2 whole cloves
Instructions
- Pit and quarter the plums and put them in a heavy 4-quart pot. Add the sugar, the cinnamon stick, and the cloves. Stir well and let sit overnight or four 8 hours.
- The next day, heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the pot, unlidded, into the oven and cook for 2 hours, stirring the mixture occasionally.
- Sterilize the glass jar and lids in boiling water.
- When the plums have broken down and the liquid has reduced to a thick jam, remove pot from the oven and fish out the cinnamon stick (if you can find the cloves, fish them out too).
- Puree the jam with an immersion blender until it resembles a fruit butter, and then fill the sterilized jars with the hot puree, screw on tops and immediately turn the jars upside down. If you prefer a jam with discernible chunks of fruit, however, don't puree the jam; simply ladle the hot jam into the sterilized jars.
- Let the jars cool complete before turning the right side up again and labeling them. The jam will keep for at least a year.
(Marisa’s note: You can also process the jars in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes if you’d prefer to do it the American way.)
Recipe from My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes) by Luisa Weiss, published by Viking, 2012.
My best food memory is helping my mom with chocolate cream pie.
I don’t know if anyone will see this question buried in all the entries, but what are your thoughts on using regular black or red plums instead of Italian prune plums? Does it make any real difference?
If i remember correctly (its been a while since i got my hands on italian prune plums) they have a much deeper flavor than the un-named reds and blacks that show up i markets this time up year.
I have every intention of making this tomorrow with black plums, but i will be tasting them after the roasting, to see if they should be either cooked down more, or are in need of a little help from spices.
If it tastes good, CAN IT!
I totally remember my mom setting up a kid’s table in the middle of the kitchen, placing a bowl of sugar and another bowl of lemon wedges on the table. Then my brother and I would go to town on the lemons dipped in sugar, playing a game to see who could resist the pucker/tart face the longest.
The plum butter looks incredible! I’d love to check out My Berlin Kitchen.
My favorite food memory is being 5 years old and helping my mom can dozens of quarts of green beans. My job, (And I LOVED it) was to use an repurposed spatula stick, sans spatula, to poke down the sides of the quart jars, removing all the bubbles. I was excruciatingly thorough.
As usual, i turned a 2 minute job into a 20 minute production. Mama never complained and I was so proud to have such an important job!
My favorite memory is watching my grandma cut up a whole chicken to fry. She would just hold the chicken down in the kitchen sink and cut it up with a big knife. I even asked her about a year ago to come and do it at my house with my husband and 2 kids watching. I videotaped it!
My favorite food memory is my Granny’s cornbread dressing (yep, Southern) that we had every Thanksgiving and Christmas. I spend my holidays every year trying to perfect mine to taste just like hers! It’s one of my favorite things!
Favorite food memory? Too many to count.
Today’s favorite memory: Having homemade noodles & homemade pasta. Why? Because it’s the first time I’ve ever made noodles. I also put about a half-cup of pumpkin in the noodle dough- pumpkin from our garden last year that I’d pureed and frozen. The sauce came from tomatoes, peppers, celery, garlic, onions, and herbs we grew ourselves this year, some things from seeds or plants that overwintered from last year (or even older).
This garden has been important to me in a number of ways. It’s been a big part of us eating and being healthier (both eating the food from it and the physical acts of caring for the garden). It’s also been one of the biggest signs of my husband and I growing closer from when we were first dating through the present – when we were first dating and I asked him to help me get some bags of soil from the nursery to my house, he said “Okay, but that’s all I’m going to do – don’t expect me to garden with you.” He’s slowly gotten drawn in, away from the computer games, drawn into the amazingness of seeds growing into baby plants growing into mature yes-you-can-eat-them-now foods. Like me, he gets into geeking out on the biology, chemistry, genetics, geology, climatology, and nutrition involved in choosing what to grow, how to grow it, how to cook it, and how to preserve it. “That’s how potatoes grow?” “That’s a good bug?” “That’s what tomatoes are supposed to taste like?”
My husband is an amazing cook too – he was even before I met him, but then the two of us get together and we can make almost anything. Now he’s even more thrilled to have really good ingredients for cooking.
One of the ways I knew the relationship was going to be long-term was when I realized we weren’t planning two separate gardens for our respective homes anymore – we’d started taking it for granted that I’d be moving in and have to figure out how to bring my garden with me, and talking about how we were going to create this joined garden in his yard. We didn’t decide one day that yes, I think we’ll move in together. Bit by bit the “we” and “our” started creeping into our language, and happened first talking about that garden. Heck, we even got married in the garden.
So my bowl of pasta & sauce the other night is pretty much a little mini-celebration of, among other things, my relationship with my husband.
Favorite food memory…has to be fall when I was little, when we would sit around the table after dinner and dad would crack apples in half by putting is thumbs in the stem divot. I thought he was so magical, like a super hero dad. We would eat apple slices with REALLY aged cheddar cheese and the crystals would crunch with the apple. Western New York in the fall really is the best 🙂
My favorite food memory as a child was my grandmother’s Texas sheet cake.
One of my favorite food memories is eating mountains of lasagna when I was little, and having my parents say that I had a hollow leg… that’s where all the food was going!
My favorite food memory is making strawberry jam with my mom growing up. We’d go strawberry picking at a local farm early in the morning and make the jam when we got home. Before canning it, we would skim off the foam and after all the jars were in the canner, we’d make buttered toast and spread the foam on top.
I’m not sure I can think of THE favorite food memory, but I did have an excellent one from yesterday. I made challah with my one and three year olds yesterday. And by “with”, I mean I made most of it and they loved eating it. It was really special to share the day with them while getting to make something delicious at the same time.
My favorite food memory is the smell of bread rising in my mother’s kitchen. And seeing the dough puff up and double in size!
My best food memory is when one of my sons thanks me for dinner or something else I’ve cooked & says “that was really good!”
I recently started canning and am super excited to try this recipe. The book itself looks fantastic.
I was born in Germany and lived there for a while, and the Zwetchkin Kuchen is the best plum cake! I loved making it with my grandma growing up.
Staying up all night stuffing/rolling tortellinis for chicken tortellini soup. I was much younger than.
Finding wild plums on the creek bank while fishing with my grandparents, filling up all the minnow buckets and bailing cans with sweet ripe plums and then going home to make beautiful hot pink jam together
Umm, I have a few that stick out to me, but I’ll play nice and only share one. As a child probably the only candy I did not care for was orange slices. I remember older relatives seemed to love them and usually offered them to me when I would visit, and I always tried them, but just couldn’t develop a taste for them. Shortly after I married my grandmother, who could make anticipation for any event exciting with her contagious enthusiasm, and wonderful descriptions, began to tell me about an orange slice cake she had made. She talked about this cake for my entire visit, and offered to make one for us. I told her not to, explaining that I had never really cared for orange slices. The cake worked it’s way into the conversation several more times, and about a week after we returned home I gave in to the haunting that had followed me and searched out the recipe and baked the cake. Just as I expected, I did not care for it, but in tribute to my Mimi’s storytelling abilities I simply had to try. That was 30 years ago, and I’m wondering if my taste have changed? I may just have to make it again!
I love Luisa too!
I have many favorite memories but the one that I still observe today is popcorn and chocolate milk on Sunday evenings. I grew up in a Mennonite community and Church was a must every Sunday morning. Sunday was also the day to visit family and friends and many Sunday afternoons were spent at my Uncle Lonnys’ home. All the children would play outside while the adults visited with each other.
Late in the afternoon aunt Mary would start popping popcorn. She would pop huge bowls full of popcorn and stir up several large pitchers of cold chocolate milk. We would eat all the popcorn we wanted and washed it all down with chocolate milk.
To this day popcorn is best on Sunday evenings and I always always serve it with chocolate milk.
When I was 17 my grandmother took me to Austria. I have no idea where we were exactly, but the tour guide took us to this lake with a pastry shop next to it. The pastry was the most delicious pastry I have ever had, everything was so flaky, buttery, not too sweet, fresh and wonderful. To this day nothing has compared, and every pastry I eat is meh :o)
roasting marshmallows over an open fire and making smores!
There’s 2 really – smelling freshly baked bread in the oven when coming home from school…and all it was was frozen bread dough that my mom bought at the grocery store. But the best part was eating a slice of it with melting butter! And the other was all us kids (there was 5) sitting around the dining table, waiting for my dad to cut up oranges or a pineapple, as he doled them out while telling us stories. Awww! Happy childhood memories!
Furiously picking ripe yellow plums into plastic grocery bags from my grandpa’s pick-up truck with my grandpa and sister one summer. And then making jars and jars of delicious yellow plum preserves.
I will always remember the many enchanted evenings spent cooking, talking, eating, and cleaning up the kitchen when my now husband, then boyfriend, would come over to my apartment for our weekend date nights.
making bread bowls for salads with my grandmother. Mmmmm good!
My favorite food memories are sharing thanksgiving dinner with my family and friends. it’s usually a large group — it’s been as many as 30 — and a potluck so it’s totally chaotic, but always marvelous. I love trying what each person has contributed.
Not surprisingly, I am always stuffed by the meal’s end.
So hard to choose…my dad was the primary cook, and he canned and pickled and preserved with a passion. He also bought beef in bulk from local farmers and ground the hamburger himself (and this was in the 60’s and 70’s.) I remember the smell of that beef, and how he would let my sister and me have a tiny bit as tartare, with just a touch of salt. Wouldn’t dream of doing that with any “commercial” beef today!!! And his homemade and canned tomato juice was luscious…now I am trying to get back to those great preserving ways.
My grandmother used to make applesauce every fall. I find my year a bit incomplete and out of balance if I don’t do the same. I miss her terribly.
This sounds like a really fun book, I’m going to head out and buy some plums to try that recipe for myself.
My dad loves to cook, and so when I was growing up, we ate lots of varied, homecooked meals – all very healthy. When we went to visit my grandmother in the midwest for the first time, I was delighted to discover that she stocked her fridge with a huge package of American cheese slices, which we never got to eat at home. I ate them up greedily, along with cookies and other goodies I normally didn’t get to have at home. Isn’t that what grandmothers are for? These days, I have a better taste in cheese – but I have a special place in my heart for processed cheese food.
Making sugar cookies for Christmas with my mom and brother: using my grandmother’s old cookie cutters, carefully decorating each cookie, and getting to eat the bits that broke off!
My favorite food memory is my grandfather making blueberry pie. He and I would go out and pick the wild blueberries along the rail road tracks, then he would make the best pie with it.
I can’t wait to try this recipe for plum butter.
holiday dinners at my grandparents. So many sweet memories.
My favorite food memory was going to my grandparents when my great-grandmother was staying with them. She would make delicious meals – our family favorite were the little pizzas! So simple but such love went into creating dozens of them for us all to enjoy to our hearts content.
Getting up early and picking blackberries and gathering all the fruit that had fallen at my parent’s house when I was young.
My favourite food memory is making “Petes de soeurs” = nun’s farts with my mother. The left-over dough scraps from making pies is rolled out, covered with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon then rolled up like a jelly roll, sliced and baked…pure deliciousness and great bonding with my mum!
It’s kind of an anti-foodie food memory, but I still love mac & cheese out of the blue box simply because it’s what my mom would make on Sunday afternoons after we did the grocery shopping for the week. It always signaled that we would be spending the afternoon in while she did laundry and read to me from the Little House books.
I have two favorite food memories – eating Christmas cookie dough that my mom would make every. single. year. (she would actually make the cookie dough and set aside some for me and my brother just to eat raw) and also the first homemade meal that I ever made for my husband – homemade spaghetti 🙂
Just one? I grew up in the middle of an apple/pear orchard. On the way home from school in the fall I would pick a few perfect Rome Beauty apples for our afternoon snack. Can’t beat fresh off the tree!
My favorite food memory is a birthday dinner that I experienced at the Black Cat Restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. I had just gotten back from a trip to NYC and had dinner at Le Bernardin. It was amazing but the birthday dinner really sticks in my mind as the chef is a friend and was so into making the food for my meal special. Food really can be love.
My favorite food memory is the first time I spent Christmas Eve dinner with my girlfriend’s Ukrainian family. Bowls of borscht followed by a never ending supply of dumplings, fish, fruit, cabbage rolls…..I was in heaven.
My favorite food memory involves smelling the whole wheat bread baking and then looking at the lovely golden brown loaves cooling on the rack. Finally, with butter & jam, eating it!!
My brother made my rehearsal dinner and it was amazing. You could tell he really wanted to make it the best he could and everyone enjoyed it. I still look back with mouth watering and heart warming memories.
Favorite food memory: my grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. She made them with black walnuts and kept them in her red McCoy cookie jar and they weren’t complete without a few strands of white persian cat hair from her cat. LOL
My favorite food memory as a little girl was when my dad would take an apple and slice it VERY thin (horizontally, so that the stars would be in the middle). He would then put the apple back together and present it to me on a plate…looking like a whole, uncut apple. When I would try and eat it…voila!…the slices would separate. It always made me laugh and think he was a magician.
Mine is probably baking pies with my mom. She would give me a little piece of the dough and I would roll and reroll and generally mangle it as long as I could. Then we’d bake it with a little milk and sugar and that would be my personal pie.
just one memory? well, i guess it would be the first time i watched the canning process done by my folks. dad was moving a hot pot of something across the kitchen, splashed hot liquid on his hand and howled till he could safely put that pot down. had blisters, and i was too scared to can for many years. then i made a garden. the rest is history and i have not scalded myself yet. i didn’t just jinx myself did i?
My favorite food memory is the first trip I made to a CSA farm with my young daughter. We were picking up food from my sister’s share and it was magical to see my toddler walking through the rows, picking and eating delicious, ripe and organic food. Her face was stained with strawberry juice and she was beaming with pride.
My favorite food memory is salmon fishing with my dad in southeast Alaska… and the subsequent smoking and canning marathon that ensued shortly afterwards!
I’d love to check out Berlin Kitchen. Many of my food memories are from my Mom’s & Grandma’s German cooking. That & good ole Troidl’s in Buffalo – the best Sauerbraten ever. Yum.
I got my love of canning by watching my mother make grape jelly. I remember seeing the bag of grapes hanging from a kitchen cupboard and the juice slowly dripping into the bowl below.
My fav food memory is warm pancakes on Sunday mornings when it’s snowing outside. My family happy at the table all sticky and satisfied 🙂
My favorite food memory is making challah with my Bubbe.
My favorite food memory was making kolachki with my family at Christmas time. We got together and made alot, then each took home some. Making memories with family is part of food memories!
My favorite food memory is making fudge with my grandma.
My favorite food memory is my grandmother’s mac and cheese. I have yet to be able to reproduce it like I remember it–and she did it without a recipe! Still working on it…..
Making pierogi with my grandma in Poland. Now she is teaching me here.
My very first make-it-from-scratch cooking foray in one of my first apartments. I had just turned 25, my very best friend had come to visit me in New York for my birthday, and we had gone on a stroll through Chinatown buying up whatever looked interesting. I’d put the word out to people that if they showed up at some point that afternoon, they would get fed for free.
My roommate had forgotten I was doing that, and had invited some of his own friends over for a card game; but I told them that hell, there would be plenty of food so they were probably all doing us a favor by being there. My roommate then offered to do all the dishes as “my birthday present.”
We made a five-course Chinese menu from scratch — everything from mung bean thread salad to pot stickers to fried rice to beef and broccoli to red bean cakes — and other friends were drifting in over the course of the afternoon while we were cooking, until I had about 17 people in my tiny living room. We ran out of chairs and someone had to sit on the stepladder and someone else sat on an overturned bucket, and everyone had to balance plates on their laps. But everyone raved about the food, and I was especially touched to see that we all made one big circle of friends at an enormous “table” rather than have people gather in little clusters while we ate. And my roommate did make good on doing the dishes (although, because there were so many, he had to wash them in the bathtub).
My favourite memory of food – climbing those trees, that yield those plums, in Germany as a small child, dodging wasps and eating as much as I could. I still hanker for that.
Picking raspberries in my grandparents’ backyard. Every time I pick a fresh raspberry I am reminded. Oh, and I LOVE Italian prune plums. Thanks for the giveaway!
Eating fresh peaches right off my grandma’s tree.
When I was little I would sit on my grandmother’s counter each fall and watch her create magic. A homemade pie crust could essentially be rolled with her eyes closed and later that day it would be make the most amazing apple dumplings that bubbled over at the core with a lava of butter and red hots (her secret) that made an warm, red, cinnamon-y glaze.
The best however was a few weeks later when she started to prepare for Christmas. I remember walking into her house and the entire living room would be covered top to bottom with cookie trays and tins waiting to cool and be frozen for the holidays. They were stacked on tables, chairs, the ironing board, on top of the hutch-it was a little girls dream to see all these haystacks, thumbprints, biscotti, buckeyes, potica, baklava, pecan nutballs, peanut butter blossoms, spritzers, chocolate candies of every flavor and so many more just knowing that soon I would have my fill. The wait until Christmas was worth it (probably because I would sneak some) and it was better than any present Santa could have brought.
What a great method for fruit butter! I do my apple butter in the crockpot and it turns out delish! Thanks for sharing this with us!
My favorite food memory is all about family. I learned from Mom, my grandmothers, aunts. I learned with my sisters, brother, cousins. I remember being at my grandma’s farm, picking fresh veggies and fruits, digging up potatos, shaking the trees and harvesting pecans. But the best parts were sitting on the porch or in the big kitchen and prepping everything. Shelling nuts, popping peas, shucking corn, and even processing meat. I was a city girl who was able to get a taste of a simpler life, full of satisfying foodie-work. 🙂
Discovering the Concord grape vine in the back corner of the yard of our apartment. It reminded me of childhood and helped brighten one dark late summer for me.
My memories involve a lot of comfort food – my grandma’s fried chicken and my mother’s ham casserole. The casserole recipe is also a favorite of my kids, in fact I just made it Monday night at the request of my 17yr old son!
That looks wonderfull! Does anyone know why these are called butters and not jams or preserves?
Found the answer:
Jam is a thick mixture of fruit, pectin, and sugar that is boiled gently but quickly until the fruit is soft and has an organic shape, yet is still thick enough that it spreads easily and can form a blob. In addition to being a spread, jams are also good for fillings.
Jelly is made from sugar, pectin, acid, and fruit juice and is a clear spread that is firm enough to hold its shape. Jellies can also be made from ingredients other than fruit, such as herbs, tea, wine, liqueurs, flowers, and vegetables.
Fruit butter is a smooth and creamy spread that is created by slow-cooking fruit and sugar until it reaches the right consistency; these types of spreads are not always translucent and are often opaque. Fruit butters are best used as a spread and a filling.
Preserves are spreads that have chunks of fruit surrounded by jelly.
Conserves are made with dried fruits and nuts and are cooked. They have a very thick and chunky texture. Conserves work very well as a spread and as a condiment for meats and cheeses.
Marmalade is a citrus spread made from the peel and pulp of the fruit. Marmalades are cooked for a long time and have no pectin, and are used as spreads and glazes.
One of my favorite food memories is my Grandmother’s Caramel Cake.
hmmm…I think I would have to say that my favorite food memory is eating Vegetable Beef Soup while I was growing up. We always ate it the same way, with a piece of buttered, store-bought bread to make sandwiches out of the beef and then dunk into the broth. I make my children eat it the same way! 🙂
One of my favorite food memories was sitting on my Grandma’s kitchen cabinet “helping” her make cookies. She taught me most everything about cooking-which I’m eternally grateful for! 🙂
My favorite food memories are when my grandmother would come to stay with us during the summer. She would cook all of our favorite dishes that we only seemed to have while she was with us.
Thanks for the giveaway.
I’m going to make this right away! Perfect timing. It reminds me of my mom’s plum chutney, but I love the idea of baking the plums.
One of my favorite food memories is of watching my grandmother make lemon cupcakes when I was a kid 🙂
Best food memory: making my first pie at the age of 9 for my dad. Shoofly pie, his favorite. And I made ONE pie when the recipe called for two. It was a big, messy, delicious pie that my dad loved.
I always remember the homemade rabbit and noodle soup that my mom makes! We raised the rabbits, Dad was always the one who butchered them. He would bring them in the house and we, (Mom, Dad and the three girls) would work together to put up as many quarts of rabbit as we could! That night we would always put on a big steaming pot of rabbit soup. Mom would then pull out the flour, eggs, salt and water and whip up some of the BEST noodles ever!!! Food and fond memories always go hand in hand in my family!!!!
Rigatoni with my Italian grandmother’s marinara sauce. This dish is a part of my favorite food memory because my grandmother was so impressed that a slender young girl of 15 could pack away a half a pound of these “macs” and still have room for dessert! She was a beautiful woman with the same cooking artistry that all of the Italian women in her family had. My portion size has decreased drastically since that memorable dinner over ten years ago but now that my own kitchen is filled with heirloom appliances and utensils, I feel the need to satisfy my loved ones with as much home cooking (and now home preserves!) as possible.
I’ve been wanting to get a copy of this book. Thank you for the chance to win it! My favorite food memory is when I lived in a place that had an apricot tree in the yard. There is nothing like tree ripened apricots.
Yum, this looks delicious. Would love to win this book! Favorite food memory: smearing Nutella on a baguette & calling it lunch (& later dinner) while riding trains across Western Europe. Simple food never tastes as good as when you have the most incredible views of the Swiss Alps or the Italian coast.
My favorite food memories were watching my son eat baby food plums. After you spooned the plums into his mouth, he would squeeze his eyes shut, scrunch up his face and pucker up his lips. As soon as he swallowed, he would open his eyes really wide and his mouth even wider for the next bite. It was the cutest thing!
My favorite food memory is making and canning persimmon butter with my mother, after spending hours searching the woods for the yummy little fruits. <3
Homemade fried dough my dad made for breakfast when I was little. Not so healthy, but really delicious!
My favorite foo memory is helping my mom make Italian Cream Cake for my dad’s birthday!
These plums sound fabulous!
Eating ravioli at my grandma’s house
My dad had this huge, octagonal stainless steel pancake griddle that had belonged to his father. One of my favorite food memories is of him making pancakes for us with it on the weekend. He even made a perfect pancake flipping spatula to go with it!
Loved the plum butter recipe! My mom, every winter, would make a big batch of egg salad. We would have “ski days” as kids, where we would get out of school to go skiing. We loved it. The best part was eating my mom’s egg salad sandwiches in the lodge. I don’t know what it was, maybe the fact that we were always cold and tired by that time, but the egg salad sandwiches never tasted better!
My favorite food memory is the tapioca pudding my mom made when we were kids.
It was gone in one night…ahhh, the memories.
My best canning memory was at my Great Aunt’s house and seeing her gorgeous red and green colored beet rings. They were breath taking colors and masterfully done. It has been my inspiration in canning to this day!
Thanks for the chance to win a copy of My Berlin Kitchen. Luisa has a great blog! 🙂
Funny how time transforms your tastebuds. My food memory is from when my mom made beef tongue stew. I was adamant about not eating it. I remember trying very little of it then. Just a few months ago, I made it myself and loved it. It made me think of mom’s cooking. I wish I would have eaten more of it when I was a kid. Maybe it wouldn’t have taken me almost 30 years to try it again and fall in love.
My favorite food memory is of making “cookie soup” with my dad. We would crush up oreos in a bowl and pour milk over them. It was so tasty!
Making fresh strawberry ice cream with my mom 🙂
My favorite food memory is at my grandmother’s. I miss her meatloaf and boiled potatoes and carrots with butter. Simple food but delicious! Grandma did alot of canning too and I wish she was still here to ask for advice!
This one took a bit of effort to decide on my favorite food memory, but I finally found it. I absolutely adore my dad’s potato chowder. My mom is usually the cook in the house, but when the weather turns from sunny summer ‘grilling days’ into blustery fall ‘comfort food’ days, my dad would always don an apron and get to work on his chowder. Since I now live on the opposite side of the country and can’t pop in for a ‘confab and chowder day’ he shared his recipe with me. Turning his “oh a handful of this and a spoonful of that” measurement system into something close to my memories has taken a bit of time that has been worth the effort as family and friends consistently give rave reviews on it.
I have lovely food memories helping my mom cook (especially Christmas baking!)
I must be hungry because as I read through everyone’s comments I come up with a similar experience, and that immediately becomes what I need to make/eat next. I’ll stick with what first came to mind, going out with the whole family after dinner for ice cream at the dairy in the next town, chocolate ice cream cone with jimmies.
there are too many good food memories that i have…but one of my earliest is helping my mom make holiday pies and her letting us make “baby” pumpkin pies in old metal measuring cups with the leftover dough!
Choosing a single favorite memory is tough, but most of my favorites revolve around my grandmother’s kitchen. Cooking was how she showed her love for us, her family. She knew each of our favorite foods and made all of them whenever she knew we were stopping by. When I was preparing to get married and move to a different state, I asked Grandma to teach me how to make some of my favorites. We spent an afternoon walking through her “recipes”, which were all written in her head and consisted of a pinch of this and a drizzle of that. I don’t think I walked away from that afternoon with a single usable recipe, but I will forever treasure the memory of I have of that time.
My favorite food memory is sitting with my grandmother under the pine trees behind her house and eating all the delicious, perfectly juicy nectarines we could handle.
My favorite food memory has to be stuffing the turkey early on Thanksgiving morning – I was the only one who liked stuffing enough to do it, so that became my job as a kid. Oh, and my grandma Joyce’s anise bread and her krumkake. Mmmmm.