Sunday, June 18, 2006

A Day for Fathers

When I need recipe inspiration I turn to the 'net'. 24 hours a day I can find exciting ideas to play with. This morning, however, I turned to an old friend. My Joy of Cooking!
This was my culinary bible when I first left home at 19. A gift from my mom. It traveled to Dallas with me, where I really wasn't much of a cook, up to Long Island then down to Florida. From Florida the pages were turning a lovely brown and the cover was long gone, but my copy of Joy of Cooking got packed up in the shipment and headed across the ocean to Paris. Sometimes you forget about those basic wonderful recipes and this morning I wanted to cook waffles for my husband on Fathers Day. Several recipes to choose from, I picked a Sour Cream Waffle, although I replaced the Sour Cream with Creme Fraiche!

Crispy on the outside, light as air on the inside, they were delicious! Of course I didn't plan in advance and had no Maple Syrup..........so another base recipe with improv thrown in and we had a lovely apple-brown sugar sauce to compliment the waffles.

This day also makes me think of my dad. He did have his favorite meals to cook. He loved to make Sunday Breakfast for us, I always complained about the way he cooked bacon. Dad would throw the whole pound of bacon in the frying pan, not separating the slices. He would fry till crisp (too crisp for me) and this would accompany eggs, pancakes or whatever he was in the mood to make that morning! Wishing Dad was here today, to throw some lean French bacon in a pan, I wouldn't complain today!
Happy Fathers Day all!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

My, but you bring tears to these eyes. Actually sounds quite delicious, delicious to me. My husband always was like a kid waiting to see what he got from his girls for Fathers Day. He saved all his cards. I still have them. Hope your hubby enjoyed his day.

Jen said...

Looks yummy, this picture is making me consider buying a waffle iron.

Betty Carlson said...

Looks great! I carted my Betty Crocker cookbook with me to France. It got replaced though, quite quickly, by Françoise Bernard as far as Bible status goes.

I got a waffle/croque-monsieur machine for Mother's Day and it has been fun.

Nic said...

What a great post, Melissa. I really love that picture of your old Joy of Cooking - reminds me of some of the books that I have.

Anonymous said...

My parents sent me off to college with The Joy of Cooking and Craig Claybourne's NYTimes Cookbook. I literally wore them both to bits.

Guy said...

Excellent!

But it brings to mind my ever festering complaint of not being able to find a regular old waffle iron at my local mega-lo marts or any other damned place. Sure they have 5 different kinds of Belgian ones. And they think I'm nuts for wanting a NON Belgian rig.

On a kinder note, I have my mother's and my grandmother's Joy of C. It's fun to run through the pages to see what pages are dirty, torn with notes. OoooO.

Biggles

Banlieue Blog said...

Hi Anonymous, It was a very good day!

Jenjen, The waffle iron won't get used a lot, but it has been fun for us to have when the mood strikes!

Betty, I'll have to head over to FNAC to check out your french bible by Francoise Bernard!

Nic, thanks for stopping by, I'm still a huge fan of your blog and Slashfood!

Lindy, is the NYTimes cookbook worth a UPS from Amazon for me??

Biggles, oh yeah, the flavor of the month, hold off a year and you'll find the old fashioned waffle iron will be back in style!

Anonymous said...

I haven't used it for years-so I'm not sure if it would still be of interest.At the time, I felt it was a sort of advanced version of the Joy. Now , I sort of think the newer Gourmet Cookbook (The yellow, Ruth Reichl edited one) fills that function better.

It pretty much has a recipe for anything you might think of, and the recipes are unusually reliable, I've found. They must test the hell out of them. Someone called it a "Joy of Cooking for people who already know what to cook."