Recipe: Lemon Chess Pie





Common American cooking measurement abbreviations:
T or tbs = tablespoon (again, a specific amount)
t or tsp = teaspoon (also a specific amount)

Lemon Chess Pie



Filling Ingredients
2 C granulated sugar
1 tbs all-purpose flour
1 tsp cornmeal
4 unbeaten eggs
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup whole milk or 2% milk
1/4 cup lemon juice
Pinch of salt (only if you use unsalted butter)

Pie Crust


Checking in

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to follow up on the cooking post. I’m looking forward to posting recipes and so on. However, I’m visiting my family, and they have very slow internet access. I think I’m going to have to wait till I return to California to post again. I’ll see you next week!

What is American cooking?

Many people have asked me this. The answer is complicated.

The food in many countries is a mix of influences from other cultures. Japanese food includes Chinese influences. Taiwanese food includes influences from different parts of China, Japan, and the South Pacific. Spanish food includes French and North African influences, and so on. However, American food is especially mixed up. Few individual dishes can be said to be 100% American: invented in America and using only ingredients from North and South America. However, we can still think of certain kinds of dishes as being part of “American cuisine” because of their origins, techniques, and flavors, or even simply if something is very popular in the USA. There is definitely more to American food than hamburgers and hot dogs!

Due to request, I will be writing some about American food in the next few weeks. I hope you will enjoy it and that you will comment with any questions you might have. I’m going to include some recipes, too.

First, one note: Much of the cooking vocabulary in English originates from French. This is because since colonial times, Americans have held French cooking in high esteem. (Thomas Jefferson really loved French food.) Words like cuisine, sauté, and braise all come from French. You can look up most ingredients and techniques on Wikipedia; be sure to read the American definition if there is more than one.

If you want to get started reading about American food now, you can visit the Smithsonian museum’s excellent site about 500 Years of American Food. It has lots of short articles on different topics, so click on whatever you’re interested.

Book review: Ella Enchanted

Ella Enchanted (Trophy Newbery)







Good Words: Comfort food

“There is nothing, absolutely nothing that pleasures me more than a bowl of pasta and tomato sauce. When I want to reach out with all my love to my husband, a dish of pasta and tomatoes is almost always in my hands. When I am worn out and the world isn’t such a nice place to be in, I make tomato sauce and pasta. When time is short but dear friends must be fed with joy and not pressure, I make pasta with tomato sauce.”

–Lynne Rossetto Kasper (Host of “The Splendid Table”),
speaking about comfort food for PBS’ The Meaning of Food

“Comfort food” is a great phrase! Can you guess what kind of food it is?

It’s not any one special food, because it’s different for everyone. It’s the food that comforts you. It might not be your #1 favorite food or the food that you think tastes best in the world. Instead, it’s something that makes you feel better when you are tired, sad, lonely, or sick.

For many people, their comfort foods are things they ate when they were small children, or that were treats when they were growing up. I asked five other Americans what their comfort foods are. Here’s what they said:

Me: macaroni and cheese, biscuits and gravy, flapjacks, hot French bread, royal milk tea, hot chocolate, warm homemade chocolate pudding, warm cinnamon rolls
My husband, Clint: macaroni and cheese, vanilla milk, spaghetti with meat sauce, pecan pie, hot links sausage, rice pudding, sushi (yes, really!)
My roommate and friend, Jenn: apple pie, chicken soup, split pea soup, fresh hot white bread, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, chicken pot pie, peach cobbler, barbecued ribs
My roommate and friend, Cory: pizza, lasagna, steak, ice cream, spinach and artichoke heart souffle
Cory’s friend, Jesse: meatloaf with twice-baked potatoes and brown gravy, fried okra
My friend, Paul: homemade (not microwaved) popcorn, homemade chocolate chip cookies

As you can see, there’s a variety of answers, but most of the answers aren’t healthy! These are the foods that you eat when you don’t care about the calories. Comfort foods are the ones that you miss when you go overseas for the first time. Sometimes people miss their comfort foods so much that they’ll pay lots of money at an international grocery store to get it, or they’ll ask their family members to mail it to them if possible.

(It’s also possible to gain a new comfort food during your life. When Clint started eating sushi after he moved to California, he just loved it, and he always felt like he was in a better mood after he ate sushi. So now it’s a comfort food for him. Royal milk tea is something I had for the first time in Japan, on the first day of our honeymoon, standing on a bullet train platform in Tokyo.)

If you want to read more about comfort food, visit PBS’ The Meaning of Food: Comfort Food. They asked some famous chefs and others to talk about their own comfort foods. Recipes are even included!

What is one of your comfort foods? Is it healthy or unhealthy? Do you make it or buy it? (Or do you ask a family member to make it?) Why do you think it makes you feel better?

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Comfort Food (Complete Idiot's Guide to)The Big Book of Breakfast: Serious Comfort Food for Any Time of the DayComfort Food (Step-by-step)Betty Crocker Comfort Food: 100 Recipes for the Way You Really Cook (100 Recipes/Way You Cook Today)

(After the health-food craze of the 1980s and 1990s, comfort food became a popular subject for cookbooks in the USA. Some people think it’s because Americans became more stressed out in the late 1990s. I don’t know, but the cookbooks are fun to look at! Please note: clicking on these images takes you away from this page, to the page about each book)