FOOD I LIKED

One of my favorite foods when I was a little girl was pie. My mother was a good baker. She made pie dough from scratch. I still use her recipe. This pie is cooling on my counter today.

Sometimes we would go to Grafton, Illinois on a ferry boat to pick peaches and apples for the pies. I think the picture below is of the Grafton ferry boat. It may be a more recent ferry, not the old paddle wheel boat.
We would buy a bushel of peaches or apples. We would come home and my father would peel the apples or peaches, my mother would slice them up, roll out the crust and make the pies. We would all eat them. Yummy!! My father could peel with a knife, not a peeler, and he could peel an entire piece of fruit in one long strip.

Sometimes Mommy would make "slurp sauce". We called it that because it tasted so good we would all slurp it up. She would slice apples, peaches, plums, and nectarines and cook them all together with some sugar and a slice of lemon.

I also liked blintzes a lot. That's why I still make them myself. At Purim mommy made hamantashen, from the same recipe I still use. They were my favorite cookie, and no matter how many she made, I never got enough.

Another favorite was potato pancakes (latkes) or potato kugel (pudding). We didn't get it very often, because if you don't have a food-processor it is a lot of work to grate the potatos, and hard to do without grating your finger a bit. So those were special treats. Now I make them more often, because it is easy when you have the food-processor.

I also liked bread. There was a bakery called Pratzel's near our house. My dad would get up early in the morning and bring home good bread for breakfast. If I went with him, I would get my "commission"--that is, I would get to eat the heel of the bread on the way home. I loved the buttercrust bread, the challah (braided egg bread), the bagels, and especially the apple coffee cake, which was sticky and sweet and wonderful. I haven't been to Pratzel's in a long time, but I just googled it and found their website. I'll go the next time I'm in St. Louis.

Pratzel's link

I always liked chocolate. One year we got chocolate eggs at Easter. I ate mine up very quickly. My sister ate hers slowly, so I had to watch her enjoying it after mine was gone. That was hard! She saved the beautiful shiny purple/pink box the egg came in and used it for her crayons.

Sometimes we would get a chocolate bar. My mother didn't want us to eat too much. My dad didn't like sweets. If we got a Hershey bar, it would have 10 squares. Mommy would eat one, and give 3 to each of us 3 kids. If we got Nestle's, we each got 3 squares and she didn't get any. I guess sometimes we got a whole chocolate bar to ourselves, but not very often.

I'm sure there were other foods I liked and will write more some other time.

Ferry boat picture courtesy of fotobydave on Flickr.