This past week we’ve so much enjoyed looking through our community cookbooks, searching as always for eye-catching and appetite pleasing favorite local recipes for this issue’s Kitchen Kapers.
There is no particular culinary theme for the local recipes collection below. This week’s recipes here were selected only because they are so interesting and some perhaps a bit different.
That casual Kitchen Kapers recipes selection approach will soon change, though only briefly, to a more intense and targeted search for more specifically themed recipes.
That is because the annual Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year holidays seasonal trio of holidays will be coming up very quickly!
All of that annual excitement and holiday glitter is just around the bend now, just a few fast weeks away. We now are only seven weeks away from Thanksgiving and in just 11 weeks we will again be celebrating Christmas!
As of now, who knows what culinary delights will be popping off these pages as we get nearer and nearer December’s wonderful most festive season of every year?
Thanksgiving will be coming our way again in just seven weeks and so fast on that fine day’s heels will be another year’s soon arriving new Christmas season!
A lot of Apopkans are soon enough going to be knee-deep in stacks of cookbooks surrounding us as we search for holiday cooking ideas for big and festive holiday meals or maybe just party refreshments.
Edible Christmas-treats we’ll be cooking or baking for giving as gifts for our family and all our best friends will be being cooked up too.
That’s still a little while away yet, however, so meanwhile for our present day cooking we are this week searching all our Apopka-area community cookbooks just for interesting recipes which are new-to-us and maybe a little bit different from our typical favorite foods.
We’re starting out this week’s Kitchen Kapers with a simple, easy and fast recipe which the contributor labeled Pigs-In-The-Blanket. Another of this week’s recipes is for a Mini-Pizza which requires only three ingredients.
Consider complementing those tasty treats like the simple cheese-and-tomato-sauce muffin-sized pizzas or the Pigs-In-The-Blanket with a side dish of tastily prepared spinach too good to resist or the asparagus-peas recipe below and perhaps a second simple side dish of either applesauce or fruit cocktail.
A quickly thrown together tomato, lettuce and bit of finely chopped onion salad is a great meal opener for any nutritious even though hastily prepared lunch on our most mega-busy days.
Most of all this week we wish to say thanks, more than we can ever express, to all of the so very many hard working, dedicated and inspired Apopkans who through the past decades worked so very diligently to collect and publish for this community all the multitude of local residents’ best and favorite recipes, many of them later reprinted here in Kitchen Kapers.
Those inspired Apopkans’ labor of love back then enables us now, decades later, still to easily access and use all of that great wealth of community treasure still easily available so many years later via their wonderful local cookbooks which all those local groups and churches so diligently and dedicatedly worked to create for the Apopka community and all of its home chefs long ago.
Most grateful of all for our extensive collection of so many Apopka cookbooks might be not-now-yet-even-born future Apopka’s local historians.
Someday, folks living in far future times, maybe around Year 2115, just might be researching and reporting on what life was like and what those ancient-era year 2015’s inhabitants of Apopka area way back in the by then long-gone old historical early 2000s era were cooking and eating.
See below their easy-answers-resources for that question, as recorded in all our current and ongoing extensive collection of local cookbooks created through past years and hopefully still an ever-ongoing project of Apopka churches, schools and community organizations including the Fran Carlton Seniors, Apopka Historical Society, Apopka Citizen Police Alumni Association, Habitat for Humanity, Sweetwater Woman’s Club and so many others.
Meanwhile, enjoy this week’s selections below, all provided by all the wonderful contributors of Apopka home chefs’ best recipes to our current Apopka cookbooks collection.
If you’ve got a favorite recipe you would like to contribute to this Kitchen Kapers column, please do send it!
BRENDA JENKINS’ MINI PIZZA
Recipe fromÂ
New Vision Community Church’s Feeding The Flock
English muffins
1 package shredded cheese
1 small can tomato sauce
Cut English muffin in half and spread tomato sauce on top. Add cheese and heat in toaster oven until cheese melts.
BRENDA JENKINS’Â
PIGS IN BLANKETS
Recipe fromÂ
New Vision Community Church’s Feeding The Flock
1 package hot dogs
1 can biscuits
1 small can chili (optional)
Wrap the biscuit dough around the hot dog. Bake in preheated oven at 425 degrees for 20 minutes. While that is cooking, heat the sauce in a saucepan. Remove the hot dogs from oven, pour sauce over them and serve.
APOPKA HISTORICAL SOCIETY’S TANGY OLIVE POTATOES
Recipe fromÂ
Apopka Historical Society’sÂ
Preserving The Big Potato
1 package (1 pound four ounces) refrigerated diced potatoes or fresh diced potatoes
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
4 ounces Canadian bacon, finely chopped
1 medium size onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 cup whipping cream
1-1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
3 tablespoons sliced pimiento-stuffed olives
Arrange the diced potatoes in a steamer basket over boiling water. Cover and steam for 20 minutes or until tender. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add bacon, onions and thyme. Saute for 10 minutes. Stir in the diced potatoes, whipping cream, salt and pepper. Cook for five minutes or until heated thoroughly.
Stir in the sliced olives and serve immediately. Recipe yields four servings.
ANTOINETTE SLOTERDYK’SÂ
GARDEN SALAD
Recipe fromÂ
Fran Carlton Seniors’ Cookbook
1 large can French style green beans
1 can Green Giant shoepeg white corn
1 large can tiny green peas
1 medium green pepper, chopped fine
1 small jar chopped pimientos
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1/2 cup onion, chopped
Dressing:
3/4 cup dressing
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 cup sugar
Salt (amount to your taste)
Combine dressing ingredients in a small sauce pan and heat to boiling. Cool mixture and pour over vegetable mixture. Chill for at least 24 hours so it can blend. (This can be made and kept refrigerated two days ahead.)
TOMMIE SMITH’SÂ
ASPARAGUS-PEAS DELUXE
Recipe fromÂ
Fran Carlton Seniors Cookbook
1 one-pound can English peas and onions, drained
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 pound can of asparagus, drained
1 can Cheddar cheese soup
Paprika (amount to your taste)
1 can French fried onion rings
In greased casserole, layer the drained peas and the mushroom soup, the asparagus and the cheese soup. (Do not mix but just layer in the order listed.) Sprinkle paprika over the top. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove from oven. Add onion rings and cook for two or three minutes longer.
MARLENE RUIZ’S PECAN PIE
Recipe from Calvary Church of the Nazarene’s A Harvest of Recipes
1/2 cup margarine
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs, slightly beaten
3/4 cup dark corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1-1/2 cups chopped pecans
1 unbaked pie shell
Set oven at 325 degrees. Cream the butter and then add the sugar gradually. Continue beating until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add eggs, corn syrup, salt, vanilla and pecans and mix well. Pour mixture into pie shell. Bake for 40-45 minutes.
