So, what do you do when life gives you lemons? Make lemonade of course!
And oh boy has life given me lemons! We came home from holidays to find a tree that was so laden with lemons that the branches were nearly lying on the ground!
Poor tree!!!!
Emergency lemon measures were called for! Friends and family were called. However, friends and family were either having their own too many lemon dilemmas or were already hooked up with other peoples too many lemon dilemmas. So, unable to give them away, I started thinking about how to deal with the lemon glut of 2019 on my own!
My old fashioned lemonade is a total classic. It’s the kind of lemonade you can imagine kids selling from a homemade stand, Lucy Van Pelt style back in the day. Or the kind that these kids gave away to marchers during the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Bless their non-capitalist hearts!
Old Fashioned lemonade is also incredibly easy to make! It has just three ingredients – Lemon juice, sugar and sparkling water. Garnishes of lemon wedges, mint leaves and ice cubes are optional.
But if you also wanted to add a little splash of booze, well, I won’t judge you. 😉
Stir the sugar into the lemon juice until it has completelty melted.
When ready to serve, fill a glass to about a third with the lemon and sugar mixture.
Add icecubes.
Top with sparkling water.
Garnish with lemon wedges and mint leaves.
Notes
The lemon and sugar mixture will keep for about a week in a bottle in the fridge.
I’m sure I will have many more lemony dishes in the coming months including a much more fancy lemonade and a super sounding pickle that was in a book I got for my birthday.
Let me know what you would make if you had a million lemons – I need all the inspiration I can get.
Coming home from vacation is always bittersweet. One of the best parts for me is being able to get back into the kitchen. My head is always buzzing with ideas of how to recreate the food I ate on holiday back at home. But before any of that, there is the first meal at home. This is usually some sort of comfort food. I crave something that is both utterly of home and different to what I’ve been eating. After time in Asia this might be meatballs or shepherd’s pie. This time after a month in Europe, the item I most wanted to cook was something spicy. Chicken Curry Mildura fit the bill perfectly!
Chicken Curry What?
Chicken Curry Mildura. Now the only Mildura I know of is a country town in northwestern Victoria about 6 hours drive from where I live. It is situated on the banks of the Murray River. It is famous for olde worlde paddle steamers and is a centre of fruit growing, particularly citrus and grapes.
The name Mildura is thought to have come from an Aboriginal word meaning either “sore eyes caused by flies” or “red rock”
Let’s go with the red rock shall we? Because it really is a delightful country town! And a beloved vacation place for many Victorians.
After researching it for this post I’m quite keen to go spend the next long weekend up there!
What I could not find at all was why, out of all the Victorian country towns, Mildura alone gets to have an eponymous chicken curry.
Now, the aspiring Sherlocks in the crowd may be thinking “might this curry contain some of the fruit for which Mildura is famous?” No, there is not so much as aa peep from any of those stalwarts of the 1970’s curry – apples, bananas and sultanas. (Thank goodness).
Chicken Curry Mildura does contain one odd, to me anyway, ingredient which is Oyster Sauce. I have never used Oyster Sauce in a curry before! It does not taste at all of oysters or seafood of any kind. I think what it brings to the curry is a lovely deep umami flavour that makes this rather simple curry taste a lot more complex than it is!
My PSA
The recipe, which you can access here calls for 6 birdseye chillies. I need to be careful when I cook because although I love my chilli, The Fussiest Eater in the World who has a white boy palate extraordinaire. However, even I feel that 6 birdseyes is a step too far.
I used two chillies in mine and it was PLENTY hot enough. Add your chillies with discretion so you can enjoy the taste of a very delicious curry!
Happy Pieathalon People of the internet! Yep, it’s that special time of year when a group of bloggers get together and bake the good, the bad and the ugly of vintage pies! It’s also my birthday week so it’s double the celebrations for me! Pie and champagne! Life, my friends, is good indeed!😍
Let’s get down to it, shall we?
The Pie
Pie choice day is always exciting. What will that email from Yinzerella reveal? There is always a slight worry in the excitement – I am happy to have an odd pie – but not too odd. One of my favourite parts of Pieathalon is that I get to eat a pie so I always give a little silent prayer. “Please do not let this contain anything disgusting like offal or beetroot. Or sugary onions.” Speaking of the sugary onions, my recipe came from The Nostalgic Cook who sent Jenny the Sweet Onion Pie recipe last year!
Luckily the Gods, (and Kari and Yinzerella) smiled down on me. The pie I received was a gorgeous sounding Honey Cream Cheese Pie from Sunset’s New Kitchen Cabinet Cookbook from 1938. It is described as a “not-quite-so rich version of the very rich German Cheesecake. This Honey Cream Cheese Pie will be welcomed by everyone”. It was more than welcomed by me. I had most of the ingredients which is important when you are leaving the country for a month! I did not want to buy things only to have to throw away any leftovers because we were going away!
This book looks great. I love the little cartoony insets. The recipe page also had a v cute cartoon for a less than appealing sounding carrot mould.
Speaking of which…remember a few Pieathalons ago, when I made the Lime Jello Pie? I totally forgot that I had moved it to the fridge in the garage so the housesitters could use the main fridge. When I opened the garage fridge about a week after we got home, it was like I had just put it in there. It had not changed one iota in the month it had been in there.
Terrifying!!!!!
The Song
Every year I get a song stuck in my head at Pieathalon time. For my first Pieathalon it was Waterloo by Abba. For the lime jello pie I went a bit hair-metal and subbed in the words “Lime Jello Pie” into “Sweet Cherry Pie”
There were two contenders this year. The first was, of course “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch” by the Four Tops. But nah, too obvious. The song that stuck was “Honey Child, what can I do?” by The Ballad of The Broken Seas. Which became Honey Pie what can I do? Which then morphed into….no, we’ll get to that…
Ch…ch…changes
The recipe for the pie says that it is big! Enough for 8 which was way too big given our impending departure. There were three eggs in the original recipe and everything else was easily divisible by three so I decided to make a third of the original recipe. And also that small pies were going to be easier to distribute out if we didn’t eat them all. It might be weird to give the neighbours who are picking up our mail a half-eaten pie. But I think, perfectly acceptable to give them a few freshly baked tartlets as a pre-emptive thank you.
The Bake aka Honey Pie what did I do?
I baked my pies on Saturday afternoon where there was a LOT happening. We were still booking some accommodation so there was stuff happening on the internet, there were phone calls, there was washing and packing and I don’t know just a lot of things going on. I was also obsessing about the nutmeg. Personally, I don’t like it so was trying to decide if I used it on all of the pies, or none or some.
But the making of the pies went perfectly. There was enough mixture for the 6 small pies and some leftover. I had a little taste of the raw filling, it was really good!!! I nutmegged three of the six tarts, popped them in the oven and went to hang out the washing.
When I came back inside I noticed a jug of milk on the bench. And realised that I had totally left the milk out of the recipe!!!!
It was too late to do anything about it. I briefly contemplated pulling the pies out of the oven, scraping out the filling, adding the milk and refilling them but they were already a little bit too set for that.
So, there was nothing to do but to sit and wait to see how these milkless tarts would turn out.
My song quickly became “Honey pies what did I do?”
The Verdict
The honey cream cheese pies looked so gorgeous when they came out of the oven, gorgeous golden domes. The smell of the baking was divine. And they tasted delicious!
We had one each while they were still warm from the oven and they were like a cross between a cheesecake and a Portuguese tart. So tasty.
I don’t know what the milk would have done to these but they were so good without it that I will not add it in when I make these again, which I will definitely do!
We had no leftovers to give neighbours or anyone else! I ate the last one the following night as we waited for the Uber to take us to the airport. With a little glass of sparkling wine, it was the perfect end to Pieathalon 2019 and the start of the holiday!
Thanks as ever to the amazing Yinzerella who organises this whole shebang each year!
You can find her Pieathalon recipe over at Dinner is Served 1972 and check out all the other pieathletes per the links below. Why not start with Kelly over at the Velveteen Lounge who got my recipe for Angel Pie?
Here is the full list of this year’s participants. Some of the links will not be working yet, I will update later today as people post their recipes!
Welcome back to Cowboy Day part 2. This one is most definitely not for children so let’s assume the little darlings are tucked up in bed, the cows have been lassoed, the horses fed and watered, the little doggies have been got along and the sun is well and truly over the yardarm. All this means that it’s time to crack open a bottle of Kentucky’s finest and whip up a cocktail…Howdy cowdy, it’s the Rhinestone Cowgirl!
One of the many joys of blogging…apart from drinking bourbon cocktails at 2 pm ‘cos it’s your “job” are the people you meet.
I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of my blogging chums in real life (Hey Jenny and Battenburg Belle, hope you are having a super Cowboy Day celebration); then there are some like the wonderful Greg who organises this cookalong and Yinzerella who runs Pieathalon who I may never meet IRL but who are much-adored pals.
Then there are the people that you “meet” while researching a topic who are just too amazing not to talk about! I had thought that Mrs Elizabeth Wilton who made the Beetle Pie might be my most favourite person ever. But then, while googling about for pictures of Dolly Parton and wondering if I should have made Dumplin’s for my Cowboy Day fare, I encountered the original Rhinestone Cowgirl….ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a rowdy Cowdy hoot and a holler for Bobbie Nudie!
Who? You might be asking right about now. Particularly, if, like me, you initially read her name as Boobie Nudie ( definitely now my new porn name)! Well, there’s quite the clue in the photograph above. The guy standing next to Elvis is Nudie Cohn. He made that Gold Lamé suit. He was also Bobbie Nudie’s husband.
These two began a company called Nudie Rodeo Tailors which has an absolute cavalcade of famous patrons. Elvis, Roy Rogers, Cher, Elton John, Robert Redford, The Beatles, John Wayne, Dolly Parton and countless others – all dressed by the Nudies!
And, as you can also see from the above, Bobbie Nudie remained a glamourous Rhinestone Cowgirl well into her later years!
Here are just a few cuts from the Nudie tailor’s back catalogue
For more celebrities in Nudie Suits you can click here.
Here’s a couple more of shots my girl Bobbie:
And, here’s the recipe for the Rhinestone Cowgirl. Why not make one up and then let’s sit a spell, because we’re about to get gossipy!
The Nudie Tailors label is iconic just within itself Here it is:
And rumour has it that our girl Bobbie is the model for the naked cowgirl on the label!
Huh….maybe she was Boobie Nudie after all!
Sadly, Bobbie Nudie passed away in 2006 at 92 years,
Her obituary in the New York Times showed her at 92 in a floor-length beaded skirt, a bandanna around her neck, a rifle in her hand and her walker at the ready. In announcing her death, The Times called her “the purveyor of glitter.”
Truewestmagazine.com
What a fashion inspiration for all of us!! I love her so much!!!!! 😍😍😍
Thanks as ever to Greg for organising the Cowboy Day Cookalong and inviting me to celebrate with you! You are a true gem in a world of rhinestones!!
Happy Cowboy Day all, and if you do raise a glass today, please raise a toast to the wonderful Bobbie Nudie!
Giddy up people of the internet and Happy Cowboy Day!
Having said that, this year we are celebrating with two posts celebrating Cowgirls! First up some OMGZ so delicious Cowgirl cookies. These are amazing. So good – as they should he when they are pretty much 2 types of M&M’s, choc chips and nuts held together by butter and sugar. They also contain oats so they are also (almost) good for you!
We celebrated Cowboy Day a little early this year because a few weekends ago I found myself entertaining children. This does not happen very often at Maison de la retro food so initially, I was at a loss of what to serve.
My go to’s of cocktails and canapes didn’t seem appropriate plus I wanted something I could whip up pretty quickly on a Saturday morning. A quick flick through the interwebs and yee hah! Cowgirl cookies to the rescue!
I’m not a big cookie maker so I was a little nervous about making these. However, a few minutes after these went into the oven that delicious aroma of sweet baking began to fill the house and I was pretty sure I was onto a winner!
Tasting one (well maybe three or four) fresh out of the oven I became even more certain but the proof of these cookies were not in my eating. So I was mildly nervous when the oldest of the kids, nine-year-old Christian approached me, cookie in hand.
And I can recommend it highly. As can the little humans who I made them for.
Child-friendly post over, but stay a while because coming right up is an adults-only tipple and a teeny peek into the life of a real-life Rhinestone Cowgirl.
