Lake: Amish cookbook provides recipes, humor
By TOOTSIE SNELLING
Marion County Park & Lake Reporter
I ordered a new cook book last week and enjoyed reading it. It is the collection from an Amish family that had 14 children. There were two sets of twins and a set of triplets in the family. Poor woman! The author is a grandchild of the original family. Most of the recipes are for the present, but she threw in a few of the older ones.
One recipe makes bread six loaves at a time! Which I'm sure if you have 14 children you would have to double that one. Another one was for pumpkin pie that makes six pies!
She also tells how to make soap, granulated and bar, several candy recipes like taffy that you have to pull (I remember that), and one for bologna that uses 90 pounds of ground meat. I don't think I'll try that one either.
In the cake section was this one called, "Sam Mommie's Cake." It read as follows: sugar, flour, salt, milk, eggs, baking powder, and vanilla flavoring. Now how do you get a cake out of that?
This one was my favorite — CAKE: Turn on the oven, get out bowl, spoons, and ingredients. Grease pan, crack nuts. Remove 18 blocks and seven toy cars from kitchen table. Measure two cups of flour, salt, and baking powder in sifter. Remove boys' hands from flour. Measure one more cup of flour and add to bowl. Get out dust pan and brush up pieces of bowl which boy has knocked on the floor. Get another bowl, answer door! Return to kitchen, remove boys' hands from the bowl. Wash boy! Get out eggs, change baby, return to kitchen. Take out lard. Remove 1/4 inch of salt from it which boy added. Get another pan and grease it. Tie up dog! Return to kitchen and find the boy and wash all the ingredients off from him. Take up greased pan and remove nut shells from it, head for boy who flees, knocking bowl off table. Wash the kitchen floor, table, chairs, and walls. Call the baker and lie down.
I finally got my butterfly stickers last week and I thought with this cool front coming through I'd see some, but I haven't yet. As cool as it got up north, a few should start coming down. A news report over the weekend said there weren't as many this year with the winter kill and the drought, so we'll watch and see.
We had several fishermen over the weekend. The bass fishermen found it tough, but the channel cat fishermen caught their limits. We didn't hear of a legal size bass caught most were under the 18" limit and were released. A few walleye, and saugeye were caught but they also were under the 18" size limit. Channel cat continues to be the hot fish. Dip cheese bait, chicken liver, and worms are what to use. Fishing on the heated dock also is slow, except for channel cat.
The thunder sounded good Saturday morning and I thought "Oh boy, it's going to rain." But as usual it was only a shower — just enough to make the grass seed sprout up again. Most of the good rains were east of us.
There are a lot of sunflower fields around and they are just beginning to bloom. If you get a chance be sure to drive around to see them — they are beautiful. Some of the fields are so big it's yellow as far as you can see.
It was another busy weekend in the hall. The Wills used it on Saturday and the Kohlmans and Dale Perkins used it on Sunday. Looked like they had big crowds.
With school starting and the cooler temperatures, the swimming crowd has dropped off. The same with boating. Sunday did bring out a few boats and jet skis in the afternoon.
