A week ago, needing a quick desert to take to a friend's house, I dug out my mom's recipe for lemon squares. Hers were always The BEST, and they still are. The other good thing is that the ingredients are almost always in the kitchen and the squares are not expensive to make. Tasty, cheap, easy. Wow! Here is the recipe.
Earla's Lemon Squares
First Part: Cream together 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 cup flour and 1/8 t. alt. Press mixture into bottom of an 8 by 8 pan. Dimension is important! Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.
Second Part: Combine and pour over hot crust: 2 beaten eggs, 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, and the grated rind of one lemon. Return to oven and make 20 - 25 minutes at 350 degrees. Do not overbake. Remove from oven and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Cool thoroughly before cutting into squares.
Do not even THINK about using bottled lemon juice. Yuck! Double-yuck!
What could be easier than that? Lots of bang for the buck. Now, back to my short story.
Grapeshot
Showing posts with label Lemon Squares. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lemon Squares. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Bird Watching 101
Thisbe watching birds. A cat's most cherished activity. Annie enjoys the same pursuit. The birds seem oblivious to the presence of a cat just a few feet away.
I haven't been posting, alas and alack. I've been writing. I did yet another rewrite of Promiscuous Mode, and it is now (whole MS) with an agent, but no great hope. I've done some more on In Flight and am almost 5000 words into a crime short story. Sent another story into a contest. So the writing goes apace.
Also cooking up a storm. Big Valentine's Day menu which we ate on for days. Then S.O.'s birthday dinner of stuffed cabbage. Finished it last night. Mega-yum.
I've also been working on a writing group's web site, dieting, working out, working on finances, yada yada. The diet is just a calorie count diet, which means I have to enter every bite into this web site which helps figure out the calories. It took a long time at first, but I'm kind of into the hang of it now. Total loss: 3.5 pounds, but hey, that's something added to the 3.5 pounds I lost before the formal diet.
The thing about a simple calorie count is that no food is forbidden. A lot of diets say that but weight watchers will penalize you a gazillion points for a tablespoon of butter, but you can eat a whole can of beans. The more something is portrayed as forbidden, i.e., foodstuffs, the hungrier I get for it.
So I take my lumps with 1/4 cup peanuts and the St. Andre cheese and eat less of something else. I haven't been hungry, by the way, in spite of the fact that I'm trying to stay around 1200 calories on days when I don't work out. Turns out I wasn't eating THAT MUCH to begin with.
I made my mother's recipe of lemon squares to take to a friend's house. They are so good I will post them here soon. And I also made crepes with a sweetened cream cheese filling and a strawberry sauce to go on top. This gave us dessert for 4 nights, 2 crepes each. A lot of bang for the buck and also cheap.
Tomorrow I'm baking a chocolate/walnut pound cake to take to another event. I would rather take a salad but it has to be something easily transportable. Doesn't sound like a diet, does it? Small portions are the key.
Tonight, we're back to chicken breast, and I'm doing the Boston Globe Saturday/Sunday recipe with one main dish and then another made from the leftovers. Not high cal and very tasty looking. First Spanish, then Mexican. Spanish Style Chicken
Then you make the Mexican Recipe with the leftovers:
Chicken Chilaquiles
Off to work on my short story. It's a lot of fun, and I'm visiting Mattapoisett today for research.
Ta Ta
Grapeshot
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Food, Food and More Food, Even Cow Food
We love the food network, the cleavage barers, the plump ones, the southerners, the northerners. Even Significant Other will sit and watch. Maybe even learn something.
We had a dinner party last night for some of my old colleagues from IT days, and spouses. We began with an antipasto to die for.I pulled out all the stops, with a trip to the Wasik's cheese shop in Wellesley, for Swiss Emmental, Parmigiano from Parma, grated to powder, Insalata Ricotta, and a couple of Italian cheese I substitued for Provlone and Fontina. Soft cheeses, with lots of flavor.The parmesan and the emmental were for the main course, more of that later.
Then I hurried to Roche brothers for fresh mozzarella, the little balls, not the big ones. Bought kalamata olives, and some mushrooms in a vinaigrette, canned artichoke hearts, a big eggplant, fresh broccoli and a red pepper. Salami, Sopressata, Mortadella, proscuitto and fresh chicken breast.Grilled the eggplant in a grill pan, everything coated with olive oil, then sprinkled it with hot pepper flakes. Broiled the red pepper, and steamed the broccoli. I hied myself into the garden for fresh basil, and made a half recipe of pesto genovese, which is the world's best pesto and takes mere minutes in a blender. Substituted almonds for pine nuts with no loss of quality. I mix some pesto into the now poached chicken breast cut into bite size pieces.
The chicken pesto used to be on the antipasto menu of a big Boston chain, Bertucci's, but they seem to have discarded it, but I figured out how to make it, so no big deal. I lined one platter with red leaf lettuce and the other with raddicchio, and arranged the antipasto on the platters. Not only was it scrumptious, it looked like a million dollars, and the effort was minimal.
Way back when I was a kid, my mom made a wonderful casserole of chicken, cheese, pasta and breadcrumbs. Even when I didn't like ANYTHING, I liked that. Found a recipe in Gourmet that served 12, that had most of the same ingredients, but updated from the 50's into more of a well, gourmet creation. Made that, and my god it was beyond belief. Not laborless, understand, but you got a long of bang for two chickens, some cheese, and a pound of imported rigatoni from Ocean State Job Lot. To die for. My mom's recipe was called Huntington Chicken.
Dessert was my mom's (what would we do without good old Mom?) lemon squares, the best ever, and made with fresh lemon juice of course. You don't use UnReal Lemon with all the off flavors and chemicals, do you? For shame. We whipped up some lemon lime ice milk and some fresh strawberry ice cream. The ice cream maker has done yeoman's duty since we figured out how to use it.
The best part, of course, except for seeing dear old friends is the leftovers. What a feast we had for lunch on the antipasto, and the chicken casserole had not deteriorated with age. Au Contraire. So now I'll have to diet all week, but it will have been worth it. One hopes.
We fed the cows the veggie scraps, and I would like to report that they do not at all like and in fact shunned the lettuce and raddichio that had been exposed to oil and vinegar. Acted like it was cow poison. Don't know what that's about. They liked everything else, and scarfed it down. The sweet faced young bull is no longer part of the herd. I knew he was on loan from another herd. He was the rascal who escaped a month or so ago. We'll miss his pleasant disposition and his randiness. Old Mama (Maggie) looks like she's preggars again. Big as a barn, and an odd time to calve. Whatcha gonna do? I dearly love those big creatures.
Onward,
Grapeshot
We had a dinner party last night for some of my old colleagues from IT days, and spouses. We began with an antipasto to die for.I pulled out all the stops, with a trip to the Wasik's cheese shop in Wellesley, for Swiss Emmental, Parmigiano from Parma, grated to powder, Insalata Ricotta, and a couple of Italian cheese I substitued for Provlone and Fontina. Soft cheeses, with lots of flavor.The parmesan and the emmental were for the main course, more of that later.
Then I hurried to Roche brothers for fresh mozzarella, the little balls, not the big ones. Bought kalamata olives, and some mushrooms in a vinaigrette, canned artichoke hearts, a big eggplant, fresh broccoli and a red pepper. Salami, Sopressata, Mortadella, proscuitto and fresh chicken breast.Grilled the eggplant in a grill pan, everything coated with olive oil, then sprinkled it with hot pepper flakes. Broiled the red pepper, and steamed the broccoli. I hied myself into the garden for fresh basil, and made a half recipe of pesto genovese, which is the world's best pesto and takes mere minutes in a blender. Substituted almonds for pine nuts with no loss of quality. I mix some pesto into the now poached chicken breast cut into bite size pieces.
The chicken pesto used to be on the antipasto menu of a big Boston chain, Bertucci's, but they seem to have discarded it, but I figured out how to make it, so no big deal. I lined one platter with red leaf lettuce and the other with raddicchio, and arranged the antipasto on the platters. Not only was it scrumptious, it looked like a million dollars, and the effort was minimal.
Way back when I was a kid, my mom made a wonderful casserole of chicken, cheese, pasta and breadcrumbs. Even when I didn't like ANYTHING, I liked that. Found a recipe in Gourmet that served 12, that had most of the same ingredients, but updated from the 50's into more of a well, gourmet creation. Made that, and my god it was beyond belief. Not laborless, understand, but you got a long of bang for two chickens, some cheese, and a pound of imported rigatoni from Ocean State Job Lot. To die for. My mom's recipe was called Huntington Chicken.
Dessert was my mom's (what would we do without good old Mom?) lemon squares, the best ever, and made with fresh lemon juice of course. You don't use UnReal Lemon with all the off flavors and chemicals, do you? For shame. We whipped up some lemon lime ice milk and some fresh strawberry ice cream. The ice cream maker has done yeoman's duty since we figured out how to use it.
The best part, of course, except for seeing dear old friends is the leftovers. What a feast we had for lunch on the antipasto, and the chicken casserole had not deteriorated with age. Au Contraire. So now I'll have to diet all week, but it will have been worth it. One hopes.
We fed the cows the veggie scraps, and I would like to report that they do not at all like and in fact shunned the lettuce and raddichio that had been exposed to oil and vinegar. Acted like it was cow poison. Don't know what that's about. They liked everything else, and scarfed it down. The sweet faced young bull is no longer part of the herd. I knew he was on loan from another herd. He was the rascal who escaped a month or so ago. We'll miss his pleasant disposition and his randiness. Old Mama (Maggie) looks like she's preggars again. Big as a barn, and an odd time to calve. Whatcha gonna do? I dearly love those big creatures.
Onward,
Grapeshot
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