2013-02-12-semi-home made cooking · web viewactually i’m watching the text messaging and...

2013-02-12-Semi-Home Made Cooking

Seminars@Hadley

Semi-Homemade Cooking:Convenience Personalized

Presented by Patti JacobsonLinn Sorge

Moderated by Dawn Turco

February 12, 2013

Dawn TurcoWelcome to Seminars@Hadley; this is Dawn Turco, I’m today’s moderator for the seminar that we’ve titled Semi-Home Made Cooking; Convenience Personalized. Personalizing or tweaking a recipe for your family’s tastes or nutritional needs is probably common. Have you ever dressed up a boxed mix or added to that frozen item that you’ve pulled out of the freezer? How about making that recipe a bit more convenient, possible using a canned brother versus making your own?

In my home all of this is SOP, standard operating procedure. How about in your home? Convenient

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind of 37


foods are defined as those that combine more than one ingredient. They can range from a brownie mix to a pasta sauce to a frozen vegetable combination. Today we are talking about some of the ways we personalized convenience foods, often accommodating our busy schedules by using shortcuts or just possibly dressing it up with something that we have on hand.

Semi-home made cooking might sound familiar to you. Sandra Lee from the cooking shows coined the phrase “semi-home made cooking,” as she puts it, and I’m quoting from Sandra now, “Semi-home made cooking is a new way of cooking where nothing is made from scratch. The semi-home made cooking approach is easily done by combining several pre-packaged foods, a few fresh ingredients and a pinch of this with a hint of that to make new, easy, gourmet tasting, inexpensive meals in minutes. It’s fast, fabulous food.” And again, that was a quote from Sandra Lee.

Well, today we’re talking about semi-home made cooking and I have with me, for those of you who are familiar with Seminars@Hadley on cooking, I’m often joined by Linn Sorge and Patti Jacobson, two Hadley instructors. And we three are home cooks and just love it, so we do these seminars, but we’re no



experts; we’re no Sandra Lee. So today we are going to have a portion where we’re going to have a little fun and everybody gets to participate if they want to with your ideas and maybe stump the panelists today.

Anyway, let’s get started, and I’ll do that with an opportunity for our presenters, Patti and Linn to do a little self-introduction. I was going to go to Linn first, but since I have Patti on the phone, let me start with Patti and then we’ll hand it over to Linn.

Patti JacobsonThank you, Dawn. Can you hear me okay? Dawn, can you hear me okay?

Dawn TurcoI can hear you; hopefully everybody else can.

Patti JacobsonAlright. My first meal that I made, when I was about 13, was as a result of a Home Ec class that I was taking in school, and I sort of was developing an interest in cooking at the time, and I made chicken pie, fruit cocktail from a can and canned spinach. And I was thrilled with myself and I think that sort of started me cooking ever since, and I do like to cook with convenience foods. I’m totally blind and I’ve



worked with Hadley for about I think 18 or 19 years, and love doing the cooking seminars. So Linn…

Dawn TurcoWe’re handing you the mic, Linn.

Linn SorgeHere we go. I tried to lock down the key three times and it wouldn’t do it, so I’ll hold it down. Patti brought back memories. It’s funny, we did not, sometimes we get together and we say “Well, what are you going to say” and kind of compare notes; we didn’t talk about the introductions today. But I was going to talk about my first meal and I used, very similar to Patti, only I used Mac & Cheese and I thought “Well that will be really good,” and typical of a young teen, I sliced up hot dogs and put in there. So right there I took something and tweaked it, even back then.

We are introducing who we are and that sort of thing. If you’ve heard me in previous seminars, I often tell you of the courses I teach. So I wanted to straighten that out this time, because it’s a little different. We have some new courses at Hadley in the area of Braille Music. Braille Music Basics for Sighted Professionals and folks that want to help to blind readers to learn about music. And we have Braille



Music Reading, which is for fluent Braille readers with music backgrounds to help them learn to read Braille music.

So since I have a degree in piano and have been reading Braille music for more moons then I want to count, I am teaching those. And my computer courses, Word Processing and Internet Basics are now being taught by Douglas Walker; a fantastic instructor that is newer to Hadley then I and is very good in technology. But no matter what you teach, one of my favorite things at the end of the day is to just take a little break and do something enjoyable.

However that often means I don’t really have the energy to cook an all-scratch meal, so our seminar today is going to focus on the kinds of things I do.

Dawn TurcoI’m laughing to myself because again we did not talk about some of our earlier examples. And one of the earliest things I was encouraged to cook in my home as a youngster was macaroni and cheese as well. It was popular on Friday’s. I came from a home where we to eat no meat on Friday. And again, to kind of dress it up, to take that box of macaroni and cheese, my brainstorm there was to add a can of tuna. So sometimes the personalizing is not complex and as



we grew older I think maybe our examples of how we have personalized convenience foods may have become a little bit more sophisticated.

But I’ll tell you, even to this day, a good macaroni and cheese with tuna brings back warm memories. Patti, let me, since I’ve got you there, did you want to give us an idea of some of the personalization of convenience foods that you’ve done?

Patti JacobsonYes. I want to just talk about in personalizing we almost talk about developing a cooking sense of what goes good together. And you have to do some experimenting. I can tell you about one experiment that flopped for me. My famous chicken soup story, maybe some of you have heard it. It was a very cold day, I was reading in the Ladies Home Journal about how to make homemade chicken noodle soup. This was not really a convenience thing. But I made it, I boiled the chicken, took it off the bones. I added the spices. I boiled it. I did what all you had to do with it and I decided it needed something to spark it up a little bit. And so I added macaroni and I cooked it and cooked it and cooked it and it was still hard. I boiled it and it was still hard. Come to find out I had put popcorn in my chicken soup, so that’s my mistake.



But anyway, I want to tell you a little bit about some of the stuff that’s going to be on the resource list because this gives an idea of how you can sort of personalize things and use convenience foods. There’s a recipe on there for lemon bars using an angel food cake mix and lemon pie filling; potato soup using frozen has brown, cream cheese, a can of chicken broth and a can of chili’s; queso dip using a jar of salsa and some Velveeta cheese.

And I tried this one; this was new to me, tomato soup using a jar of spaghetti sauce and a jar of Alfredo sauce. And it’s just amazing what you can do to combine foods. I like to make casseroles, and I think casseroles a lot of times are famous for using convenience foods, like cream of chicken soup and cream of mushroom soup, and that type of thing.

Dawn TurcoYou’re right. and in fact, in telling that story about your chicken soup, even though you did that one from scratch, one of the recipes I’m adding to the resource list is an easy “get well chicken soup” recipe that I found and have tweaked. It’s actually, you can do it on the stovetop, but it’s for a crock pot. And I would say that one of the convenience foods that I think is so much, can be so personalized is the roasted chickens that you can buy almost in any grocery store



– I happen to go to Costco for mine because I think they’re big, they’re cheap; I couldn’t be bothered to make the chicken myself.

And there are so many ways that you can use that chicken meat in so many varieties of recipes that you can do this and have it be semi-home made, have it be convenient and not have your family feel like you’re eating a lot of chicken all the time. You can really go many directions with that. So you will see on the resource list that we have various places that you can go to get some ideas for this; kind of another website, instead of calling it semi-home made cooking talks about it being almost homemade cooking, or something such as that, it’s on the resource list guys.

UFRight. And another thing that I wanted to add was also get a reader to come over sometime when you’ve got some time and read recipes on some boxes and cans. I had some stovetop stuffing the other day and I made an easy chicken bake with chicken and cream of chicken soup and frozen mixed vegetables and Stovetop stuffing. And it was really good. I wanted to talk a little bit about labeling convenience foods.



If you know Braille, using brailled index cards or dymotape is great. If you don’t know Braille, and even if you do know a little Braille, pieces of masking tape are great. You can put it like the dots one and two for brownie, or the dots three and four for a C for chicken or chocolate. Rubber bands are great. One thing I don’t suggest is that you use the expensive raised markers, because you’re just going to be throwing those away. So try to think of things that you can use that you can throw away and are cheap. Linn, to add about personalizing food.

Dawn TurcoOkay, we’re handing it over to Linn. I know she’s chomping at the bit, Patti. Well maybe not chomping at the bit quite yet. I know she’s having trouble folks, just hang in.

Linn SorgeI’m giving up on the locking down key. I’ve been talking a blue streak but apparently just to myself. Anyway, if you’re a “pen friend” user, it’s a little audio labeling system, and you can put a label about the size of a dime, stick it on a magnet and put it on a can. And then, as Patti was saying, if you have certain recipes you like to use with that, you can record the whole thing on this little tiny label. And then you put a pen on it and play it back. But the nice



thing is you can then lift the magnet off, throw the can away, get a new can and put a new magnet on it.

I want to talk you through something just for fun that a friend and I were writing back and forth about today, to tell you what you can do in a big kind of unexpected situation. A friend of mine suddenly was to do Thanksgiving dinner due to an illness in her family, and she was not a cook by any sense of the word. But, exactly as Dawn pointed out, they went to the store and purchased three great big roasted chickens, cut them up and put them on a platter as you would a turkey or a big chicken.

They went to the frozen food, not frozen, but refrigerated food area of the store, and got mashed potatoes. You can get plain old boring mashed potatoes or you can get them spiced up a bit with sour cream and bacon bits; whatever you want. You can also start out with the plain ones and buy a can of sour cream and a little jar of bacon bits and let people sprinkle as they wish. They also used creamed corn, which I like to do, but they added about a ¼ cup of sour cream from that same container they were using for the potatoes. They also added about two tablespoons of butter and a cup of regular frozen corn that they thawed, and that creamed corn tasted



excellent and it wasn’t much work at all. So they did that for their vegetable.

They took frozen biscuit dough, flattened it out, put scoops of cherry and apple pie filling in the middle, squished the edges shut on the biscuits to fold them over and baked them. Now, it’s not your typical Thanksgiving dinner, and of course there was Stovetop stuffing, similar to what Patti did, but it was all done in less than an hour.

Dawn TurcoThat’s very good, very good putting together a meal. We had a comment, ladies, from Jeanne, mentioning that many of the recipes that are on convenience food packages are also on the products websites, and that is so true. And we actually we’re going to bring up a few resources, and let me ask Patti before I release it back to Linn, do you have any follow-up to that comment.

Patti JacobsonWe are going to talk about some resources from Horizons for the Blind and talking about that, so.

Dawn TurcoGo ahead, mention them.



Patti JacobsonOh okay. Horizons for the Blind, we’ll give you the website on the resource list so you don’t have to remember it, they have all kinds of cookbooks. And I’m going to tell you about some of their cookbooks in a minute, but they also have directions for me, it’s directionsforme.org and dot com also will work, I learned that. So you can do either one. But this; like if you type in, I typed in “Stovetop stuffing” because I just wanted to see how my stuffing mix would work, but it will give you nutritional ingredients, nutritional facts, calories, serving size, that type of thing.

It does not give the recipes that are on the boxes. They also have barcode readers that you can buy from Horizons for the Blind and you can probably buy then other places too. And if yo scan the barcode on the product and plug it into the computer with a USB cord, it will automatically type it into “directions for me” and it will give you all kinds of information. And they have, I learned, over 450,000 products on directions for me, so it’s pretty neat.

Dawn TurcoMy lord, that’s a lot.

Patti Jacobson



I wanted to tell you a little bit about the cookbooks that Horizons for the Blind has that might relate, they have so many more then what I’m going to tell you about, but these ones might relate to cooking with convenience foods. They have Baking with Mixes, Betty Crocker’s Casserole Cookbook, Betty Crocker’s Bisquick Cookbook – I always wanted to read the Bisquick box – Holiday Cooking with Bisquick, Pillsbury Incredible Crescents, Pillsbury – I can’t read my writing, what does this say – oh, Pillsbury Easy Biscuit Ideas.

They have a Campbell’s Meals in 20 Minutes, and Best Recipes – this is a great one – Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes. That’s a seven volume set. But they are great. Okay Linn.

Linn SorgeWell, this gives me a little chance to pitch something that really isn’t part of today, but very handy. Seven volumes of braille, all about what you can find on the back of boxes; we’re doing a “spring into braille” reading thing, which you’ll be able to read about in Connections, and an eConnect from Hadley. But one of the things you can do during that time period is read cookbooks in braille. So it’s a fun time to be able to read interesting things and join in on contests. So



be looking for information about that in the middle of March, it should be coming out.

I want to talk about brownie mixes, one of my very favorite things of all times. But again, you think “Well what’s so – you just add this or that,” but a pinch of this or that is amazing. You can take a brownie mix, perhaps add mini chips and diced up little dried cherries if you want something like that, any kind of thing will perk it up. And sometimes I will tell you that if add a nice frosting, and that doesn’t have to be from scratch either, people will think you’ve made this marvelous dessert from scratch and it truly was a good old box with some nuts, if you like nuts and things like that in it, on the dessert side.

On the regular side, lots of people love egg salad, me being one of them. But again, what can you do that takes maybe five extra minutes? You can use some diced almonds with it. You can add celery, dill pickle, any little thing you add, or Dawn’s tuna, a little can of tuna, something like that, throw a little sour cream in there along with your mayonnaise, whatever you think tastes good and you’ll get a sense.

Often you can add chicken broth to things, but you need to realize when chicken broth is a better addition then say water or milk, and that comes from practice.



A good place that I checked for cookbooks, some of you are beginning to use the [Bard] website from the National Library Service. And on our resource list there are two books you can download from there. One is called Hungry Girl, which some of us are getting to be the more this seminar progresses.

And it’s got all sorts of convenience foods, and this is a digital book, DB for digital book, 67081. It will also be on our resource list. And then there is another one that is called Jackie Pippins Fast Food My Way. Again, thinking of this nice braille reading contest that’s coming up, this is a braille book and it’s BR16295. Both will be on our list. There’s a group in Madison called Volunteer [Braillests] and Tapists, and the nice thing about their books, several things, some of them are done on plastic or what we call thermal form paper; it’s a special kind which is very handy because if some flour gets on it or something you can just wipe a cloth across it and it doesn’t make the braille go away.

But the real perk about the Madison crew is that you can borrow or buy books. So what I often do is just borrow some and just copy the recipes I want.

Dawn Turco



Excellent. Actually I’m watching the text messaging and somebody asked a question about the pen friend. We didn’t have that on the resource list yet, but was that Patti, you who mentioned the pen friend?

Patti JacobsonNo, Linn did.

Dawn TurcoLinn did. Linn, quickly do you know – we’ll put it on the list, but can you answer that question really quickly. It was called pen friend and where do you get it?

Linn SorgeYou can get it several places. This is where consumer shopping sometimes is a little helpful. Independent Living Aids, Speak to Me and – oh what is their new name; I’m so embarrassed, I know this – Second Sense. It was the Guild for the Blind in Chicago, they have it; the Wisconsin Council has it. And it’s kind of a big, chunky, fat pen, but it’s all done with audio and it comes with directions right in its box. It runs anywhere from about $120 to $140, and you can get all sorts of different kinds of labels for it.

Dawn Turco



Since we’re mentioning resources and before we go to our next section, which let me forewarn participants, we are going to ask you to offer up and give us an ingredient and let’s see what we can come up with to make it a semi-homemade dish of some interest. So be thinking about a stump the panel ingredient.

Patti JacobsonBut don’t use liver or kidneys or cow brains or anything like that.

Dawn TurcoYeah, something that we would normally use, something we might have on hand or can get. But I do want to add, and I’ll add this to the resource list, I’m an iPAd and iPhone user so I’ve been looking for some fun apps. And I’ve had All Recipes on my iDevice for a while now, but I found a new one and it’s called Big Oven and I’m just now starting to play with it. And I’ll say that I’m a low vision user, so I’m using this with magnification or when I can make it a little larger on my screen.

But Big Oven is so much fun. Besides having hundreds of thousands of recipes that you can sort through and take a look at, they also have an area where you can put what you happen to have on hand



and it will offer up recipes that use the ingredient, which I think is just so much fun. So Big Oven for those of you who are kind of wondering about apps. And as I said, it’s brand new to me and I did not run it through our person here on site to see how navigable it is for voiceover, so you might want to let me know that.

And I see some people are offering up some ideas on well on the text chat. Let me just say that if you send any recipes that you have or ideas that you have to me within the next two days, we often add these sorts of things to our resource list. So I’ll add it to the list before we post it. and before I open it up and ask for that stump the ingredients, I’m going to add one more thing I’m adding to the website, and this is absolutely delicious, and it’s not my recipe, I’ll own up to that although I’ve played with it.

There is a granola recipe with raspberries that I found from Lazy Oak Bed & Breakfast in Austin. And you take that boxed granola and you add a few other things to it, and I tend to substitute Splenda for any sugar, and you bake it. And it is fabulous with maple syrup on top, so if you want to wow some people you might be having for breakfast, take a look at that recipe. Alright ladies, stand by, I’m going to open up



the microphone and see what folks can come up with here.

Linn SorgeBefore they start, let me give you an idea of what we’re thinking of. I like homemade noodles; I love them. I like any kind of pasta, but you can now get them at various places. Perhaps at a Farmers Market there will be somebody who makes them, packages them; at a Food Co-Op, I have a local dairy you can buy them. And they come in a package and they’re doughy, they’re in various kind of noodle form. But you don’t have to do the putting it all together, mixing it, rolling it out on the board, cutting the noodles.

So you start almost homemade, but then what do you do with it? That’s something I did every other week and your question to me, or my question to Dawn and Patti would be, I get these wonderful things that I don’t have to mess up my kitchen to do, and I can wow my guests because I’m using them, but what would I put with it.

Dawn TurcoWell we got one offer up, ladies, Gary is asking “What would we do with instant rice.”



UFOoo, I would probably brown some hamburger and onion, prepare the instant rice according to the package directions – I don’t know what those are, again “directions for me” would help – but I would add some tomatoes and a little chili powder and make Spanish rice.

Dawn TurcoYou’re right, and in fact, I don’t use instant rice, but I’m sure it’s got the water involved, and I would just replace the water with a chicken broth or a beef broth and perhaps put a stir fry on top. Going back to my roasted chicken, I make stir fry with roasted chicken a lot. But sometimes just replacing that water with a flavor adds a new layer. I’m releasing the microphone.

NancyHi, this is Nancy. I’m trying to cut down on beef and so we bought some ground turkey meat. Does anybody have an idea what you can do besides turkey burgers?

Linn SorgeI just did this last week, Nancy, and I can put this recipe – I didn’t think about it, it’s a really nice



meatloaf but it’s a veggie; it has meat in it but it also has carrots and spinach and cheese. But you can use ground turkey instead of the ground beef. The thing is, ground turkey tends to be softer and you don’t want it so mushy that it falls apart, so add a few more cracker crumbs or a bit more oatmeal than you would to your… Or, if you’re making quite a bit, use one pound of ground beef and two pounds of ground turkey, and that really does really nice stuff and you can make a fine meatloaf.

You can also use it if you’re making a chili where you get the canned chili or something like that, brown it up and add it. Or if you’re making spaghetti, get a jar of spaghetti sauce, use my homemade noodles that I get in the package, probably a marinara sauce, brown up your ground turkey, get a can of mushrooms, drain them out throw them in there and you got a really nice spaghetti sauce. Get yourself some packaged parmesan cheese and you’re ready to roll.

Dawn TurcoThose are great ideas, and in fact, I thought of chili too because that’s about the only way I can sneak ground turkey or ground chicken past my husband is if I put in chili because there’s enough other flavor for him that he can go with that. But it is a good choice if you want to get something a little bit lower in fat.



Patti Jacobson I thought of sloppy joe’s too.

Dawn TurcoYeah. See, when you’re adding enough flavor there you can, I think, really do it and have it taste very good. We had somebody offer up wonton wrappers. And interestingly, last night at the store I bought my first package of wonton wrappers, so I am so ready for this challenge. I am watching after a young man from China going to school, we’re kind of the host family for him. And they are hugely into dumplings. And I’m not talking where they eat one or two little dumplings, I mean he makes a meal of 20, 25 dumplings.

So I’ve been looking, and I went to my apps and I was searching on “how to make easy Chinese dumplings” and one of the easier ways where you’re not making the wrapper yourself or the dough is to use wonton wrappers. So that’s something you can do by adding any combination of things that goes inside. So you could certainly do a search on “easy Chinese dumplings.”

And my new phone is buzzing at me. Are you still there Patti?



Patti JacobsonYes.

Dawn TurcoAny other ideas before I release it to Linn?

Patti Jacobson I don’t know about wontons that much. You’ve stumped me a little bit. Can’t you put cream cheese in them, isn’t that what – and crab. Isn’t that what crab rangoon is?

Dawn TurcoYou betcha. That’s exactly it. Greg, I see you’re mentioning ground turkey in Sheppard’s pie – yes! Sheppard’s pie is so easy to throw together and it really has a good wow factor if you have it for guests; so Sheppard’s pie. Linn, other ideas?

Linn SorgeWe do think on the same track. I was first starting to put up my hand because of crab rangoon; oh that is wonderful stuff in those wrappers. And if you don’t have to mess with much except putting it in there and heating it up you’re great. Chicken pot pie is another of my favorites. Two things to remember – you can cut down on not only things like beef, but sodium by



what you do. Unfortunately, I love Campbell’s products, they’re soups are very good. But one of the reasons they’re so good is that they have lots of sodium.

If you work with a reader or can read the labels yourself, the sodium in a can of Campbell’s soup is way up there beyond what we would need. So look for low sodium broths, either bouillon or low sodium broth in a can. But when you make your chicken pot pie, again you could start with one of Dawn’s roasted chickens. You can get chicken from Schwan’s. And Schwan’s is a great frozen food place because they have braille catalogues and braille prep guides that are free of charge and they send them every quarter.

So, you get some chicken that’s already cooked up, you thaw it out and really you can do the whole works pretty much from there. Get your low fat broth, some various kinds of frozen vegetables. You can get potatoes in a can, drain them, dice them and put them in a store bought pie crust, sprinkle some store bought grated cheese in there and put it in the oven and it’s excellent.

Dawn TurcoWe had the question earlier about the high amount of salt in a lot of the processed and packaged foods and



how you get around that, so it was good you kind of addressed that a little bit because you just have to look for some things that are reduced sodium versions. Also, when I’m doing something with butter, especially in baking, I always use the unsalted butter. I pretty much only buy unsalted butter now that I think about it because that allows you to control the salt a little bit. So that would be a suggestion as well. Anything from you Patti, and there’s another question here I’ll bring up if not.

Patti JacobsonJust bring up another questions, we’ll see if we can answer it.

Dawn TurcoOkay, this one’s a tricky one – polenta. Alice is asking about what we would do with polenta. It comes in a tube and I’m big into Italian cooking, but I am not big into polenta. Anybody else?

Patti JacobsonI think you can add, can’t you add sausage to it and then put a red sauce, Italian sauce on it and just eat it that way?

Dawn Turco



I think you can also use it kind of as a base like you can put a meat on top of it, use it in place of maybe a potato or something. Any ideas from either you Linn or the group; hands up.

Linn SorgeSorry to say that’s something I don’t use. I have many food allergies and it’s something that I’m always working with when I have guests or, you know, I’m always adapting recipes. Unfortunately, I’m allergic to garlic and onions; that kind of stuff is in everything. I’ve found one kind of Hunt’s tomato sauce that has none, and then I can make my own spaghetti sauce using other spices but no garlic and onion. And yet for my guests, I tend to be a two pot stovetop if I’m doing something like that because a lot of people like them. But if you’re working with food allergies, this is where again, you might be able to take various cans or this or boxes of that; avoid the allergy and still make a really nice meal.

Dawn TurcoWe have a question about Schwan’s, somebody wanted you to repeat what do they offer in braille? Patti, I don’t think you use them…

Patti Jacobson



Oh I can answer that because I get Schwan’s all the time. They have their catalogues in braille, and you get them, they send them to you through the mail free every other month. And it lists all their products and the prices and you can get product preparation directions, you can get nutritional information, all in braille. And I think it used to be that you could get them on cassette. Now since cassettes are not so readily available now I don’t know if they still do that. But their phone number is 1-888-Schwans.

Dawn TurcoAlright, let me release the microphone, see if we have any other comments related to this.

AliceHello, this is Alice and I do know that Schwan’s, besides the braille, does offer CDs. And they used to have one source that recorded the catalogue on one CD, but now they’ve gone to another source and it’s several CDs that one receives as Patti said, every other month.

Dawn TurcoThank you, Alice. Anybody else out there, you’re a quiet group of cooks today. Come on, let’s hear a little chatting.



UFThey’re hungry.

Dawn TurcoAre Schwan’s the ones who deliver?Patti JacobsonYes, that is exactly what I was going to say. They will deliver right to your door. You can call in your orders ahead. And my Schwan’s guy that I use, he is just a joy, and I’ve had three or four different ones through the years and they all will do it. If you want a quick, “I got my prep guide but I’d just like to make this right now,” they will even read you what’s on the box. So, you can just jot it down or throw a good old fashioned cassette in or something like that, while they’re there. You can call in your orders ahead, they’ll come once a month, every other week, whatever. And it is a very nice service. I think it’s pretty much nationwide.

They have a website that you can also explore, but it’s not as friendly as it could be, so cheers for them for giving us accessible hard copy.

Dawn TurcoWe have a question about french toast, ladies. And Jeanette says that when she makes it, it comes out mushy, and she’s even had her husband try and it doesn’t come out much better. I have a couple of



thoughts related to that – one is if you’re going to make french toast the traditional way, I would use perhaps a different kind of bread. Get perhaps a baguette or some kind of bread that has a little bit of firmer crust and slice that up and don’t leave it in your egg mixture for very long. That definitely will get it soggy.

Perhaps using bread that’s a couple of days old so it’s not quite so soft, it will taste find as french toast. But lastly, and you can search on this online folks, there’s many recipes out there for baked french toast. And again, I’ve done this for a brunch and you actually do it the night before. And it uses a french bread or a baguette, and I guess you could even use an Italian bread. But you slice it up and put it in a casserole dish, and there’s an egg, cream or milk mixture that goes on top. And it soaks it in overnight and then you bake it. And the one I used has kind of a pecan topping on it as well, so it really comes out very nicely.

But that’s taking something and giving – again, it’s a wow factor; I wouldn’t do it on a regular weekend. I’m ready to release the microphone for more and I’ll try reading some more questions here.

Patti Jacobson



I also use baked french toast now and then, and in my notes I had to discuss a breakfast casserole. There are many, many of them that you can find. And again, it’s interesting, you think “Well what do you want to pop on the resource list,” so I will send this one off to Dawn when I’m done here. But you use old bread, I mean that’s part of it; it doesn’t matter if it’s two or three day old bread. And you tear it up into little pieces and you use some of that. Also you use packaged hash browns, again, grated cheese like cheddar usually that you buy in a package at the store; that’s part of the casserole.

You can brown up some sausage or get pre-cooked sausage links from a place in your fridge section or Schwan’s and slice it up into little tiny and mix it in there. You’ve got a great breakfast casserole, you can put it all in the fridge the night before so all you have to do in the morning if you have guests is get up a little early, pop it in there and it’s ready. And if you’re really lucky, that afternoon previous, you can go to a bakery and get a nice raisin bread or something like that and you’ve got breakfast.

CallerIs polenta sort of along grits?

Dawn Turco



We had a question is polenta like grits?

UFOh gosh. You might have stumped the panel. Maybe you get a prize.

Dawn TurcoYou know, it’s not the same. I’m trying to think what is the base of polenta? It’s a….it’s not corn. I’m going to have to think about that one. I’m releasing the mic…

UFWe might have to – I know somebody I can check with if we can put an addendum in…

Dawn TurcoSomebody Google polenta quick and give us an answer here.

Linn SorgeI don’t know, but whoever asked the first question about it, I think was it Alice – maybe somebody will know that answer. But before I give the key up about that, you can really tweak up oatmeal, cream of wheat, cocoa wheats just with little things like dried raspberries, dried currants, dice up some dried



apricots, whatever you like or dried strawberries; oooh, they’re really good on top. You can also take what I always, my kids and my nieces and nephews call “squirt cream” and it’s whip cream in a can.

And you make this – when I make this, let’s say cocoa wheats as an example, I add an eighth of a cup of Swiss Miss instant cocoa when I’m making the cocoa wheat water or milk. You’d be amazed what the does to it. And then the kids like to take that quirt cream in the can, shake it up and make a little design on the top. If you’ve got little youngsters you can use raisins on top of oatmeal and the squirt cream and make little faces with a strawberry, dried strawberry nose. So now maybe I’ve given somebody enough time to research our question.

Dawn TurcoSorry folks, I had to clear the speaker. One of you was on and I don’t think you knew you were on. This is Dawn again, and as a couple of people have texted in, I went and asked Siri. And Siri and I don’t always get along; I’ll have to be honest about that. But she came through and she searched the web, and I found that polenta is coarsely or freshly ground yellow or white cornmeal boiled with water or stock into porridge. So that’s kind of where we were going before where you can kind of put it under something.



I also have had it in restaurants where it’s made a little bit stiffer and it’s kind of fried and they cut it into wedges as an appetizer with something fancy on top. We were right, we were on the right track; it’s cornmeal. So maybe it’s Italian grits; shall we go with that? I think we’ll stick with Italian grits. I’m releasing the microphone again. I have to laugh – Donna went to Siri too, so we were on the same track. Thank you. Other questions, as we are winding down our hour today, and then I want to, I know we have a few things we want to add to conclude here today.

Patti JacobsonOne thing I want to add to encourage you all to do, not just because you might get reading practice, but it’s fun to read cookbooks; it really is. I enjoy borrowing them or borrowing some from my friends, sharing recipes. It also gives you ideas. Let’s say in a dessert cookbook you read five brownie recipes and you think, “ooh, well I could put a caramel frosting on it” or “oh how about that; a cream cheese kind of mix right in the batter.” And the more recipes you read the more creative you’re going to get in working with packaged foods and adding them to things or mixing things with them.



So reading recipes out of books is good fun and gives you great ideas and helps you to develop what we were calling a cooking sense; kind of what sounds good and what goes well with this or that.

Linn SorgeThe other thing that I wanted to talk about is maybe subscribing to the Better Homes and Gardens or Ladies Home Journal Magazines; you can get those in braille through [NLS]. And I don’t know for sure about in an audio format, maybe somebody knows that, but I wanted to tell you about a couple of cooking, lack of cooking sense mistakes that a sighted person I know made, and so it doesn’t matter whether you’re blind or sighted.

This person made a tuna casserole and instead of making it with cream of mushroom soup, which is kind of a standard that you would use, she used skim milk and it was terrible. And then, the same person made deviled eggs with worstershire sauce in it, and it made the yolks kind of a brown color and a very odd taste. So she was probably trying to experiment, and I give her credit for that, but you might want to experiment on yourself or friends before you maybe experiment on other people.

Dawn Turco



Barbara mentioned that there are audio magazines from [NLS] and that is true. We also had a comment about vegetable chili. Are there ways to – let’s see what it is – ideas for dressing up vegetable chili, no meat. You know what I actually do with my chili, and I make a big batch and it’s just my husband and I, so I don’t eat it the next day but we wait a couple of days.

And when there’s only a little bit left, and this will work with vegetable chili as well, I get a big baking potato, I nuke it and I’ll put chili on top of the baked potato and add a little bit of sour cream and some cheddar cheese to the top. And it kind of gives a whole new face to the chili, so that’s kind of a neat way to personalize it.

So folks, we’ve been talking about convenience food and personalizing and semi-homemade working in the kitchen today, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the seminar. We’ve had a lot of fun with it and I love it when we have this much interactivity. We’ve mentioned the resource list many a time, and as I said, if you want to send me a recipe you can do that by sending it to the feedback line at Hadley. That’s just [email protected]. We’ll watch for those for the next two days and then I’ll finalize our resource list and post it on the past seminars page along with the recording of today’s seminar.


mailto:[email protected]


And so you will be able to go there and pick up both. If you want to recommend a listening on to somebody else, feel free to do so. We love traffic on our past seminars. And again, I’ll watch for those recipes. Patti, you want to say a quick goodbye?

Patti Jacobson…to everybody for attending and to have a good, conveniently lovely lunch. Happy Valentine’s Day too.

Dawn TurcoLinn, you’re upLinn SorgeYes, I was going to join Patti in saying not only lunch, but dinner tonight. And think “Oh I’m so tired, but I can take some of these ideas and come up with something.” And another thing, don’t forget about salads. They’re good and healthy and if you eat a really big salad you can have a nice dessert and don’t feel quite so guilty about eating it. But you can get regular lettuce that’s ready to use, different kinds, sliced up things like carrots, celery, broccoli – they’re all ready to use in the stores, so you can take one of those nice box mixes, tweak it a bit, have a big salad with some nice diced up frozen shrimp that you thaw or crab as you’re beginning and have a great dessert.



And thanks again for joining us. It’s always such great fun to work with my two cooking buddies here and it just gives us a little chance to meet and greet you and prompt you to go do something creative and new.

Dawn TurcoThank you, Linn and thank you, Patti, again, for a great deal of fun today. I appreciate it. And to everybody who participated, thank you much. If you have a question or feedback, you know there is that feedback email. Thank you everyone and goodbye.


2013-02-12-semi-home made cooking · web viewactually i’m watching the text messaging and...

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