2013-02-12-Semi-Home Made Cooking
Seminars@Hadley
Semi-Homemade Cooking:
Convenience Personalized
Presented by
Patti Jacobson
Linn Sorge
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
February 12, 2013
Dawn Turco
Welcome 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 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 Jacobson
Thank you, Dawn. Can you hear me okay? Dawn, can you hear me okay?
Dawn Turco
I can hear you; hopefully everybody else can.
Patti Jacobson
Alright. 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 Turco
We’re handing you the mic, Linn.
Linn Sorge
Here 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 Turco
I’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 Jacobson
Yes. 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 Turco
You’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.
UF
Right. 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 Turco
Okay, 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 Sorge
I’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 Turco
That’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 Jacobson
We are going to talk about some resources from Horizons for the Blind and talking about that, so.
Dawn Turco
Go ahead, mention them.
Patti Jacobson
Oh 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 Turco
My 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 Sorge
Well, 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.