Moultrie

The weather: foggy, icy, windy. This followed by sleet, blowing snow, temperatures below freezing, and the sky so stormy dark we turned on the kitchen lights to see to eat a meal. Then the weather turned bad. Perfect weather to schedule the meeting.

“Grandma’s Baking and Cooking Club will come to order.”

The number of participants varies. If families are visiting the area, I may have a dozen or so grandchildren. A slumber party could host a half-dozen. A spur-of-the- moment gathering might consist of a couple or three young wannabe cooks.

Purpose of the club — not a regulated, intense, rule-imposed gathering but to have a fun time with food, even better on a stormy day with the oven adding warmth in the house. Flour and yeast, butter and eggs, vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon add mouthwatering aromas.

First order of business: review the theme/topic for the club that day. At first, we focused on breads. Later, we got more specific — white, whole wheat, sourdough. We branched out to homemade egg noodles and added a pot of chicken soup bubbling on the stove. For focaccia bread, we flattened a disc of dough onto a large cookie sheet, let it rise, then finger-poked the dough into dimples, added fresh herbs and a splash of olive oil. Especially good with a homemade vegetable soup.

We used ingredients we had in the house if no time to grocery shop. Old family favorites: peach cobbler (the peaches had to be home-bottled), chocolate chip cookies, pioneer potato bread. We tried calzones — after reading about coal miners and their lunches. The filling a meat and potato combo and then, at the end, some cherry pie filling. The miners ate the main part of the moon-shaped turnover and then the end for dessert.

Sometimes we invited guests to our gatherings. A college student from Ethiopia showed us where to purchase injera flatbread made from teff flour. With ingredients we purchased, she demonstrated her spicy chicken and how to scoop up the chicken with chunks of injera.

Experiments encouraged. One year some of the children worked on a blueberry farm and could purchase blueberries at a reasonable price. From the blueberries we came up with “sour cream, blueberry supreme, cheesecake pie,” which became so popular sometimes the children requested that on their birthday instead of a birthday cake.

Fun times. Fun eats. No fussing.

Safety first. Hair tied up. No floppy sleeves. No trip or burn hazards — no pets or toddlers underfoot.

Our cookbook collection grew. Reading cookbooks is sometimes like enjoying a fantasy novel. We fantasized about French pastries taking three days to prepare while munching on PB&J sandwiches. We collected recipes from magazines, pamphlets extolling the wonders of herbs, up to a vegetable recipe book that weighs about 10 pounds. The older kids branched out into pizza tacos, lasagna and enchiladas. The young, upcoming batch of grandchildren worked their magic with canned fruit cocktail and Jell-O.

Every dish didn’t turn out perfect. Make do. A burned cookie — whack off the black. An inedible doughy center on a loaf of bread — feed it to chickens.

We searched for the “best brownie” recipe. After years of trial, we discovered the “best brownie.” Now we had that recipe in our recipe box, we felt free to whip up a batch of “second-best, packaged brownie mix.” Some days we bake and cook all day. Other times our to-do baking and cooking list seems daunting and we settle on a brownie mix, then, depending where we live, head off to a matinee movie, library, the park or the fish hatchery.