Tea In a Tin Cup Read online

  These gifts were in the form of leftovers from some of the troops at that particular time. They’d made their evening meal of chili or soup or stew, had way too much left over, and so—in the spirit of camaraderie and economy and because refrigeration was very limited—they’d give the surplus chili or soup or stew to the staff.

  We appreciated it. It cut down on our grocery bill, saved Cooky some time, and didn’t waste food.

  We appreciate it until those particular weeks.

  For some reason, during a stretch of two consecutive weeks, a bunch of troops made spaghetti for dinner. That was a common menu item, I’m sure, being easy to make and pretty cheap, but it seemed the majority of the campers for those weeks ate spaghetti for supper. And made too much.

  We welcomed the first pot of leftovers with sincere thanks—it looked and smelled great. A day or two later another contingent of girls arrived at the staff cottage, huge pot in hand, offering us their abundance of spaghetti. We took it and thanked them. Another day or two passed before the third delegation delivered their remnant meal. We accepted it and thanked them.

  The next week started where the previous one had ended. A troop of senior scouts was camping in Sequoia, a lodge somewhat like Gaylord, but it had no breezeway. One evening, a few of the seniors walked up to Redwood with a huge pot. I didn’t have to guess. They approached, smiling, and asked if we’d like their leftover spaghetti.

  Normally, I’m a gracious person. I appreciate the thought that goes into a gift and I’m thankful someone’s considered me. This pot of spaghetti was, as they say, the last straw. I couldn’t even stand to look at the stuff. Luckily for me and unfortunately for them, they’d been considerate to leave the large ladle in the pot. I grabbed both and began flinging spaghetti at them.

  I think the younger girls in Gaylord Lodge screamed louder. I know their shrieks were higher pitched. Anyway, I ran after the retreating high school girls, chucking spaghetti as I went. I even got some of the others in the troop—those innocent of the delivery.

  When I was finished, spaghetti draped over branches and rocks and fanned out in bunches on the grass. We had a good laugh, and I spent a lot of time with them the remainder of the week. In fact, we liked each other so much that we exchanged names and phone numbers and addresses, and in the ensuing months we formed a folk singing group.

  There were six of us: MaryAnn, Sue, Judy, Marilyn, Judy and me. Four of us had camp names or nicknames, so we were Mak, Sue, Judy, Marty, Ernie and Nick. We called ourselves The Six Pack, and we practiced just about weekly. We had a repertoire and snappy patter. We had matching outfits for our singing engagements—wheat jeans, solid color western-style shirts (two each of three colors for the group) and matching print scarves worn around the collars; long dresses of dotted Swiss; short-sleeved one-piece culottes-dresses… We were stylin’!

  We bought microphones, and my dad made a wooden, plush-lined box in which we carried them.

  Our personal musical instruments included 6- and 12-string guitars, a banjo, and an autoharp.

  Mak’s dad got us paid and non-paid engagements at a variety of community festivals and events. We even secured a two-hour booking at a pizza parlor. We tried out for a summer job at a resort in the Ozarks and auditioned for a music agent.

  We were doing rather well. Oh, not on the pro level, but we had gigs and we had a lot of fun. We became incredibly close friends, bonded by our love of Scouting and music. And just think…we wouldn’t have met if I hadn’t had my fill of spaghetti.

  This recipe stipulates that the raw spaghetti be cooked in the sauce as it cooks. It’s a favorite of mine, for the flavor of the sauce is cooked into the spaghetti and isn’t just a topping for the pasta.

  * * *

  Savory Spaghetti

  Vegetable oil

  ½ lb ground beef

  ¼ lb ground pork

  ½ tsp onion salt

  8-oz can tomato sauce

  28-oz can tomatoes

  2 cups water

  2 tsp salt

  ¼ tsp ground pepper

  1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

  6 drops tobasco sauce

  4 oz long spaghetti - uncooked

  * * *

  In large skillet over medium heat, melt a small amount of vegetable oil.

  Brown the ground beef and ground pork. Drain the grease.

  Add and mix lightly onion salt and tomato sauce.

  Stir in the tomatoes, water, salt, ground pepper, Worcestershire sauce and tobasco sauce.

  Add the spaghetti and bring the sauce to a boil.

  Separate spaghetti with fork as it cooks. Cover skillet, reduce heat and simmer 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Uncover and simmer another 15 minutes.

  Chapter 12

  For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow

  Some people don’t like birthdays. I don’t quite understand that. There’s the old cliché about having one is better than not having one, and some don’t like the fact that they’re now a year older. That, too, has usually not bothered me, although I admit that turning thirty-three wasn't the happiest day of my life. But I’ve always liked birthdays. It’s the one day of the year when I can feel special.

  Birthday celebrations were special for the members of The Six Pack.

  We’d commemorate each other’s Day with a cake. Nothing unusual in that, I hear you scoff. But what cakes we had! Not for us a mundane two-tier thing from a cake mix, sitting on a plate, the cake top blazing away in a mini conflagration. Nope. The cake could be cake mix in nature, but it had to be unique in decoration or design. Different. Creative.

  When a group member’s birthday was approaching, one of us would volunteer to make the cake. We always had the party at the house of the person hosting that week’s music rehearsal. Usually that person made the cake, but sometimes someone else would make the masterpiece and bring it to the practice.

  I know we had dozens of cakes through our years together. Even if we’d been together for just one year, that called for six cakes.

  Among my kitchen paraphernalia I had a guitar-shaped cake pan, and I used that probably more than once for a birthday. There wasn’t much chance to be creative with the icing decoration: six strings of chocolate frosting running from the peg head to the saddle, a pick guard of icing or else cut from a fruit roll-up or piece of cardboard, a frosted sound hole, and the birthday girl’s name drizzled on the guitar head in place of the instrument’s brand name… Cute, apropos and tasty.

  One other cake remains in my memory. It was decorated as a can of beer.

  It makes sense. Our group name was The Six Pack.

  We baked three cake layers and cut them in half, thus winding up with six halves. The halves were put together with icing and arranged on the plate, cut-side down, so a half cylinder shape rose from the plate. Like a beer can cut lengthwise.

  We covered the whole thing in icing and made a sort of ‘label’ on the can. Probably Happy Birthday, or something equally clever. But that cake produced a lot of laughter and was incredibly unique, for I still remember it.

  Other cakes came and went until Marty and I thought we needed a culinary change. We made a pie.

  I don’t know the flavor, but before we spooned the filling into the pan we carved a message into the raw pie crust, using the tine of a fork.

  When the pie was baked and we cut the slices, Marty told everyone not to eat the crust. So we forked the filling into our mouths, scraping the crust as clean as possible without damaging it. Then we matched the six pieces together, like a jigsaw puzzle, so we could read the birthday wish.

  The crust had puffed a bit during baking, and I’m sure the filling also interfered with the wording. The letters weren’t as deep and precise as she and I had carved them before baking. But they were legible if we squinted. We could make out the message. ‘If you can read this, happy birthday’ sticks in my brain, but I could just be making that up. We’d never done anything like this and it was pretty darned funny.

 
But we didn’t waste a lot of time chuckling. We still had our crusts to eat.

  Toffee-Topped Cake

  2 cups flour

  1 cup brown sugar, packed

  1 cup granulated sugar

  ½ cup butter

  1 tsp baking powder

  1 tsp baking soda

  1 tsp salt

  1 cup buttermilk

  2 eggs

  1 tsp vanilla extract

  4 frozen chocolate-covered toffee candy bars (6 oz total)

  * * *

  Preheat oven to 350°F

  In a large bowl, combine flour, brown sugar, granulated sugar, butter, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

  Blend ingredients as for a pie crust and reserve 1 cup for the crumb topping.

  In a small bowl, combine buttermilk, eggs and vanilla extract

  Beat well and combine with dry ingredients. Mix until blended and pour batter into greased 9x13” cake pan.

  Cover the batter with the reserved crumbs.

  Chop the candy bars into small chunks. Sprinkle over crumbs.

  Bake at 350°F for 30-35 minutes or until cake tests done.

  Creating My Own Way

  Chapter 13

  A Foreshadowing?

  In case you don’t know me or about me, I write mystery novels. I assume this is the product of reading a lot of them as I grew up: Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, Tim Holt. As I grew older I learned of Ngaio Marsh, PD James, Josephine Tey, and Charles Todd, to name a few. I loved the stories and the worlds these authors created. I had to try doing that.

  I did. After a bit of a struggle, I now am writing two British series and one St. Louis-area series.

  I tell you this simply to let you know that everything stems from something, everything began at some point, that no knowledge is ever wasted.

  Take that venture into creating recipes that my friend Sue and I did before I began writing. That gave me permission, I guess you’d call it, to invent a recipe years later for one of my Peak District mystery novels, A Recipe For Murder.

  The story centers on a cookie recipe, the cookie having become famous, reaping kudos and fortune onto the inventive baker and the bakery that sells it. It’s a big part of the plot, so I thought I should have a cookie recipe to go along with the book. But what? I couldn’t take a recipe that was floating around, innocent and carefree between the covers of a cookbook or sitting on a person’s website. Besides, what if someone somewhere had made that cookie? That would shoot down the credibility of my story.

  I needed a brand new cookie, one that had never seen anyone’s plate or taste buds.

  I made one up.

  To be precise, I adapted one of aunt’s recipes.

  Well, to be even more precise, she wasn’t really my aunt. My sister and I called her that. She was the friend of my maternal grandmother, but she was as kind and gentle as an aunt. Aunt Winnie lived in an apartment in University City, one of St. Louis’ suburbs. Going to visit her was fun because we got dressed up and could look at her miniature doll dishes. She kept them in a glass-top coffee table. We’d peer through the glass and marvel that anything so small could be so beautifully decorated with tiny flowers. Once, she took them out, and we got to hold them. They had hardly any weight at all. I suppose they were made of china. Mom told us to be very careful with them.

  There were teacups and saucers, a teapot, creamer and sugar bowl. They were too small to use for a doll or in one of my sister’s and my pretend doll teas, so I didn’t know why Aunt Winnie had them. Maybe because they were pretty to look at.

  Sometimes at her apartment we had a sort of tea ourselves. Aunt Winnie would bring out her freshly baked cookies and we’d sit on the couch in the living room, napkins on our laps, trying to keep the crumbs on our plates. We may have had something to drink. I don’t remember. I just remember those cookies. They were heavenly. A sort of shortbread cookie, but not as we think of Scottish shortbread. Shortbread in the sense of the dough being short—a high proportion of butter to the amount of flour.

  The cookies were flat and thin along the edges, and pieces of pecan studded the dough. I adored those cookies. I’ve never come across this cookie anywhere—in a bakery or a cookbook or from another friend. I realize that doesn’t preclude that it could be in some cookbook, but I’ve baked and served these cookies for decades, and people love them and find them unique. So, I figured I was fairly safe if I used the recipe for The Recipe in my book.

  I didn’t change much from the original. It’s perfect. I debated about using it as it is or altering it. I think my nerves kicked in. I think the whispers of the recipe floating around or coming to light in a 1940’s book nudged me into making a slight adaption. I did. And I named it Flying Saucers because they’re so good they disappear from the plate as fast as a flying saucer.

  In the book, one of the detectives brings Detective-Chief Inspector Geoffrey Graham a sack of the cookies for their morning break. Cookies are called biscuits in Britain. Here’s a snatch of the scene from the book…

  I handed him a white bag and leaned back in the chair. Even the cold metal frame felt good after half an hour outside.

  “What’s this?” He opened the bag cautiously, as though expecting something grisly from the crime scene.

  “Biscuits from the tearoom. They’re called Flying Saucers. The shop’s quite famous for them. They sell them hand over fist, even packaging and posting overseas orders. Owen developed the recipe. I thought you’d like some for your elevenses.”

  Graham needed no urging, plunging his hand into the bag. When he stopped midway in chewing, he raised a skeptical eyebrow and angled the open bag toward me. I thanked him as I took two biscuits.

  “Marvelous,” he finally said. “Why the name?” He reached for another biscuit.

  “There’s your answer.”

  So, with apologies to my aunt, I went ahead with the tweaked version of her recipe. I actually had to invent a cookie for the book even though I didn’t include the recipe, for I needed to know if my characters talked about a cinnamon cookie or a chocolate cookie or a caramel-topped cookie… When I wrote the companion cookbook to The Peak District mysteries years later, I included the recipe.

  I give it here, too, and hope they will live up to their name for you.

  Flying Saucers – about 4 dozen cookies

  1 cup butter, softened

  1 cup sugar

  1 egg

  1 tsp vanilla extract

  3 tsp ground cinnamon

  3 cups flour

  * * *

  Preheat oven to 350°F.

  In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar.

  Add the egg and vanilla extract.

  Stir in the cinnamon and flour.

  Use your hands to mix in the last of flour. Form dough into walnut-sized balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Place sheet of waxed paper over dough and squash dough flat with the bottom of a drinking glass. The thinner the dough, the crisper the cookie.

  Bake for 15-18 minutes at 350°F or until edges are slightly golden. Cool on wire cookie rack.

  Chapter 14

  A Failed Creation

  The invention of the Flying Saucers cookie came years after my venture into creating my original pie recipe.

  I love berry pies. Especially strawberry and blueberry. I didn’t see why they couldn’t be combined into one pie, with maybe my favorite fruit, raspberry, thrown in. So I went about developing my recipe.

  I know the adage about not serving anything you haven’t tried or made before to company. But it was a game night, only my parents and the couple who made up our fivesome. Besides, what could go wrong with a fruit pie? It wasn’t like I was making something complicated, like B’stilla, for the first time. I was in my thirties and an old hand at baking pies.

  I set to work, measuring, writing down ingredients and amounts. It smelled wonderful as the kitchen filled with the fragrance of baking crust and berries. And when I lifted it from the oven at the end of
its baking time, it looked wonderful. The juices from the berries bubbled up around the cookie cutter dough shapes I usually substitute for a lattice top. I set the pie on the wire rack to cool, and moved on to cleaning the house and setting the table and cooking dinner.

  Hours later, I welcomed my parents and friends to my home. We finished the meal and I went into the kitchen to cut the pie (Usually I cut dessert at the dining room table, but I didn’t want to risk my tablecloth to stray berry juices and their subsequent stains.) I was smiling as I cut the pie, anticipating the compliments I’d get.

  The compliments never came. Rather, my shriek alerted everyone in the dining room that something was not quite right. I brought in the pie and set it on the table. Everyone leaned forward to look at the pan.

  I’d cut the first piece and lifted it onto a plate, so the interior of the pie in the pan was easy to see. Bluish water sat in the bottom of the pie pan. Bluish water oozed from the fruit of the first cut piece on the plate. It was a mess.

  I asked my mom what had happened. She tasted the liquid and made a face. Obviously, I had to find out what prompted that reaction from my usually placid mother. I tasted it. And promptly spit it out.

  It was bitter. What in the world happened?

  My first thought was that I’d forgotten to add the sugar. That was a possibility. I got my paper from the kitchen, brought it to the table, and read over my notes. No, I’d listed the amount of sugar. But I could’ve written it down before I added it, and then got a phone call or had to tend to the cat or some such diversion. I vowed to try the recipe again, apologized for the problem with the dessert, and offered ice cream.

  Eager to prove to myself that my recipe was actually wonderful, I tried it again the following week. I bought more strawberries, blueberries and raspberries at the grocery store. I set out a fresh sheet of paper. I measured ingredients and listed them after I added them. I timed the baking and wrote down the correct time and oven temperature. I took it from the oven, and set it on the wire rack. It smelled great. Surely it would taste great.