For Readers

I like food. Okay, that doesn’t completely cover it. I love food. I love cooking it, eating it, and talking about it. I love everything about it. I especially like finding the perfect ingredients and preparing a long, happy meal, and sharing it over funny stories with family and friends. Lots of my food has a story to go along with it, and lots of my stories have some food to go along with them, too.

These next bits are not exactly the kinds of recipes you might expect to find in a cookbook. I am not someone, for example, who measures. I am more of an estimator. This is how I cook and how we eat. You won’t always find which size saucepan to use or any directions about boiling and peeling. You might, however, find some good ideas for supper.

Here’s a peek at some of the Old Fashioned Christmas recipes

Some recipes featured in my new book:

Cheddar Chive Biscuits

Mud Season

Coffee-Encrusted Skirt Steak

Cheese Recipes

And cheese. Let me count the ways. Around here, you’ll find a fabulous boutique dairy every few miles along the road, just like the one where Zeus lives. Some of these dairies sell their milk and cheese just inside the barn, on the honor system. There is usually a refrigerator with a hand-lettered sign and a cash box. You make your own change. Then you write what you took on the clipboard hanging from the ceiling. You might pay a deposit on your jar of milk. Next week you bring your jar back, so you only have to pay the deposit once. It is quaint, charming, delicious, and well-nigh irresistible. So I had to come up with a whole bunch of new recipes to use all the cheese that suddenly found its way into my home.

Easy Cheddar Grits

Summer Watermelon Salad

Panzanella

Vermont Mac & Cheese

Egg Recipes

So, my old See ’n Say taught me that chickens lay eggs. It didn’t say how many. Young chickens lay eggs like crazy. At least one every other day for the first two years or so. Sometimes every day. Some breeds lay more than others. The chicken books are woefully cautious about predicting this, since many people who get chickens apparently want to sell the eggs, so they need big producers. For a family, I suspect any gaggle of hens will give you more than you need. We have eleven hens and one rooster just at the moment. So we have gobs of eggs. Egg dishes have become house specialties.

Ellen’s Best Prosciutto Brioche (very eggy dough)

Yankee Deviled Eggs

Lovely Fluffy Quiche

Crepes

Take Home Suppers

There were so many of these . . . Whatever we wanted to eat became a Peltier’s Take Home Supper, since we could save time by cooking our suppers at the store. Benjamin was going to Green Mountain College, just half an hour away, and his friends would come by for these lots of nights. So we were always cooking for a crowd, even if they weren’t always exactly customers. Plus, we might have been headed for trouble, but we were also going to get fat! We had to get something out of it. Here are a few favorites. Yes, despite what I said, and will say, a few people bought these all the time. And the tourists. The tourists loved them. Just because we were lousy shopkeepers didn’t mean we couldn’t cook. We can definitely cook. And eat. Both of those.

Summer

Strawberry Soup

Pulled Pork Sandwiches

HQCS Crab Cakes

Winter

Moroccan Shepherd’s Pie

Braised Short Ribs

Autumn

Homemade Pizza

Only in October

The Vermonter

Christmas Season Snacks

I believe in the goodness of sugar and butter, especially at Christmas. The gooeyer the better. Here are a few of the foods we have around every December. There are so many special foods we enjoy that time of year; these are just some of the standard snacks. If I don’t make them at the same general time they’re expected every year, I get a revolt. Food is sort of the bass note of the songs around here. The melody changes some, but the bass is always there keeping the beat.