Trying to help y’all with some recipes

written to someone asking

The recipes were so large and I have lost them but I can give you the ingredients if that will help. The cheese veggie which was my favorite had shredded cheddar and jack in equal parts with a small amount of Swiss added which was maybe 10%. Then we shredded equal parts of sweet potatoes and carrots and onions (preferably Visalia) and then mix them in a bag and freeze them. I know this sounds weird but it sort of cooks them. Unfreeze them and when they 5haw, mix them into the shredded cheeses in a mixer. The tough part is remembering how much of each. We made 100lb at a time. Ha. It would be about 1 cup of cheese to 1/4 cup of the veggies. After mixed then you would spread out a portion on the flowerpot bread and bake in the oven until the cheese melted. Top with bean sprouts chopped tomatoes and lettuce.
The chicken and almond had shaved turkey breast ( what can I say, it sounded better and was in the same family ha) cream cheese, sherry wine, chopped green olives and toasted sliced almonds. Put in a pan and slowly heat. The juice from the turkey will mix with the cream cheese to help it not burn. Plain turkey, no flavors. I’ll try to test it to see how much but I think 1/2 lb Shaved turkey with 3 oz cream cheese, maybe a tlb of chopped olives and a couple tlb. Of almonds and a couple tlb. Of sherry wine. Hope this helps.

written to Christopher

Hey Chris, I can’t seem to find the actual recipe but the best I can do is give you the ingredients. We used a dry potat that was called potato pearls but couldn’t find it anymore, but could use any kind, mix with water but pretty dry and add raw eggs, Parmesan garlic salt, and a little milk. Then we put it in a cookie press. Not sure you remember, but it squeezes the dough through a tip that makes ridges directly into hot oil so it gets crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Hope this helps. Hope you are doing well.

The flowerpot bread………….

Well, what I thought would be weeks turned into years. I’m going to show you the original recipe and then maybe you will understand why.  Recipes that have leavening agents whether it be baking powder or yeast do not divide well or multiply well. They take a lot of adjusting. I have finally come up with a product close to the original. Since I retired, I loved to travel, so I kept putting this deed off, but with the dreadful time we are all going through, I figured since I am old and stuck at home, I would be productive. Haha, I guess everyone else had the same idea of baking bread as all of a sudden, it seemed impossible to buy yeast and whole wheat bread flour and unbleached bread flour and high heat milk powder. Especially when I didn’t feel like I could go in stores. Publix said they had yeast but when I would order it to pick up, it would be gone.  Finally, I was able to piecemeal it together.  To show you how difficult it can be to cut the recipe, this is the original.

20 lbs. unbleached bread flour

3 lbs. whole wheat bread flour

2 lbs prima wheat flour

1 tlb.honey

2 cup yeast

10 lbs. water

mix in 80qt mixer Set to rise until double

add:

6lbs. Unbleached flour

7 lbs. whole wheat bread flour

2 lbs prima wheat flour

4 lb high heat milk powder

5 oz malt

1 cup butter melted

1/2 cup kitchen biuquet

1 cup safflower oil

9.5 lbs wildflower honey

1 tlb. Ginger powder

3 lbs water

2 cups yeast

1 tlb honey

11 oz salt

mix together until forms ball and kneed for 8-10 minutes

okay as you see that’s about an 80 lbs. dough. Ha.
okay, here is what I have come up with.

mix In mixer with paddle

3 cups of unbleached bread flour

1/2 cup whole wheat bread flour

1/3 cup prima wheat flour ( wheat flour with lots of bran)

2 tlb. Yeast ( I heap them just because …)

mix dry ingredients and add water below  should not be too sticky or too dry but make a nice ball

2 cups + or- 112 degree water or as close as you think you can get it to that temp

Leave in mixer and cover with a damp towel until at least 1.5 times the size. When you push a finger in it and it stays it’s done.

while that is rising, mix in a bowl:

1 cup unbleached flour

1 1/4 cup whole wheat bread flour

2/3 cup prima flour

1/4 oz malt

3/4 cup high heat milk powder ( regular milk powder keeps yeast from rising)

1 tlb. Yeast (heap)

2 tsp. Salt

set aside and mix in separate bowl:

5/8 cup wildflower honey

1 oz of butter melted

3/4 tsp. Safflower oil

1 1/4 tsp kitchen bouquet

1/2 tsp ginger

When dough or sponge as we call it has risen, then switch to a dough hook and as you turn the mixer on add small amounts to the sponge alternately of each bowl. If you finish and the dough seems too dry then add small amounts of water a tablespoon at a time until the dough is smooth and elastic.
there are so many possible things that need to change depending on where you live and how much humidity is in the air. If the flour is in an area where there is high humidity then it won’t need the water but if your kitchen is very dry, then you will

now you can pinch of rolls and put them on a cookie sheet  flowerpots take lots of seasoning so I suggest you make rolls instead. Place them on a warm stove to rise and cover with a damp towel until they have risen. Same test, push with finger until it doesn’t bounce back. I use parchment or you can oil the pans  bake at 350 degrees for around 10 minutes depending on how big you make the rolls  check the bottom of the roll to see if it’s browned to see if done. 10-15 minutes usually works. They freeze well then thaw and toast  I actually like them better the day after or at least a few hours after and make great sandwiches complimenting the flavors.
good luck  and bon appetite!

 

recipes coming

To all the inquires about recipes, I retire in a couple of months and am going to put together a cookbook of the recipes from Good ol’ Days and from my catering company, Sally’s Events. Thanks for your patience.

Sally

There is gold in them there flowerpots

I know it has been a while, but hearing from Terre has spurred me on. It reminded me of a customer who became my dentist. Her name was Barbara and she graduated from Emory Dental School and used to come in to eat Cheese Flowerpots on a regular basis. She was also my dentist after a while. I remember her telling me once that she dabbled in making jewelry and especially gold and silver. She said it was from working with teeth with gold and silver. One day right before Christmas, she came in for her “usual” and we were laughing and talking and she got an emergency call so we boxed up her lunch and she left the money on the table. I picked up the cash and below was a beautiful necklace with a baby gold flowerpot filled with flowerpot bread. The best tip ever, I had tears in my eyes. I do want to say to everyone who has either worked with me or been a patron of Good Ol’ Days, thank you from the bottom of my heart, it was because of you that we had so many wonderful years.

The Taco Cake

The Taco Cake.

The Taco Cake

Hi Everyone,
I woke up thinking about this story and decided I had to write about it now before I forgot again. Many years ago at the Good ol’ Days in Emory Village, I had a regular customer(there were a lot of them), that would come in and say “I wanted a taco, but could not pass up the craving for a chicken with almond sandwich, so the taco will have to wait.” He literally said this every time he came in. Well, obviously, we did not make tacos, but I started to think….he will come in and have a flowerpot sandwich, why not make him a “taco” cake for dessert. What I mean is a cake that looks like a taco. Then I thought, what about the rest of the customers? So I need to make a giant taco cake. You have to remember, my first Good ol’ Days was the size of a Waffle House so we are talking about 20 or so customers at a time. Problem one, I did not have a giant pan that would make a cake big enough, but thin enough that I could fold it over in half. (and not have it break when I do it. We had not been open very long, and money was definitely an obstacle, so I was looking around my home for something I could use as a giant taco pan. Suddenly, I look up and on the ceiling is a giant flat metal cover over the light fixture. Hmmmmm. I take it down, wash it, (whew, it needed that anyway), wrapped the whole thing in foil,(it did have a hole in the middle) and proceeded to bake a sponge cake in it which I was so excited about when it came out perfect. Nothing like having duel use things in your home. Then I proceeded to make marzipan candies that looked like tomatoes and onions, ground up chunks of chocolate to look like ground beef, white icing for sour cream and used white bark with a little yellow food coloring to look like shredded cheese.
I wish I had a picture when he came in for his weekly fix of flowerpots and we had his taco waiting for him for dessert. Everyone had a lot of fun, got full, there were a couple of people that said that just doesn’t look right, a sweet taco. But we made them close their eyes and they were fine.
Have a great day,
Sally

The Guess Who……and Mrs. Roy Barnes

For those of you old enough to remember the rock n roll group called The Guess Who, well many many years after their hey day, we had what was left of them play at the Sandy Springs Restaurant. I found out through a friend of mine that if you could catch them (old musicians) on their way down to play for someone in Fla.  traveling through Atlanta and were willing to pay their hotel for the night(on an off night like Tues. or Wed.) and pay them a reasonable amount to play about 1 and a half hours, that they were affordable and great publicity for the restaurant. So we were very excited about getting them and started telling all the regulars and customers for about a month. The afternoon of the big event the place started filling up around 3:30 and by 6pm it was wall to wall people not only in the restaurant, but in the parking lot too. They were supposed to play at 8 and about 7pm I got a call that one of them was sick and they were going to have to cancel. Holy smokes, did I not want to get up in front of that crowd and tell everyone that they were not coming. To make everyone happy, I had to buy the whole place a round of drinks. We are talking about over 1,000 people at a minimum. I was just happy that they did not start a riot. The good news is that they came on their way back from Fla. and played a week later. Thank goodness there were no problems that night and “American Women” sounded as good in person as it does on the radio.

I know these are two odd things to write about together, but I have to write what I think about so as they say “so sue me”. Just kidding.

This one is about the Good ol’ Days in Buckhead. We had a sandwich that was called the beef Sarver Sandwich because I was inspired to make it by a guy that worked for me named Mike Sarver. He was always trying to get me to make a beef sandwich with horseradish. I decided to make it more like a chicken salad, but used beef tenderloin strips and tossed them with a horseradish sauce that we made with sour cream, mayo, horseradish, and Worchestireshire sauce or as my mother used to say “Lea and Perrin sauce, Sally, it is much easier to say”. Well, it became an overnight hit. At that time, Roy Barnes was the Governor of Ga. Some how the word got out, and I am in the kitchen one day, and get an order for a dozen Beef Sarver Sandwiches to go. I look out the window and there is a limo waiting to pick up the sandwiches. Evidently Mrs. Barnes liked them and once in a while the limo would show up for our flowerpot sandwiches. Our sandwiches traveled in style.

All for now, but I think 2012 is going to be a great year. Talk to you soon.

The Guess Who……and Mrs. Roy Barnes

The Guess Who……and Mrs. Roy Barnes.

Potatoes Wonderful

For those of you that don’t know, I now own a catering company. Three events last night and two tonight, you think I would not be sitting here at 6am in the morning writing about Potatoes Wonderful…..Well, sometimes you just can’t sleep, might as well be productive.

As you might have noticed, I like my food to be innovative and different. So a regular customer came to me one day and said, “Sally, we love the flowerpot sandwiches, but we love our french fries with our sandwiches, why don’t you add french fries to the menu?” Welllll, that sounded so ordinary. I decided we did indeed need some potato, but was not going to give in to french fries. So I started fooling around in the kitchen with a mashed potato. First I put it on the grill and basically made a potato pancake. Sort of boring. Someone had given me one of those “super shooters” which was a small gun that held either icing or cookie dough and it was electric and you  could make fancy cookies with it. So I stuck some mashed potatoes in it and squirted them into the fryer and they disintegrated.  So I added some eggs and they held together, but they were boring. Then I added some garlic and still not right. Finally I added some parmesan cheese and put a tip on the gun (kind of like a pastry bag) that made the potatoes have ridges and shot them into the fryer and they came out crispy on the outside and soft mashed garlic cheese potatoes on the inside. Yummy! The one problem was the gun made a total of three potatoes. The first day I tried them we sold 229 potatoes. Holy smokes, I thought the cooks were going to kill me. Having to reload this little bitty cylinder every few min. was not fun or fast. So I started searching for someone who could make me a large version of the gun, the mac daddy of a real super shooter. I found a man in Greyson, Ga. (not far from me) who did indeed make machines for big companies. I went to see him and he showed me the machine he made for McDonald’s which made chicken nuggets. You will never eat a McDonald’s chicken nugget again after you see what they are made of. To be fair, I think they now use real chicken, thank goodness. Sure enough, he was able to make it and that was the beginning of Potatoes Wonderful. Have a great Day.

Mother’s Finest

Mother’s Finest may sound like some Grandmother’s best apple pie, but those of you from the south know it was a regional rock band in the 70’s. I am skipping ahead for this blog because I saw that they were playing last week somewhere here locally and it brought back the memory of my “Big Labor Day Festival” that I organized with not only Good ol’ Days, but with the whole area of Buckhead. It seemed like such a good idea at the time…..

Labor Day in Buckhead was always a slow weekend for the restaurants and bars in the area. I had often hired the old 60’s and 70’s bands through the years and someone told me Mother’s Finest was traveling through the area to get to Miami about that time. They were still out of my price range, especially on a holiday weekend, so I asked the restaurants in the area if they would be interested in chipping in with me. Some said yes, some said no, and many said they would pay if it was worth it afterwards. I am not going to name any names here, but there were a few restaurants that were true to their word, and came and paid me after the event. Then there were the ones that were not so honorable. The reason  I know they did well, well, let me explain.

Looking back at the past when I had hired the oldies, we could expect 2-4000 people brought to the area. So I hired Mother’s Finest, and hired 4 policemen to patrol the area. One of the hip clothing stores in the area offered to let us use their place for a dressing area. Part of the deal with Mother’s Finest was that I had to pay for their hotel rooms while they were here. So I booked the rooms, and had a car bring them to the clothing store. I believe it was named “Here comes the Sun”. When they came to the dressing rooms, I was there with my 4 children, who were very young at the time. We were hanging out in the front while they were dressing in the back. One of my policemen knocked on the front door(we are still hours away from showtime) and said, “Sally, you have to come out here and look at this.” Well, I walked outside and there were people everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. Hanging on billboards, sitting on roofs, lawn chairs blocking the streets, OMG, we figured there must be 25,000 people crowding into Buckhead and we still had hours to go. I looked at my friend Doug who was a policeman who hired the extras and we both said together, “we have got to get more cops out here.” Scrambling to the phones, we called as many as we could find.

After an hour, I began to think we had it under control when a sheriff walked into clothing store. I asked if he was here to work, and he said, “no ma’am, I am here to arrest Mother’s Finest.” “Excuse me”, I looked at him with horrified eyes, “you cannot do that, there are 25,000 people outside waiting to see them and if they do not show, we may have a riot, and there is no telling what will happen.” “Well, I cannot lose them, they are wanted for stealing $50,000 from Alex Cooley.” (For those of you who are not familiar with Atlanta, Alex Cooley was the main music person in this city for years and had many times fronted money to musicians for records.) Sooo, I knew this was for real. You know how it is when the light bulb goes off in your head about an idea, well thank goodness, my brain was working that day. I told the sheriff that I had paid for their hotel rooms and would give them the room number and let him know when we dropped them off at the hotel and he could be there with his team to arrest them at that time. He agreed that he did not want to cause a riot, and so the show must go on. (I have wanted to say that my whole life).  And it did. And later that evening, Mother’s Finest was arrested.

The area was so busy on Labor Day that many of the restaurants ran out of food and alcohol. Some of the honest ones told me it was the busiest day they had had that year. I was just glad when the day was over. A few came to me and wanted to know when I was going to put on another one. Ahhh, when hell freezes over, maybe???