Desserts: Grandma’s pumpkin cake

Image Credit: wilton.com

Get Ready For Fall With Grandma’s Pumpkin Cake

David Klein in Lifestyle on Aug 17, 2015

Another family favorite, this recipe comes from my grandmother. Though it may seem like a fall thing, let’s be real, there is no bad time of the year for anything pumpkin flavored let alone this pumpkin cake. The recipe is easy, prep takes less than 15 minutes, then bake for an hour and it’s like Thanksgiving come early.

Ingredients:

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

½ tsp. salt

1 ½ cups oil

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. cinnamon

3 cups sifted flour

2 cups pumpkin (16 oz. can)

2 tsp. baking soda

1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Lightly grease 13 x 9 inch pan or tube or Bundt cake pan.

Combine and mix in the following order:

• Pour 2 cups sugar in the bowl.
• Add 4 eggs and mix well. Continue mixing.
• Add ½ tsp. salt.
• Add 1 ½ cups oil.
• Add 2 tsp. baking powder.
• Add 1 tsp. cinnamon.
• Add 3 cups sifted flour.
• Add 2 cups pumpkin.
• Add 2 tsp. baking soda.
• Add 1 cup chopped walnuts, if desired.

Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.

My adjustments: I’ve never been a nut guy so I got rid of the nuts, still tastes great.

Fun tips: in terms of toppings, you can cover it with powdered sugar (also known as confectioners’ sugar) another option would be to make a cream cheese frosting. You can also make it in any form, bunt cake loaf cake, cupcakes… etc. My mom even has a pumpkin shaped cake pan for added effect.

Chinese food: hot and sour soup

You may as well start off your Chinese meal with some soup. I got this recipe from my aunt, but seeing as it is for Hot and sour soup, a traditional Sichuan dish, I have a feeling it wasn’t brought over from mother Russia from with my great grandmother in 1905. I’m sure if you look you’ll find it in some cookbook somewhere. None the less its great dish that can be made cheaply in less than a half an hour.

Hot and sour soup can be used to describe a number of dishes from all over Asia but most commonly in the US it refers to a dish from the Sichuan region of china, which combines the tastes of soy sauce, white pepper and vinegar to a make a predictably spicy and sour soup. American hot and sour soup usually has a notably thicker if not goopy consistency compared to the original Chinese dish.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need.
6 cups low-salt stock (can use water with bullion cubes)

5 tbs. soy sauce or tamari

1/2 tsp.  white pepper

3 tbs. cider vinegar

3 tbs. cornstarch mixed with 3 tbs. warm water

1 oz. shiitake mushrooms or 2 handfuls of regular mushrooms

2 tbs. scallions

6 oz. tofu, drained and cut in chunks

2 tsp. sugar

1 egg white, beaten

Directions:

Boil the  stock, then add the soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, pepper and cook for 2 minutes. Add tofu and mushrooms and cook for 5 more minutes. Add the cornstarch mixed with water and boil for 10 more minutes. Stir in egg and finally garnish Garnish with scallions if you’re into that.

My adjustments: Okay, if I’m making this for myself I’m not wasting time with garnishes, also full disclosure I total forgot about the egg still tasted great. So too I added an extra tablespoon and half of cornstarch cause I like my hot and sour soup for lack of a more appetizing term “goopy”. I also Just threw in the entire package of mushrooms and tofu…  because well why not…

All in all it tasted exactly like its restaurant equivalent.

Chinese food: Bourbon Chicken

Chinese food is probably the most popular “foreign” cuisine in America. In fact, it’s probably the most popular cuisine in the world seeing as just about anywhere you go you’ll manage to find it. Not to mention that China is the world’s most populous country. But if you’ve ever had an annoying, snobby friend, I’m sure they’ve repeatedly told you that Chinese food in America “isn’t real Chinese food.” By that, they mean that it’s nothing like the food served in China.

Of course they’re not wrong, what we call Chinese food is a combination of a wide range of different regional cuisines from East Asia, and has been largely adapted to appeal to American tastes, making the sauces sweeter, frying more things, etc. However, that’s no reason to dismiss it. I’m not looking for a deep cultural experience when I order take out, I’m just looking to enjoy a tasty meal as I watch Netflix and eat straight from the container in my bed.

In the vein of making American Chinese food rather than just Chinese food, I decided to make Bourbon Chicken, a dish that can simultaneously be found at the Cajun stand in a food court and as well at Chinese takeaways. Despite its name, Bourbon chicken wasn’t named for the whiskey, though it often contains some in the sauce. Rather it was named for Bourbon Street where it was invented by a Chinese chef.

Here’s a recipe for Bourbon Chicken which is fairly easy to make and, being that this is a Philadelphia-based section of The Odyssey , doesn’t require dealing with Pennsylvania’s draconian liquor laws for the sake of a single ingredient.

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs boneless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
• 1-2 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 1⁄4 teaspoon ginger
• 3⁄4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1⁄4 cup apple juice
• 1⁄3 cup light brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons ketchup
• 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
• 1⁄2 cup water
• 1⁄3 cup soy sauce

Directions: You’ll need a both a pan and a small, deep pot. Cut the chicken into cubes, put it in the pan, and brown in the oil as you combine the rest of the ingredients in the pot to make the sauce. Heat them and continually stir as the chicken browns. Once everything has dissolved, add the chicken, and then let the sauce come to a hard boil. Let it simmer for 20 minutes, and that’s it. Remove and serve over rice.

Carnival Cuisine: Caramel Corn

Popcorn is perhaps the all-time easiest food in the world to make, even before we had those microwavable envelopes, making yourself popcorn is about as difficult as boiling pasta. Personally thoughI find plain salted popcorn a little bland. Even with butter it’s never something I’m so excited for. Now caramel corn is a whole other story. Simultaneously fluffy and sticky, salty and sweet, it is, in my mind the perfect snack.  

Carnival Cuisine: Funnel Cake

Another carnival mainstay, funnel cake, can also be made right in your kitchen with incredibly little effort.  Since funnel cake is so simple to make, it’s a little hard to trace its history as strikingly similar dishes exist all over the world. Nonetheless, I’m going to give its introduction to the American carnival scene to the Germans. Since we already credited them with the corn dog and where you’ll find one you’ll more often than not find the other I think it is a fair judgement.  In southern Germany it was referred to as strauben, but is known by many names across the world. In Slovenia, flancati, in Finland, tippaleipä, in India, Jalebi and in Iran, zulbia.

Week 1: Carnival Cuisine

It’s summer. Back in the day that meant school was closed, the sun was out, and it would soon be time for the county fair or a trip to the Beach with family and friends. Alas, all summer means now is that they are blasting the air conditioning in the office and it’s so hot outside that between leaving my apartment and arriving in class I’ve sweated enough rival the average rainfall of Vietnam. Unfortunately I can’t put a Ferris wheel in your living room or bring the sea to your back yard, but maybe this week we can bring the tastes of those youthful summers back to your kitchen.

Corn dogs

Let’s start with the corndog. If you  ever spent a summer in New York you’ll remember this Coney Island treat, however it’s invention has been credited to Germans immigrants to Texas, who, after finding resistance to their traditional sausages decided to wrap them in sweet southern cornbread, coincidently giving them the look of an ear of corn. Well that is at least according to one source, no less than half a dozen other tales from as many different states claim to be the real origin origin of the dog.

One truth we can agree on is corn dogs couldn’t be easier to make. For the batter I’ve yet to find a better recipe than this.

Ingredients:

• 8 Hotdogs
• 1 ¼ cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ³⁄₄ cup cornmeal
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 eggs
• ³⁄₄ cup milk or almond milk
• Honey

Directions: Mix all the Ingredients together until the batter is no longer lumpy, coat your choice brand of hotdog, and Deep Fry for 2-5 Min.

My adjustments: 1. I add a generous drizzling of honey to the batter, this is key as I find the batter can taste somewhat bland without it. 2. Since I have a small deep fryer I cut the hot dogs into thirds and make corn dog poppers rather than full dogs. 3.For Kashrut Reasons I replace the milk with almond milk , I cannot vouch for the recipe with actual milk as I’ve never tried it but it is probably better that way. 4. Using a thicker skewer such as a chop stick makes it way easier to batter the dog. 

ketchup or mustard are of course allways a good pick for Hot dogs but these things taste great on their own too.

Fun Tips: This corn batter pretty much tastes good on anything, one particular example I found was on half sour pickles. If you are feeling particularly health conscious you could try it on vegetables. While you are at it you should also stop lying to yourself. You are shoving those vegetables into a deep fryer and covering them with sugar filled cornbread, nothing about this recipe jives with being health conscious.

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About Phila-Phried

Health craze be damned! Admit you love junk food, we all do. Walk the aisles of any supermarket and you’ll see dozens of brands of chips, cakes, frozen foods  and all manner of things drenched in sugar and ready to be fried. Junk food as a cuisine is America made edible. Brought to our shores by the huddled masses of tired, poor and most importantly hungry, foods from across the world were joined together and made uniquely American. On the streets of New York and the tenements of the lower east side people who came from Minsk to Palermo lent each other their expertise and created whole new flavors. In the rail yards, ranches, and gold mines great frontier the same happened between people from Shanghai, Glasgow and Berlin.

As a college student on a budget and and a stress cooker I thought it would be fun to start trying to make some of these foods from scratch, and as an orthodox Jew, I figured I’d try my hand at making them kosher. Being a journalism student, the obvious next step is to blog about it. So for at least the rest of this summer I’ll be cooking my way through the oily sugar drenched history of American immigration and beyond.  I plan to have weekly themes ranging from Chinese, to Jewish, and Italian food as well as things like carnival fare that comes with its own unique history.

so why call it Phila-Phried you ask? simple I live in philadelphia and plan on doing a hell of a lot of frying!