My Great Recipes Collection

Great Recipes From the Past

Eggs

Toasted Crabmeat Sandwiches

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This recipe for Toasted Crabmeat Sandwiches comes from the Edison Electric Kitchen. I found the recipe card in the Red Plastic Box recipe collection I found at an estate sale a couple of years ago.

toasted crabmeat sandwiches from edison electric kitchen

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Toasted Crabmeat Sandwiches

Servings 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 cup crabmeat flaked
  • 3 hard-cooked eggs
  • 1 teaspoon onion miced
  • 1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
  • paprika
  • 4 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/4 cup cheese grated
  • 6 slices bread

Instructions

  1. Mix crabmeat, eggs, onion, worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise, salt, and pepper into a paste.
  2. Toast one side of bread slices.
  3. Spread crabmeat over untoasted side of bread.
  4. Sprinkle with grated cheese; sprinkle paprika on top.
  5. Broil 4 inches from unit until cheese has melted and lightly browned. Serve at once.

Recipe Notes

L-5 (the flip side of this is Cheese toastwich.) Taste tested recipes from the Edison Electric Kitchen

Crown Jewel Eggs

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Shimmer, regal crowns of black and red caviar nestled atop mildly deviled eggs make this hors d’oeuvre platter an aristocratic sight to behold. From the 2-in-1 International Recipe Card Collection, the card has two drinks and one recipe.

About the hard-boiled egg instructions

Let’s talk about the recommendation on this card for hard-boiling eggs:
“Supermarket eggs may be super-fresh, and super-fresh eggs do not peel easily when hard-cooked. For ease in peeling, plan ahead: let fresh eggs stand at room temperature 2-3 days. Place in saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to gentle boil and continue to boil gently for 15-20 minutes. Drain and rinse under cold running water. Chill completely before peeling.”
There are two questionable recommendations in this ‘recipe.’ First, stand at room temperature for 2-3 days?
That might frighten an American who’s used to keeping eggs in the fridge. We’ve been conditioned to think that an egg is terribly, terribly dangerous. They’re not. If you leave fresh eggs, straight from the chicken for 2-3 days on your counter top, they’ll be fine.
But most of us don’t have chickens in our yard laying eggs. We go to the supermarket and get refrigerated eggs and store those in the fridge. Once an egg is chilled, it should stay chilled. Personally, I’ve kept eggs in the fridge for a month or two, and they’re still ‘good’ eggs. Even for hard-boiling.
Second, the whole recommendation to boil an egg for 15-20 minutes is wacky. It would make the eggs rock hard and just plain icky.  Even Simply Recipes and Incredible Egg agree, 20 minutes for boiling is not called for.
Instead, friends, bring to a gentle boil. Remove from heat. Let stand 12-15 minutes. Then drain and rinse under cold running water.
You might need a drink after all of that egg controversy. Apertifs card 30 recommends a Coronation or Slow Vermouth.

Coronation

2/3 jigger sweet sherry
2/3 jigger dry white vermouth
1 dash maraschino liqueur
1 dash orange bitters
Stir well with ice and strain into cocktail glass.

Slow Vermouth

2/3 jigger sloe gin
2/3 jigger dry vermouth
1/3 jigger lemon juice
Shake well with ice and strain into prechilled cocktail glass.
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Crown Jewel Eggs

Ingredients

  • 6 hard-cooked eggs
  • 1/4 cup dairy sour cream
  • 2 tablespoons onion minced
  • 1/4 teaspoon paprika
  • 1 teaspoon lemon juice
  • 1 2- ounce jar whitefish or lumpfish caviar
  • 1 2- ounce jar salmon roe

Instructions

  1. Peel hard-cooked eggs and slice in half lengthwise. Remove yolks and place in mixing bowl. Add sour cream, onion, paprika, and lemon juice. Blend thoroughly with fork or blend to puree.
  2. Spoon mixture into egg white halves. Top 6 halves with black caviar and 6 halves with red caviar. Arrange on plate and garnish with parsley sprigs and lemon slices.

Hannah Swenson and the Lake Eden Cookbook

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The Lake Eden Cookbook is a host of recipes developed and baked by cozy mystery super sleuth Hannah Swenson at her “The Cookie Jar” in the fictional town of Lake Eden, Minnesota. If you love cookies and cozy mysteries, check out the series by author Joanne Fluke from the very first in the series: The Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.

As a busy-body sleuth and full-time cookie store owner, Hannah Swenson is always contemplating cookies. It’s also not unusual to find her whipping up a something savory in the kitchen. In my first attempt at making some recipes a few years ago, I tried Desperation Cookies, Salmon Cakes with Dill Sauce, Mexican Hotdish, and Sally’s Sunny Vegetable Salad – all from the Lake Eden Cookbook.

There are more than twenty books in this lighthearted and tasty cozy mystery series. You can pick them up from Amazon, or haunt your local bookstore for used copies.

Full disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a link and buy something (even if it’s not the particular book,) I receive a little compensation.

                                                       

 

Lake Eden Cookbook

The Desperation Cookies caused nothing but desperation for me. In fact, I baked two batches of these “everything but the kitchen sink” cookies and both failed miserably. To this day, I really don’t know why.  As a teenager, I was the family’s chief cookie baker. I baked double batches of cookies nearly every week and can’t remember running into a recipe this troublesome. I haven’t tried any cookie recipes from a Hannah Swenson book since then…until now.

I made the salmon cakes with dill sauce for dinner one night. They were easy enough to pull together, but tended to crumble in the pan; I probably could have used another egg to help them stay formed as patties. Overall the taste was satisfying, but nothing spectacular, even with the heavy cream and fresh dill.

Another night I split the better part of the Mexican Hotdish and Sally’s Sunny Vegetable Salad with a friend. This was a rousing success, though admittedly not spectacular knock-yer-socks-off awesome. For Sally’s Sunny Vegetable Salad, I’d boiled my veggies to tender crisp; that made all the difference in the success of the salad. Even Sally at the Lake Eden Inn doesn’t do that.

I suppose my lack of enthusiasm is based in provincialism. Hannah lives in the fictional tiny town of Lake Eden, Minnesota. The savory recipes presented sparingly throughout the series are often hearty, stick-to-your-bones, casual food served at potluck suppers in the middle of a long, cold winter. Nothing wrong with that, though casseroles (known as hotdishes in Minnesota) don’t lend themselves to “spectacular” in my mind. Or taste buds.

Raspberry Danish Murder

Recently, a friend lent me book 22 in the series – Raspberry Danish Murder, and I decided to try he recipes once again. This time I baked the Chili-Cheese Omelet Squares and the Chocolate Cherry Bar Cookies.

One criticism I have is that the recipes are oversimplified and lengthy. The recipe for the omelet squares is two pages long – not bad. But the recipe for the bar cookies? If you count the optional chocolate frosting it’s five pages long. Five pages for bar cookies!

For example, instead of just saying 1 12-15 ounce jar cherry preserves, the recipe says 1 jar (12 to 15 ounces) cherry preserves (that’s jam with cherries in it.) Well, duh!

Another example is this super helpful tip: “You can mix the flour and the baking powder with a fork.”

No kidding.

The recipes also include notes from written by baker and sleuth Hannah like this:  “You can mix up these bar cookies by hand with a wooden spoon in a large bowl, or with an electric mixer. Either way will work just fine.”

You’re kidding, right? I’m going to mix these up however the heck I want to…and probably experiment or improvise with the recipe, too.

Chili-Cheese Omelet Squares

I definitely experimented with this for Chili-Cheese Omelet Squares. It’s a winner for breakfast because you can whip it up in the morning, throw it into the oven, jump in the shower, and by the time you’re dressed, breakfast is just about out of the oven.

I tweaked the recipe in the cookbook by adding the corn and black pepper – and substituting Ortega Taco Sauce for the tomato sauce and chili powder. How would you change the recipe up to suit your family?

chili cheese omelet square via mygreatrecipescollection

chili cheese omelet square piece via mygreatrecipescollection

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Chili-Cheese Omelet Squares

Ingredients

  • 2 cups cheddar cheese shredded
  • 1 4-ounce can chopped green chilies
  • 1 can whole kernel corn drained
  • 2 cups havarti or Monterey Jack cheese shredded
  • 1 1/4 cups whole milk or half and half
  • 3 tablespoons flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon cumin powder
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 can Ortega taco sauce

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease an 8 x 8 pan.

  2. Combine milk, flour, salt, black pepper, cumin, and eggs until well blended. Set aside.

  3. Into the prepared pan, layer about half the cheddar cheese, then half the green chilis, half the corn, and half the havarti or Monterey Jack cheese. Repeat for a second layer.

  4. Slowly pour the milk mixture over the cheese.

  5. Bake 40 minutes or until golden brown. Cook at least 10 minutes, then serve with the Ortega taco sauce or your choice of salsa.

Recipe Notes

Instead of Ortega Taco Sauce, the original recipe suggests combining 8 ounces tomato sauce with 1/4 chili powder. 

This could easily be doubled for a 9x13 pan to feed a crowd.

Chocolate Cherry Bar Cookies

I adore the combination of chocolate and cherry, plus their bar cookies, so I had to try these. And – despite my previous bad experience with Hannah Swenson cookies – these were a success!

I suspect you could eliminate the coconut and up the cherry content even more, if you’d like. I might like them better with cherry pie filling instead of cherry preserves; that would really make the cherry sing in these. And can’t you just imagine these with a chocolate cookie base?

Here’s the base layer with cherry preserves.

chocolate cherry bar cookies cherry layer

You add a layer of coconut, then chocolate chips and walnuts, and finally more cookie dough batter.

chocolate cherry bar cookies ready for the oven

30 minutes later, they come out of the oven. Let them sit as long as you can stand it. Mine were pretty crumbly, but ooo yess – look at this!

chocolate cherry bar cookies final my great recipes collection

If I ever make these again, I would make the base layer a little thicker and smush down the top layer, too.

The recipe says you could even frost these with a chocolate frosting, but that *might* be going a little too far, even for me.

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Cherry Chocolate Bar Cookies

Ingredients

  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 3/4 cup salted butter softened
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 12-ounce jar Smucker's cherry preserves or similar
  • 2 cups coconut minced
  • 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1/2 cup walnuts chopped, optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 9x13 pan and set aside.

  2. Combine sugar, butter, egg, vanilla, flour, baking powder. Press all but 1 cup into the prepared pan.

  3. Take the cherry preserves and heat the jar in the microwave about 20 seconds or until they flop out of the jar with ease. Spread them on the cookie dough.

  4. Cover the cherry with coconut, optional walnuts, and chocolate chips. Press down slightly.

  5. Drop the remaining dough on top of the chocolate chips as you please. Press down again, if you wish.

  6. Bake 30-35 minutes. Cool thoroughly.

Recipe Notes

In the original recipe, there is mention of adding walnuts to the cookie base, but no quantity is given. I threw a half cup of walnuts into the cherries and the recipe turned out just fine.

Optional Neverfail Frosting

1/2 cup salted butter

1 cup white sugar

1/3 cup heavy whipping cream

1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

1 teaspoon vanilla

Bring butter, sugar, and cream to boil on medium high heat. Stir constantly. Turn heat down to medium and stir for 2 minutes. 

Add chocolate chips, stir them in, remove from heat. Let the mixture cool without stirring for one minute, then add in the vanilla. 

Pour the frosting on the cake (or cookies) and spread it out quickly. Cool completely before cutting and serving.

Curious about Hannah Swenson series? Check out author Joane Fluke’s website.

I’m delighted that these recipes worked for me. Have you read any of these books or cooked any of the recipes?

Artichoke Avocado Salad

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A bed of greens is piled with wedges of hard-cooked eggs, avocados, oranges, and artichokes. Each person can make his own salad and drizzle a creamy artichoke dressing over all.

Good served with crisp sour dough rolls and a roast pork loin. In the summer, serve with a heaping mound of whole shrimp or crab meat and French bread brushed with herb butter. For dessert, thinly sliced lemon pound cake and strawberry sherbet.

This dressing makes a nice sauce for whole cooked artichokes. The addition of chilled shrimp can turn this salad into a main dish.

Serves 4

Salads and Their Dressings, Section 2, Card 92

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Artichoke Avocado Salad

Ingredients

  • 1/2 head romaine lettuce washed and chilled
  • 4 hard-cooked eggs quartered lengthwise
  • 1 1/2 avocados peeled and sliced
  • 2 navel oranges peeled and cut into sections
  • 1 6- ounce jar marinated artichokes divided
  • 3 tablespoons marinade
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
  • 1/2 peeled avocado
  • 1/3 cup plain yogurt
  • 1/4 cup green onions chopped

Instructions

  1. Place romaine leaves on large platter. Arrange eggs, avocados, and oranges over top. Also place half of the artichokes on top.
  2. Use the remaining artichokes for the dressing, plus the marinade, olive oil, red wine vinegar, avocado, and yogurt until well blended. Stir in green onions.
  3. Serve salad immediately for each person to make his own salad.

Swiss Chard Bundles

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A delicious alternative to the usual appetizers are these little bundles of swiss chard, drizzled with lemon-oil dressing and sprinkled with minced hard-cooked eggs and bacon. You can also serve them at room temperature as a vegetable salad, if you wish, to make a good accompaniment to grilled and cold, sliced meats.

If you wish to offer these as a salad and serve right away, a light bacon dressing can be used. After frying the bacon an crumbling over the chard, pour off bacon fat. In same skillet, heat 3 tablespoons olive oil. Remove from heat. Stir in 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar, 1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Drizzle over the chard. Serve on a circle of sliced hard-cooked eggs.

Makes 4 servings.

Easy and tasty.

Hot and Cold Appetizers, Section 1, Card 61.

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Swiss Chard Bundles

Ingredients

  • 1 pound swiss chard green or red, washed well
  • 2 hard-cooked eggs minced
  • 3 slices bacon fried and crumbled
  • salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Trim discolored ends of stems and discard. Cut off stems from leaves.
  2. In a small amount of water, boil stems about 5 minutes until tender.
  3. Remove. Add leaves. Cook 2 to 3 minutes, or until limp. Remove. Drain.
  4. Reserve 8 well-formed leaves. Coarsely chop remaining leaves and stems. Divide into 8 portions. Wrap each portion in each leaf. Place seam-side down on serving plate.
  5. Prepare dressing by mixing together oil and lemon juice. Drizzle over bundles. Sprinkle with egg and bacon. Season with salt and pepper. Serve at room temperature.