Happy Easter!

Wishing you a Wonderful Easter, filled with family, friends, fun and above all, the hope and promise that this day is all about.

"I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die."
-- John 11:25-26

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake."
-- Basil C. Hume

My Grandma's Butterscotch Sauce

This is a great recipe to have at your fingertips. It tastes delicious poured over ice cream and makes amazing sundaes. I am told my Grandma served it with her carrot pudding, which is the stuff of legend amongst those who have eaten it, but as she sadly passed away before I was born I never got to taste it. I do however have the recipe, and I am looking forward to making and sharing it as part of my Family Food History and Recipe Project. For the moment though, I will just share this fantastic, easy to make sauce in the hopes that you will love it as much as I do!

2½ cups brown sugar
½ cup butter
¾ cup corn syrup
¾ cup light (single) cream or half and half

Put the brown sugar and butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat and bring to the boil slowly, stirring constantly. Let it boil for a couple of minutes, stirring constantly, until the mixture reaches the soft ball stage. This is 235 - 240℉ or about 112 - 115℃ on a candy thermometer. If you don’t have a candy thermometer, just do as my Grandma did and just drop a tiny amount of syrup in cold water. The mixture is ready if a small soft ball forms in the water.

Remove from the heat (this recipe is truly vintage - if you look at the photograph of the recipe you can see my Grandma actually wrote “remove from fire” here!) and slowly stir in the cream. Allow to cool slightly, stir and serve.

My Secret Ingredient

Cakes and muffins are among the things I enjoy baking most. I started out when I was a little girl with ready prepared mixes, moved on to other people’s recipes and then began to invent my own as well. When you have made cakes and muffins for as long as I have, you start to learn tricks and ingredients that make them tasty nearly every time – things that affect not just the flavour, but also the texture and mouth-feel of these treats. And one of the ingredients I have come to value the most is one I never really even liked very much to start with - buttermilk.

Buttermilk was originally the liquid that was left over when cream was churned into butter. However as butter is made on a large commercial scale these days, the buttermilk we buy in the supermarket now is cultured. Basically, lactic acid bacteria is added to skim or non fat milk. It’s perfectly safe because it is pasturized, but I don’t like to think about it too much because no cook wants to hear the word bacteria in their kitchen! However like many things that sound a bit strange, this ingredient actually makes things taste incredibly good.

I first remember buttermilk in my mother’s kitchen. Mom wasn’t really a big baker so I can’t imagine what she used it for, but I know she would drink it ice cold from the fridge. I tasted it once and was horrified. Thicker than ordinary milk, with a tart, almost sour taste, it didn’t impress my childish taste buds one bit. Such was my dislike that when I discovered a muffin recipe not that much later which called for it, I made it a point to substitute ordinary milk. I avoided buttermilk like the plague. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I decided to make that old recipe actually using the real thing.

It was a revelation. The muffins had more body, and thus a more satisfying mouth feel. The sugar in the muffin recipe offset the buttermilk’s tart flavour, and it somehow made them taste even better. I started to use it regularly in muffins. Now people have been using buttermilk in muffins for years, but one day I got to thinking about what the results would be like if I used buttermilk in my cakes. I’d heard about using mayonnaise in chocolate cakes, and although I had never done it myself, I had tasted cakes made with it that were delicious. So much against my better judgement I used buttermilk in a sweet cake recipe – my devil’s food cake recipe in fact. The results were fantastic. Just like in muffins, the buttermilk gave the cake more body and enhanced the flavour. It didn’t make it taste any less sweet, and it was just somehow better.

Since then I’ve been using buttermilk in a lot of my recipes. Not every cake responds well to it; very light white cakes are not enhanced by it at all, and it certainly does not work well in a classic Victoria sponge. However most chocolate cakes, especially those which involve bananas, and also ginger and spice cakes get a real boost from my now not-so-secret ingredient. Not surprisingly, cakes that take a leaf out of the muffin book, like my Carrot, Walnut and Ginger Snack Cake and my Banana Maple Walnut Loaf Cake also benefit from the addition of buttermilk.

So if you like making cakes and muffins, do yourself a favour and consider substituting buttermilk when ordinary milk is called for next time. The results may surprise and - I hope - delight you!

The 21st Century Housewife’s© Mediterranean Beef Stew

Last night I needed a meal that would comfort and impress, but that would allow me to be out of the kitchen while it cooked and give me flexibility as to when I served it. For me, that meal is nearly always stew, but if you don’t mix it up a bit, everyone can get very bored indeed with this staple go-to dinner. However I find that by playing with some unexpected ingredients, you can develop some really lovely recipes.

I’ve been to both Spain and Portugal and I love the slow cooked dishes they serve there. So I decided to try to replicate some of the tastes I have enjoyed while travelling in the Mediterranean. Many of their dishes involve one of my favourite ingredients – red wine – and they also use vinegars as the perfect foil to it. Vinegar may sound like a funny ingredient to use in a stew, but its complex flavour really adds body and depth to just about any meat dish. It also seems to make all the other flavours just that little bit more intense and satisfying. For me, one of the vinegars that really stands out in cooking is sherry vinegar.

Sherry vinegar is of course made from sherry. It’s aged in oak barrels for at least six months and even up to ten years in the same way as wines and brandies. As well as adding a lovely kick to stews and slow cooked dishes, it is wonderful in salad dressing and gravies.

Last night’s experimentation in the kitchen was incredibly successful and my recipe got rave reviews around our dinner table. I served it with baked potatoes because I had potatoes on hand, but I think next time I’d serve this dish with some rice to soak up the wonderful gravy. Speaking of which, be sure to use a good red wine (one you would be prepared to drink) for this. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but unless it tastes nice in a glass, it isn’t going to taste nice in the dish.

I hope you enjoy my Mediterranean inspired dinner as much as we did!

The 21st Century Housewife's© Mediterranean Beef Stew

¼ cup (2 tablespoons + 2 tablespoons) olive oil
2 -3 medium onions, peeled, halved and sliced
1 pound chuck or braising steak, cut in cubes (roughly one inch square)
¼ cup flour
3 tbsp sherry or red wine vinegar
1 cup good red wine (I used Shiraz)
1½ cups beef stock (from a cube is fine)
1 or 2 garlic cloves
½ tsp dried oregano
¼ tsp dried thyme
¼ tsp pepper

In a large oven safe casserole dish that is also safe on the stovetop – or in a large frying pan – fry the onions gently over medium heat in 2 tablespoons of the oil. Let them soften up slowly until they get all melty and delicious looking. This will take about fifteen minutes.

Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil to the onions in the pan. Put the heat up a little bit. Coat the pieces of steak in the flour and add to the pan. Cook, stirring constantly, until the steak begins to brown.

Leaving the heat just above medium, add the sherry vinegar and allow it to bubble around in the pan a bit and absorb into the flour coated meat. Pour in the wine and beef stock and stir.

Finely grate in the garlic cloves (or chop them finely and add to the pan if you prefer) and add the spices.

If you are using an oven safe casserole that is safe on the stovetop, at this point you can just move it into the oven. If you are using a frying pan, transfer the contents to an oven safe casserole at this point.

Cook at 325 to 350℉ or 150 to 170℃ (depending on how fierce your oven is) for 1½ to 2 hours, stirring every half hour or so. The beauty of this kind of recipe is that you can adjust the cooking time to suit your serving time. For example if you need to be doing something else and want to cook the stew for longer – say 2½ to 3 hours - just use a lower heat setting (but don’t go below a safe temperature). Personally I never cook below 140℃ which is 280℉.

Leftovers will keep for a couple days in the fridge, and you can easily freeze this stew once it has cooled completely.

My Grandma's Special White Cake

My Grandma’s name was Ruby Sybil Wilde, and she was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, which is very close to the Welsh border. Her mother brought her to Canada when she was a little girl where she grew up and eventually met and married my Grandpa. They had two daughters, one of whom was my Mom. Grandpa was the Reeve (Mayor) of the town they lived in for over thirty years, so Grandma used to do lots of entertaining and people always talked about what an amazing cook she was. Sadly I never got to meet her as she died in her early sixties, four years before I was born. (If you want to read a bit more about her slightly mysterious story, you can click here.)

I don’t know why Grandma called this ‘Special’ White Cake but it may have been because it tastes amazing. It’s a lovely light cake that you can eat frosted or unfrosted, and as the original recipe calls for ‘2 teaspoons vanilla or other’ you can flavour it pretty much how you like. Next time I might try using almond flavouring. As Grandma wrote on the recipe card (you can just see it at the bottom of the photo), this is “a good size cake with some body to it”. You could use just about any flavour frosting, from something seriously chocolatey to something light and lemony. I think it would be nice served with fruit too. On this, my first attempt with it, I‘m going to just sprinkle confectioner’s sugar over the top to make it look pretty and to emphasise the vanilla flavour.

I did fiddle about with the method a bit because I was using an electric mixer so I didn’t feel I needed to separate the eggs and add the whites separately as they used to do back in the days before electric mixers were common. I also misread the recipe and added a cup of milk instead of the ½ cup Grandma called for but I didn’t realise until after it was in the oven. It all turned out beautifully anyway. Plus it uses store cupboard ingredients and takes about ten minutes to throw together. I baked this in a 9 inch square pan, but I’m sure you could use the mixture for cupcakes if you preferred - just don’t bake them as long. I can’t wait to experiment with this recipe; it’s got so much potential! Thanks Grandma!

Ruby Sybil Wilde’s “Special” White Cake

½ cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla (or another flavouring of your choice)
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup milk (recipe originally called for ½ cup but 1 cup worked nicely)

Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer. Beat in the eggs. Add the vanilla.

Sift the flour and baking powder together, and add alternately with the milk, beating after each addition.

Bake in a greased and floured (or lined) nine inch square pan at 350℉ or 160 to 170℃. Be careful, the cake tends to brown very quickly and ideally you want it to be fairly pale. Mine took about thirty minutes to cook, but I did lower the heat to 150℃ (about 325℉) for the last five minutes. I would suggest setting the timer for fifteen to twenty minutes and then keeping an eye on it after that, depending on how fierce your oven is.

Frost if you like, or sprinkle with some confectioner’s sugar. As you can see, it does want some sort of adornment as it really isn’t all that pretty, but it smells and tastes so good I’m struggling not to just eat it plain, straight from the tin!



In the end, I served this cake sprinkled with icing sugar with a bit of good vanilla ice cream on the side, and it tasted amazing.

The 21st Century Housewife's© Italian Style Beef Stew

I had some really nice chuck steak in the freezer and the other night I wanted to use it up, but I felt like eating Italian food so I used some of the flavours I remember from our visits to Italy. It turned out really well and I was very pleased as it is an easy, nutritious and economical midweek meal. It serves three to four hungry adults, and leftovers can be cooled and stored in the fridge for a couple of days, or frozen if you prefer.

I use my large shallow Le Creuset casserole for this recipe. If you have not got a large casserole that will go from stove top to oven, do the first steps in a frying pan and then transfer the browned beef and onions to an oven-safe casserole before adding the remaining ingredients.

2 – 3 tablespoons mild olive, sunflower or Canola oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic (optional)
1 pound of beef chuck, cut in cubes
½ cup flour
2 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
2 cups plain tomato sauce
or 2 small cans of chopped tomatoes
2 cups beef stock
3 to 4 tablespoons basil pesto
1½ to 2 cups uncooked macaroni

In a large casserole that will go from stove top into the oven, gently fry the onion in 2 tablespoons of oil over medium heat until it is beginning to soften. Dredge the chunks of beef in the flour and brown them, stirring frequently, along with the onion in the oil. (You may need to add another tablespoon of oil at this point.)

Add the tomato sauce or cans of chopped tomatoes, beef stock and the basil pesto and stir through well. Stir in the carrots. If you are using garlic, grate the cloves into the stew at this point and stir.

Cook in the oven at 350℉ (or 160 to 170℃ for an hour and a half, stirring every half hour.

If the liquid has reduced a lot, boil about a cup or two of water in a kettle and stir it in at this point as you are going to cook the macaroni in the sauce. (Careful not to overfill the casserole as the macaroni will displace the water when it goes in!) Add the macaroni, stir through and return to the oven for another 15 to 20 minutes or until the macaroni is tender.

Serve with hot crusty rolls.

The 21st Century Housewife's© Easy White Wine Sauce

For some reason I had never made my own white wine sauce until a few weeks ago. I don’t know why I was intimidated by the idea of it, but for some reason I thought it must be really complicated. Then I tried out my own version and I can promise you, it’s really not difficult at all.

I started out with the usual butter and flour roux, and then just added stock, white wine and some cream to make it special. Since then I’ve been using this sauce really regularly. It goes beautifully with chicken, pasta and fish - particularly salmon. It’s also good poured over vegetables, and it’s easy to make it vegetarian - just use vegetable instead of chicken stock.

Use good white wine for this sauce - it doesn’t have to be expensive, just tasty. You can use whatever herbs suit the dish. When I made the dinner in the photograph I flavoured the white wine sauce with just a pinch of oregano and garnished it with parsley, but you could use dill, tarragon or just about anything you fancy. Or let the simplicity of the sauce shine through by just leaving it plain. The stock has seasonings in it anyway.

For a really special treat, you can substitute champagne for white wine to make a champagne sauce. It tastes amazing, and as you only need 1/2 cup, there will be plenty left to drink!

This amount of sauce should serve about four to six, or dress four to six servings of meat, fish, vegetables or pasta.

2 generous tablespoons butter
2 generous tablespoons flour
1 cup chicken or vegetable stock
1/2 cup white wine
about 1/4 cup light (single) cream or half and half

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in the flour and allow the mixture (which is called a roux) to cook for about a minute. Gradually whisk in the stock, allowing the sauce to thicken between each addition. Whisk in the white wine.

The sauce should be fairly thick at this point, so gradually add the cream, a bit at a time (you may not need it all or you may need a little more) until you get the sauce to a nice, pourable consistency. If you want to add any herbs or flavourings, now is the time to do so. (I always go carefully, and only add a bit at a time because this sauce tastes so lovely it only needs the barest minimum of enhancement.)

That’s it, the sauce is ready to serve! Pour over fish, chicken, vegetables or stir into pasta and enjoy.