Make Room for Daddy's Cookbooks

Cookbooks & Whiskeys Cabinet

Drinks Books Case

 

Sometimes I wonder whether I'll eventually need to move out of our house in order for Edward to have enough room for his cookbooks and back issues of cooking magazines.  Seriously.

At least he does tend to make use of some of them, concocting wonderfully enjoyable meals from the ideas he finds there.  My standard complaint though, is that, once he makes something, even if it turns out to be GREAT, we'll never, ever have it again.  Once a dish is conquered, the thrill must be gone or something.

On our recent trip to the South Carolina coast (Wild Dunes on the Isle of Palms), Edward purchased one of those local, collected, bound with a plastic comb cookbooks, Seafood Recipes by South Carolina Shrimpers Association: Recipes Furnished by Wives of South Carolina Shrimpers and Friends.  This copy was published in 1976, which means it contains both The Original South Carolina Shrimpers Cookbook along with new recipes for this edition.  He actually READ the whole thing at the beach.  And a good thing that turned out to be too, because he found a recipe for Green Goddess Salad Dressing (from Mrs. C. A. Magwood, Jr., btw) that made last night's ubiquitous tossed salad much less so.  Yum.


I thought I'd share our find the way it appears in the book:

GREEN GODDESS SALAD DRESSING
1 cup chopped parsley
3/4 cup chopped onions
1 clove garlic
1/2 pint sour cream
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 cup mayonnaise
1 pkg. Bleu cheese
1 tsp. sugar
Blend in blender; salt and pepper to taste.  May be used as a raw vegetable dip or on cole slaw, and tossed salad.

Of course Edward played around with this recipe.  I don't know what Ms. Magwood meant by a "package" of Bleu cheese, but Edward used around 2 tablespoons of Maytag.  He used 4 cloves of locally-grown, Romanian Red garlic, which is fairly spicy.  He started out using the blender, but switched to the food processor, with much better results.  (I'm trying to get Edward to write this part of this blog entry for himself, but he refuses.)  As unbelievable as this will sound to our children, we didn't have an entire cup of sour cream in the house, so he used only what we had and supplemented with a little milk (don't know why he didn't use the buttermilk we DID have; he says he would next time).

Anyway, for others who remember Green Goddess dressing (the couple of brands you might still be able to find in most grocery stores just aren't the real thing), you might want to give this a try. 

I'm lobbying for Pickled Shrimp or Shrimp Chowder next.