It's nearly Fathers' Day and time for grilled ribs, coleslaw and Three Bean Salad.
I found recipes for these dishes and more in a new cookbook titled, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers. The author of the book, Martha Foose, is a Mississippi native who was living in Minneapolis when I met her some years ago. I got to know this talented, young woman when I hired her to test recipes for magazines that we were working on at the time. (She is now the executive chef of the Viking cooking School.)
I'm very proud of Martha's culinary accomplishments and her new cookbook. It is full of beautiful photographs which capture the feeling of warm summer days. What makes this cookbook really special are the tales that Martha tells about each recipe—giving us insight to the history of Southern cooking.
In working my way through the cookbook, I found a recipe for Cherry-Vanilla Cream Soda. As a kid, red cream soda was my favorite soft drink and apparently it was Martha's too. She has even invented a recipe for it using sugar, a vanilla bean, vanilla extract, almond extract and soda water. I was amazed at how much this beverage tasted like the one that I remembered from my childhood. She adds in a note that you can add some cherry juice or a little grenadine to make these drinks red.
One morning at the cabin I baked some Blueberry Muffins from Old Mr. Ashcraft. I loved the flavor combination of buttermilk, brown sugar, grated lemon zest, and almond and vanilla extracts. The generous amount of streusel on top of the muffins made these muffins especially delicious. The coffee mug in the background is from the Pottery at Best store in Hayward, Wisconsin.
Another recipe that I tried from the cookbook was the West Indies Salad. It’s a recipe for a crab salad that is based on a salad served since 1947 at the famous Mobile, Alabama, seafood institution Bill Bailey's Restaurant. Although it can be served as a salad, Martha states in the recipe introduction that, "About half of a making disappears within the allotted marinating time right out of the mixing bowl, scooped out with plain saltine crackers." This seemed like a great idea to me and I served it as an appetizer instead of as a salad.
