Lemon Torte

When people think of Easter, they usually think about eggs, bunnies, Jesus raised from the dead, the normal Easter things.  Not me.  I always think of Lemon Tortes.  Every year I would sit and watch my Mom make them.  While they are not my favorite dessert, there is something so special about them, especially now that she's gone.  I try and make them every year, and this year the girls were here to watch and help at the end. It is so cool to pass traditions down to the kids.

So here they are:     RUTHIE'S LEMON TORTES


First you have to make the meringue shells.   You will need 4 eggs, 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar, and 1cup of granulated sugar.  Separate the eggs, putting the whites into a mixing bowl, and saving the yolks in a small bowl for later.  I can not stress enough (nor could my Mother) you can not get ANY yolk into these whites, or it will not work.  I have always managed to keep them perfect, so I can't say if this is really true.

Beat the eggs whites and cream of tartar on high, adding the sugar slowly.  Beat until stiff.  This is going to take a few boring minutes of standing there.  Make sure you have a rubber scraper and scrape the sides of the bowl periodically.  My Mom always called it the "stiff peak" stage.  The mixture will get very glossy, and if you stick the spatula in it and lift it out, peaks like this are left behind.



Tortes work best when placed on a cookie sheet. WAIT!  Put some baking paper down first!  Just use a soup spoon and plop a dollop onto the sheet.  I have to make 13 tortes, so my dollops aren't huge.  I actually use five eggs in this recipe to get that many tortes, but don't change any of the other ingredients at all. :)  I am a "wing it" kind of cook.

Use the spoon to make an indent in the middle, so there's a place for the lemon pudding to go.  Try not to lick the spoon.  It is raw egg after all.  If no one saw me do it, it didn't happen.

Tortes go into a 275 degree oven for one hour.  I have to use both shelves in my oven for this many, so I switch them mid way, otherwise one batch is going to be brown on the bottom.   Then you turn the oven off and let them cool right in there. 

This is the part where you turn on the little ipod shuffle player and do dishes to Hall and Oats,  singing "Your Kiss Is On My List" as loud as you want to.  Who cares if you annoy psycho pants upstairs?  Then you must call your sister to ask about the double boiler.  You only use it once a year, so you don't want to screw anything up.  If she is in the shower you can dance around like a crazy person to "You Make My Dreams Come True", and "Private Eyes" while you wait for her to call you back...................... Oh, and even if you accidentally put the pans the wrong way, you wont screw up the pudding.  Don't ask, just be careful not to burn yourself.

THE PUDDING

Take the egg yolks you were saving, put them in the top of the double boiler.  Beat them up a little bit, then stir in  1/2 cup granulated sugar, and 1/4 cup lemon juice.  Mom used the bottle kind, I use the bottle kind.  This recipe has enough nonsense without squeezin' lemons!  Stir it over the double boiler for 5-8 minutes, until it thickens into pudding.  When I say stir, I mean stand there and stir til your arm falls off, or you are going to have scrambled egg in your pudding.  *gag*

Put the pudding in the fridge to cool.  Some years I have stored the torte shells in a ziploc and made the dessert right at dessert time.  You are really supposed to put it together at least twelve hours before, and my Mom always made them Sat afternoon, which is what I did this time.

Aren't the shells beautiful!?  You are supposed to leave them in the oven to cool, but today I took them out after about a half hour.  "I don't have time for this nonsense."  Then about five minutes later I heard a bunch of cracking noises coming from the kitchen.  It was the tortes!  I whipped them back into the oven and left them there til they were cool.  I guess it's about two hours.  Apparently my Mother wasn't kidding about that part.

Ashlyn, Hannah, and Caitlin were still here when the torte shells were ready, so I let them watch me fill them with pudding, and Hannah helped me with the saran wrap.  (Saran wrap is the devil.)  That's Ashlyn's thumb in the picture.  She loves lemon tortes!  So does Caitlin, she got to lick the spoon and sucked on it for a LONG time. :)  I had a little lick and shivered, because this pudding is SO sour.  It doesn't make much, but you do not need much on these tortes, believe me.

"I notice you have one left Auntie Jo." 

I was one torte short of room on the cookie sheet.  Forget it Ashlyn

HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!

Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past

When I write what I am thankful for tomorrow on facebook, it will read something like "I am thankful for all of the wonderful Thanksgiving memories that I have made over the years."  I have the gift/curse of a good memory, although half the time I can't remember what the heck I'm doing, or looking for, my recall of past events is amazing. 

I'm sitting here trying to think of just which memory to share, there are so many!  I think this year I will go with my earlier ones.  Of course I remember making hand turkey's in art class, and thanksgiving place mats at school.  I always think of my Mom making her dressing (ugh, giblets) after supper dishes were done on the night before the holiday.  The smell of the celery, onion, and sage filling the house.  She called it dressing, not stuffing, and it had apples in it.  I liked it, just not the little extra parts (giblets).  I always picked them out. 

Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Joe would sometimes come from Madison to share the holiday with us.  My very first real Thanksgiving memory is of a blizzard holding them up, and sitting outside my house in full snow gear, in a huge snowbank, waiting for them.  I couldn't have been more than six.  Another memory, probably the following year has me sitting in a car with Aunt Dorothy outside of Presidents liquor store, it was sleeting that time.  Uncle Joe was inside getting supplies for the holiday.  Then we flash forward a few years and my brother and I were playing in the woods, skating on some frozen pond water, killing time while waiting for them to arrive.  No snow that year, but cold.  I might have been ten.

Sometimes the holiday was at our house, sometimes at my Aunt Mary's.  We didn't do Thanksgiving with the Meys side, and my Grandma Meys must have gone over to Aunt Pat and Uncle Bill's house during those early years.  She and sister Eva Jean were definitely there with us in my later teens though.  I believe the water goblet incident, as it has come to be called, happened on Thanksgiving.  What?  I haven't told you the water goblet incident?  Ha, that will be my turkey day blog tomorrow.

When I was twelve, I had my first "boyfriend" ask me to "go" with him right around Thanksgiving.  He called me on Thanksgiving night, and I still remember part of the call.  (awwww) That would be Rick, for those of you keeping count. :)

Somewhere around this time things changed.  Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Joe moved to Utah, and Aunt Mary and Uncle Clate started wintering in Texas.  Now it was just our immediate family for Thanksgiving.  My Mom was the church secretary at St. Anthony's, and she would invite the housekeeper, Dorothy Baker, and the priest, Father Pius to join us.  I remember lots of laughter, and checker games.  Then the later teens where my Grandma Meys, and Aunt, Sister Eva Jean would join us too.

Funny thing is, though Wally and I were together for most of those years, I have no Thanksgiving memories of him.  He was always out at his Grandma's farm hunting.  Lots of memories of my siblings and Vicki and I playing outside during the holiday break from school though!  I'm trying to think if I even saw Wally when I came home........OH, the Wiley story.  I didn't see him when I came home in '87 for Thanksgiving. He was in basic training.  He called though, and the operator had a southern accent.  I was laying in bed sleeping in and I hear my sister say  "No, I wont accept the charges, I don't know any Wiley."  I came flying out of bed yelling " It's Wally you dummy!"  On the other end he's yelling "Katy it's me!"  Sheesh..  :)

So I sit here laughing, although almost everyone in this blog is gone now.  They are good memories, with good people, and good times.  May we all make many more happy Thanksgiving memories this year.

Aunt Dorothy's Eggs

The best Easter on record happened when I was about eight years old. I guess that would mean it was B.D. (before David) He arrived just after my ninth birthday. Mom, Dad, Grandma Lenihan, Kate, Jerry, and I all piled into the Volare wagon at o'dark thirty on Good Friday morning. The trip was uneventful. I remember stopping in Spooner to eat breakfast, and then in Black River Falls for lunch. We always stopped in Black River falls at the Perkins. Kind of our family tradition I guess. My Mom was big on traditions, and I definitely got that gene!

We arrived sometime in the afternoon, and of course were pleasantly surprised at the change in temperature in Madison (Oregon) WI. Jackets were tossed aside, not to be worn again until we drove closer to home on Monday afternoon. We piled out of the family roadster, to hugs (Aunt Dorothy) and tormenting (Uncle Joe), and then dragged our luggage up the "stairs of death" to the spare room upstairs that we would use. Kate and I slept on the bed and Jerry on the floor. Mom and Dad had a room up there too, and Grandma slept downstairs. I never understood why people build houses with narrow steep stairs to the second floor. You can never just zoom down the stairs, and I would think moving any furniture up them would be awful!

So many memories are flooding back from our Madison trips that it's hard to stay on track. I'll try to keep the rest of the description to just this Easter. We headed out to play, and our cousins came over for dinner. I remember playing games outside well after dark. The next day Johnny, and Mary Lee came over to color Easter eggs with us. Aunt Dorothy had boiled them that morning. How to describe my Aunt..... Five feet tall (if even) with a foot tall beehive hairdo, beer drinker, and her laugh is something else. There is no way you could hear it and not join in. I can still hear her, "Oh Joe, leave those kids alone." Actually, my Aunt is still with us and is back living in the Madison area amongst some of her boys. My Uncle sadly passed away several years ago while they were living in Utah.

Anyway, the egg coloring went as egg colorings do. Everyone had a certain amount of eggs to color so there was no fighting, and all went well. Until the end that is, and thank God it did happen. Johnny knocked one of the eggs off of the table onto the floor, and it broke, and it was NOT cooked. Apparently my Aunt didn't have a clue how to boil that many eggs. My Mom took over, tossing them all back into boiling water. The egg color came off every one of the eggs, and we got to color them again!!

I remember frilly dresses with cute bonnets, and no snow suits! I also remember hunting for plastic eggs on Easter morning, with all the grown ups watching over us. Then a big family dinner later in the day to round out the festivities. Simpler times, with people who are dearly missed. Within a few years my cousins Johnny, Mary Lee, and a younger sibling, Dehlia were taken away from their parents and adopted by others. We never saw them again. At the same time my Aunt and Uncle moved to Utah, and I saw them probably ten times over the next 20 years. That Easter though, and the uncooked eggs, is a story we tell every year.

Times change, and traditions have to change with them. It was a hard thing for me to accept when the first of my Grandma's passed on. I had no idea then how much our family would change and grow. The old makes room for the new, and while it can be difficult and at time's even heartbreaking, in the end it's all good.

Happy Easter!