The making of it dwindled into nothing after he passed away. I didn’t bring out the recipe for decades, but I retrieved it a few years ago when I was feeling nostalgic. I made a half batch for Christmas, and it tasted wonderful: thick, heavy, creamy and chocolatey.
You don’t have to wait for a special occasion to make and eat this, but if you do serve it then, it may make the event slightly more enjoyable. I give you the option of adding chopped pecans, which are good, but I prefer the fudge plain. I love to chew it and savor its smoothness.
* * *
Grandaddy’s Fudge
12 oz (2 cups) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk
1/8 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup chopped pecans, optional
* * *
In a saucepan, over low heat, melt the chocolate chips.
Add the sweetened condensed milk, salt and vanilla extract. Mix thoroughly and remove from heat. If desired, add pecans.
Pour fudge into a greased 8” square baking pan. Place in refrigerator. When the fudge has solidified, cut it into squares.
Chapter 5
An Overlooked Holiday
My dad worked at McDonnell Douglas for a long time. The corporation was one of the major aerospace manufacturers in the U.S., as well as an American military defense supplier. It also built commercial aircraft such as the DC-10 and the F-15 Eagle fighter. Mac, as the employees called the company, also produced components of Sky Lab.
Dad was an electrical engineer, one of many in his department. I guess they did the usual office stuff, though dad would never really tell us much. One day, however, he related something that had happened. One guy in their group wrote a letter to Broderick Crawford.
You younger readers might not know who Broderick Crawford was, unless you like movies of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a Name Actor, starring in “All the King’s Men”—for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor—and “Born Yesterday.”
He also starred in “Highway Patrol,” a television series about the California Highway Patrol.
There was always a scene in each episode when Crawford stood outside his patrol car, the two-way radio microphone in his hand, the coiled cord stretching out the window. He’d talk to the radio dispatcher or some officer, telling them the situation, and he’d always end the conversation with “Ten-four.”
Ten-four means ‘understood’ or ‘acknowledged’ and is a brevity code that stands for common phrases or questions in conversation. Citizens band radio conversations use them—they are probably best known among long distance truckers—as well as law enforcement. The codes not only save conversation time but also help eliminate misunderstandings.
“Highway Patrol” was an extremely well-liked program, running from 1955-1959. Its high ranking helped popularize the phrase 10-4.
When one of the men in dad’s work group realized 10-4 was also a date, he wrote the letter to Crawford. He explained how they had invented a Broderick Crawford Day, which was to be celebrated on October 4th. They invited Mr. Crawford to attend as their guest.
Mr. Crawford replied, thanked them, and probably said he was busy that day.
My family watched “Highway Patrol” regularly and thought the idea of the day was a lot of fun. We began celebrating 10-4 at our house. Mom would make a cake for our dinner dessert. Every year I wondered how she would decorate it to depict The Day.
One cake had a clock face piped in icing on the top. The time depicted was 10:04.
For some reason, the celebration fell by the wayside. I don’t know if there were only so many ways of decorating a cake that led to the day’s demise, or we just forgot. Even now, I nearly forget it’s approaching or that the day has arrived. To combat my faulty memory, when I get my calendar for the new year, in addition to writing family and friends’ birthdays on each date, I ink in Broderick Crawford Day on October 4. I don’t want it to slip by unobserved.
Several years ago I revived the 10-4 observance. Once I made a cut out sugar cookie and iced it to look like Crawford’s black-and-white cruiser and plopped it on top of the cake. This past year I made a road of chocolate icing that ran diagonally atop the cake. For his cruiser, I went online, printed out a few copies of the patrol car used in the shows, taped them onto toothpicks, and stuck them in the road.
That cake was reminiscent of the August 2017 Missouri total solar eclipse cookies I made to celebrate that occasion. Four friends came over for lunch and we snacked on appetizers and finger foods and ran outside every few minutes to view the eclipse. I wanted something special to commemorate the occasion, but I wanted to keep the dessert easy to eat in case we had to run outside. Cookies were portable, so they were just the thing.
I bought a state-shaped cookie cutter, made sugar cookies, and decorated them with a swath of chocolate icing that generally followed the eclipse route from west to east state borders. I made streaks of yellow sunshine peaking out from beneath the dark path to signify the dimming of the sun. I think it worked fine and everyone laughed. At least the cookies were good even if they weren’t expertly decorated.
The cookies were decorated with the same degree of ept-ness as the cake was. I’ve no great skill at applying icing, but they were good enough. And the 10-4 cake brought back great memories of our family Broderick Crawford Day dinners. And that’s the important part, isn’t it?
Dilly Cheese Truffles are one of the appetizers I made for the eclipse watching party. I thought them apropos. Even if they weren’t sunshine yellow, they were round and stood for the moon, which was a major player, perfectly blocking the sun.
* * *
Dilly Cheese Truffles – makes approximately 3 ½ dozen appetizers
9 oz cream cheese, softened
1 oz Swiss cheese, finely shredded
1 ½ tsp dried dill weed
1 tbsp lemon pepper
¼ tsp garlic powder
assorted garnish, such as minced fresh parsley, toasted sesame seeds, finely chopped pecans, chopped chives…
In a medium sized bowl, combine the cheese, dill, lemon pepper and garlic powder. Mix well and shape into one-inch sized balls.
Roll them in your choice of the garnishes, being sure to coat the entire cheese ball.
Place on tray or in baking pan and refrigerate until the cheese balls are well chilled. To serve, place them on a serving tray or put into miniature muffin/candy paper cups.
Those Fun Years
Chapter 6
Would You Like S’More?
From Brownies through Seniors, Girl Scouts membership consumed a large part of my life. I began as a Brownie in the second grade—there was no such thing as Pixie level at that time. Each school grade was a separate troop, unlike today’s Scouting that combines ages.
I loved the friendships, the projects our troop did, the ceremonies. But I especially loved camping.
I don’t remember my first camping trip, so it must’ve been all right, as one tends to remember either glorious events or disasters. We probably stayed in one of the building units at Girl Scout camp, either Hill and Dale at Camp Fiddlecreek, or perhaps Lucky Stone Lodge at Camp Cedarledge. Either one would’ve been exciting as I discovered Nature and cooking over a fire and the joys of the outdoor latrine.
As befit the Girl Scout motto ‘Be Prepared’, we were. Before our trip, we made Sit Upons. If you’ve never been a Scout or been around anyone who was, you might not be familiar with this creation. A Sit Upon is just that—something you make to sit upon the ground. Definitely a young person’s item, I know now, several decades later. The Sit Upon can be anything, really, from a piece of plastic to a sofa cushion or a throw pillow. Ours were somewhere in between those.
The day we were to make them, each girl brought a magazine to the troop meeting. Large magazines were the best, as it gave more area on which to sit. Life and Saturday Evening Post were probably the best, as they were about the largest publications at that time. You’d place the magazi
ne on a sheet of vinyl (like the type to cover chair stools) big enough to envelope the magazine, with two inches around three edges. One side of the magazine should snuggle against the fold of the vinyl. Once the magazine was cocooned, we’d use a punch to make holes along the three edges, two inches or so apart. Next, we’d lace plastic lanyard ‘string’, leather thong, or cotton cord through the holes to seal the edges. We added a vinyl strap so we could carry our Sit Upons. Easy to make and useful.
We used them a lot: sitting on the ground around the campfire, sitting on the linoleum floor in the lodge, and even sitting on the wooden benches of the picnic tables. In later years, as I grew taller and wider, I substituted a foam chair cushion for the magazine. Much better.
Another item we made for overnight camping trips was beaver bags. They’re made from two loose woven dishcloths sewn together on three sides. The top of the bag is left open and two shoelaces woven across the width of the cloths. This serves as a drawstring to close the top because after we washed and rinsed our personal dishes we put them into the bags. They were then dunked in steaming hot bleach (to kill any nasty bacteria clinging to them), and hung up on a clothesline. The dishes air dried. When the next meal rolled around, we simply took our dishes out of our bags and set them at our place at the table. Convenient.
The beaver bags thus took the place of tea towels. I loved them. One less chore cut out; no hand drying. Simply hang up your dishes and leave them to beaver.
I think we also made lanyards. I usually carried my Girl Scout pocketknife on my lanyard, though sometimes I’d replace the knife with my compass. When I went to summer camp, the counselors hooked whistles on theirs.
I learned a lot of things during my ten years in Scouting: the art of building fires, cooking, tying various types of knots, identifying plants and animals, and simple stargazing. At summer camp I learned how to canoe, how to lash sticks together to form a table, how to pitch a tent, and the art of caching food so our friendly bears and raccoons couldn’t get to it. Maybe these, with the exception of canoeing, are no longer useful to me, but every bit of knowledge is good, for it keeps your mind active and can be applied to something else.
Camp cooking techniques got more interesting as I grew older. As Brownies, we began with stick cooking. Maybe I should rephrase that, since it sounds as though we cooked sticks for food. We used sticks as tools, like roasting forks. Toasting marshmallows might be the first thing that comes to mind, but we also made Angels on Horseback (raw bacon spiraled around a hotdog, pinned in place by two toothpicks, and roasted), Pigs in Blankets (a refrigerated biscuit spiraled around a hotdog, pinned in place by two toothpicks, and roasted), Cinnamon Bears (a refrigerated biscuit spiraled around a stick, coated in butter, sprinkled with granulated sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, and toasted), and Brown Bears (a refrigerated biscuit spiraled around a stick, coated in butter, sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon, and toasted).
Lest you think we were in a rut and only knew how to employ sticks, we also cooked one-pot meals, such as Campfire Stew and an egg-bacon-cheese mix of which I forget the name. Then I learned how to actually bake using a fire! I was astounded and thrilled when the food really came out done and tasty. Some recipes we made were brownies, biscuits and pineapple upside down cake. We used a reflector oven for these. We had a ‘real’ one that the troop bought. It was a metal V-shaped ‘box’ that sat on metal legs with its open side facing the fire. The tray of brownie batter or whatever sat on a rack consisting of two metal rods. The heat of the fire reflected into the mouth of the V and thus baked the cake. That was a wonder.
That commercial oven came a few years after we first honed our skills with a reflector oven we made by covering a lidless cardboard box with aluminum foil. As in the store-bought variety, the open side of our box faced the fire. We cut two holes in the two sides, through which we inserted two dowel rods. These were foil-covered and were our rack that held the pan of dough or batter.
I don’t remember it being any better or worse than the bought variety, so maybe it worked well. But it did have the added value of being larger and able to hold cake pans.
Anyway, I believe our troop outdoor cooking began similar to many people’s: with S’Mores. There’s not much that can top that classic marshmallow-chocolate bar-graham cracker confection, but here are a few variations you might wish to try.
Differ the foundation. Use graham crackers, chocolate graham crackers, waffle cookies, chocolate chip cookies, shortbread cookies, thin brownies.
Alter the interior. Use slices of different candy bars—flavored, with or without nuts—instead of the usual plain chocolate; spread the foundation with peanut butter; cover the foundation with thin slices of apple and drizzle with melted caramels; spread on crushed pineapple.
If you want real recipes to follow, here are some digressions from the original known so well. You might want to lay a small sheet of parchment paper on the tray before you broil or use the toaster oven. Cleanup’s a lot easier.
Peanut Butter S’mores
8 graham crackers
32 large marshmallows, cut in half
2 1.5-ounce chocolate bars (such as Hershey's)
1 cup peanut butter (crunchy or smooth)
Adjust rack to middle position and heat broiler or toaster oven. Break the crackers in half to form squares and place on a baking sheet. Arrange 4 marshmallow halves on top of each square. Broil for 30 to 60 seconds or until the marshmallows are golden brown.
Spread peanut butter on the other half of the graham crackers.
Break each chocolate bar into 12 pieces. Arrange the chocolate on top of the crackers that are spread with peanut butter. Invert the remaining marshmallow-topped crackers onto the peanut butter-and-chocolate–topped crackers, pressing gently to make sandwiches.
* * *
Raspberry S’mores
8 graham crackers
32 large marshmallows, cut in half
2 1.5-ounce chocolate bars (such as Hershey's)
1cup fresh raspberries
Adjust rack to middle position and heat broiler or toaster oven. Break the crackers in half to form squares and place on a baking sheet. Arrange 4 marshmallow halves on top of each square. Broil for 30 to 60 seconds or until the marshmallows are golden brown.
Break each chocolate bar into 12 pieces. Arrange the chocolate and raspberries on top of half the crackers. Invert the remaining marshmallow-topped crackers onto the raspberry-and-chocolate–topped crackers, pressing gently to make sandwiches. Stack them, if desired.
* * *
Mexican S’mores
8 cinnamon graham crackers
8 marshmallows
4 1.5-ounce milk chocolate bars, broken into pieces
Heat broiler.
Break the crackers in half to form squares. Place 4 cracker squares on a baking sheet and top each with a marshmallow.
Broil until the marshmallows are puffed and lightly browned, about 1 1/2 minutes.
Sandwich with the chocolate pieces and remaining crackers. Serve immediately.
* * *
Caramel S’mores
8 graham crackers
8 marshmallows
4 1.5-ounce milk chocolate bars, broken into pieces
caramel ice cream topping
Heat broiler.
Break the crackers in half to form squares. Place 4 cracker squares on a baking sheet and top each with a marshmallow.
Broil until the marshmallows are puffed and lightly browned, about 1 1/2 minutes.
Spread some caramel ice cream topping on the 4 remaining cracker squares and top with the chocolate pieces. Crown that with the marshmallow crackers. Serve immediately.
* * *
Peppermint S’mores
8 graham crackers
8 marshmallows
4 1.5-ounce peppermint chocolate bars, broken into pieces
Heat broiler.
Break the crackers in half to form squares. Place 4 cracker squares on a baking sheet and top eac
h with a marshmallow.
Broil until the marshmallows are puffed and lightly browned, about 1 1/2 minutes.
Sandwich with the peppermint chocolate pieces and remaining crackers. Serve immediately.
* * *
Candy Cane S’mores
8 graham crackers
8 marshmallows
4 1.5-ounce milk chocolate bars, broken into pieces
one candy cane, crushed
Heat broiler.
Break the crackers in half to form squares. Place 4 cracker squares on a baking sheet and top each with a marshmallow.
Broil until the marshmallows are puffed and lightly browned, about 1 1/2 minutes.
Sprinkle some of the crushed candy cane on top of the gooey marshmallows (hopefully, so the crushed candy bits will stick in the marshmallows.)
Sandwich with the milk chocolate pieces and remaining crackers. Serve immediately.
* * *
Coconut S’mores
8 graham crackers
8 marshmallows
4 1.5-ounce milk chocolate bars, broken into pieces
shredded, flaked coconut
Heat broiler.
Break the crackers in half to form squares. Place 4 cracker squares on a baking sheet and top each with a marshmallow.
Broil until the marshmallows are puffed and lightly browned, about 1 1/2 minutes.
Sprinkle some of the coconut on top of the gooey marshmallows (hopefully, so the coconut will stick in the marshmallows.)
Sandwich with the milk chocolate pieces and remaining crackers. Serve immediately.
Tea In a Tin Cup Page 3
