Today's Recipe: Green Bean Casserole: Variations on a Theme.

 

It always amazes me how two people can follow the same recipe and come up with completely different final dishes.

When I was in Jr High, I competed in the county fair baking category. The recipe for chocolate chip cookies was printed in the newspaper. To enter your cookies you had to follow the recipe exactly.

Baking is one area of cooking where following the recipe is pretty important. The chemistry that allows flour and sugar to become tasty cake and cookies requires a certain amount of precision and some elements shouldn't be compromised with a good understanding of the purpose they serve in the mix.

A few days before the fair started you had to turn in six of your best cookies on a white paper plate. They had to stand on their own without any of the frills or decorations allowed in some of the other competitions. The judges would sample one or two and the rest would go on display in the glass cases in the homemakers building for the duration of the fair.

It was always kind of strange to look at all the cookies lined up on their identical paper plates. You knew, that in theory at least, they all used the identical ingredients and proportions. And yet the final cookies were so very different. Some were round balls that didn't spread out at all. Some were thin sprawling cookies with lumps where the chocolate chips were. Some were perfectly sized and perfectly smooth, making you wonder if they contained any chips at all. And then there were the ones of even size with just enough chocolate chip peeking through the top. You just knew that they had the perfect mix of chewy center and crunchy, crumbly exterior. Same recipe, different outcomes.

I practiced and practiced that cookie recipe until I am quite certain my entire family was sick of chocolate chip cookies. I definitely have it memorized and made it scale-able. Once I found myself with free range of the commercial kitchen at field camp. I spent at least one evening every week making dozens and dozens of cookies using the floor stand Hobart mixer. My pretty kitchen aid is wonderful but I loved that giant Hobie! (Remind me to tell you the story of the great cookie war and the turtle walk some day.)

Following recipes can be important. We may think we follow them carefully but the more you make something the less likely it is that you actually do what the recipe says.

My mom had a recipe for a soup called Hearty Hodgepodge You can find it in old seventies cookbooks. It is loaded with sausage, beef, ham, potatoes and garbanzo beans. It is the soup I crave on blustery winter days. She readily shared the recipe. It is even in the family cook book. If I haven't made it for a while, I will glance at it to make sure I am headed in the right direction.

One time I was at a potluck where some one else brought the hodgepodge. It was watery and almost inedible. My mom re-read the recipe and started laughing. She said, she hadn't actually made it that way in years! So much of the recipe is subjective. Particularly with something like soup, you have to taste along the way. You really can't just dump it all together and hope to get a perfect result. The recipe provides a guideline and in some cases there are rules but you always have to trust your judgement on the final product.

Which brings me to green bean casserole. I really like green bean casserole. My father-in-law always asked for it. The spuds like it particularly when it is the middle layer in tater tot casserole. There are literally dozens of recipes for green bean casserole. Some are pretentious. Some are basic. At their core, they have green beans, mushroom soup and french fried onion rings.

None of them should ever involve adding milk! Ever. Similar potluck story. Same cook claimed the green bean casserole. It was swimming in watery milk. I politely (yes, truly I was very polite in my questioning) asked for the recipe. It was a national brand that called for adding milk. Ugh.

So the basics....

Three cans of green beans (Drained. For the love of all that is good drain the beans!!!)

One can of cream of mushroom soup (this is the not pretentious, easy to make on a week night version)

A good handful of french fried onion rings

Another good handful or two of shredded cheddar cheese.

(If you must have a definition... a good handful of onions is probably a half a cup and good handful of shredded cheddar is probably about 3/4 of a cup. But don't take my word for it. Use your judgment.)

No salt

No pepper

Nothing else.

And absolutely NO MILK.

Mix. Gently. No bean mash here. Put it in a casserole dish. Top with more onions and bake until bubbly and delicious.

One thing that makes this double delicious (and pretentious) is making your own mushroom soup. I am going to be making some this weekend in preparation for Thanksgiving. I will try to document it so I can share. The key to the rich flavor is using dried wild mushrooms. (OK. Fair call. It does use heavy cream. Heavy cream is milk. So I put milk in my green bean casserole. But..... It isn't the same and it isn't watery.)

The fresh mushroom soup lends a strong mushroom flavor to the casserole. If you don't like mushrooms stick to the prepared versions. You can find some lovely gluten free versions in the specialty aisle. You can probably substitute cream of chicken soup. But never cream of celery soup. Cream of celery soup is an abomination and the bane of every unregulated pot of stone soup at camp everywhere.

So.... follow the recipe. But taste and use your judgement. Unless it is burned to a crisp or the broccoli is full of worms there are ways to fix it. Ask me if you need some help. And enjoy it. Enjoy making your food. Enjoy sharing your food. Enjoy Eating your food.

--- Oh, and that county fair thing. Yeah. I won the blue ribbon.

 

What Can You Do With Different Sizes of Blocks?

 

The problem of having blocks of different sizes has come up in a number of chats I have had over the past month or so.  There are lots of reasons why we end up with blocks that just won't fit together.  T-shirt quilts are notorious for this because the sizes of the logos are all over the map and there is always one that just won't fit in no matter how you try to make it.  Sometimes we get swap blocks where the sizes are all over the map.  Sometimes we have an issue assembling a block and end up with different sizes.  Sometimes, like in the quilt pictured, we have absolutely no idea what we are doing and we just keep winging it until it seems like it might actually fit together. 

 

The easiest answer is to trim.  Find the smallest block and trim everything else to that size.  If you are good with wonky, and believe me, I am often good with wonky, then just go for it.  If you aren't into wonky then you will need to center your blocks and trim them carefully.  Use the lines on your ruler to help you line things up to get the even trim.  In the image above I have drawn a 16 patch trimmed wonky and trimmed square.  Both are exaggerated to show the difference.   These 4, 9, 16 patch blocks are probably the easiest ones to trim up and make work.  You will know the sizes are off but they won't be seen from the back of a galloping horse so they just aren't there for anyone else!

 Blocks with points start to get trickier and you need to look for other answers. Using sashing is one way to address this.  Slight variations in the width of a sashing are less noticeable than a completely severed point. You just need to think carefully about how you are going to place your blocks and how to manage cornerstones if you are using them.  Perhaps put the block that has a wider sash in a bottom corner.  Leave off the cornerstones if you can't make them line up.

Trimming and sashing work for the slight variations you can get when piecing blocks of a similar size.  But it gets more complicated when your blocks are random sizes.  I have a set of wonky house blocks I received in a block swap.  I love them  But they are all different sizes.  I haven't looked at them in a while but I am about ready to address the issue. 

 

When you have blocks of completely different sizes perhaps from fussy cutting or orphan blocks you may need a slightly different approach.  The trick to dealing with random size blocks is figuring out how to make them fit into a common set of sizes.  First you need to figure out the measurements of the largest block you have.  Everything else will have to be sized up to match or paired up with other blocks to make the same size.  

 

One approach is to add borders to the blocks to bring them up to a consistent size.  This allows you to take one small block and make it fit with a bigger block.  Borders can be even but they don't have to be. The block in the center above has a 6 inch block in the center with 3 inch borders placed evenly around it.  The block on the left has a narrow border but it is still centered.  The block on the right is offset.  You can even make the central block sit at an angle (see my example at the end of the post).  It doesn't matter how you do it as long as you like the way it looks. 

 

The blocks pictured above represent a situation where your blocks are wildly different in size.  Let's pretend that the largest block measures 12 inches finished.  (That means the unfinished block is 12.5 inches on each side.)  You can easily put together blocks in units of 3", 6" and 9" (finished) that will all pair up in various ways to equal your 12" (finished) block.

You can also combine smaller blocks into a block of the appropriate size.  These are several examples of how to use 3, 6 and 9 inch blocks and strips to make a 12 in block.  We've already seen the first example of just adding a 3" border to a 6" block.  But each of the squares around it could also be individual 3 inch squares.  The picture on the top right shows a 9 inch block with three 3 inch blocks on the side and a three inch border on the bottom.  Lower Right is four 6 inch blocks.  Lower left show two solid 6 inch blocks and two 4 patch blocks (made of 3 inch blocks) themselves made in to a 12 inch four patch.  The variations are endless.

It is important to remember that you can add in your coordinating fabrics as blocks or swatches.  You can still add in sashing and you can split up a block if you like.  Perhaps adding two stacked 6 inch blocks to one end and finishing up the row with a set of six 3 inch blocks.  It will all come out even in the end.

You can add any other easily stacked up measurements like 2, 4, 6 8 and 12 inch (finished) blocks.  It all depends upon what you have and where you want to go with it.  

The quilt pictured at the top of the page was a quilt without a plan.  I had photos of all sorts of sizes and not idea how to fit them together.  I just kept sewing things together and then sewing them in to rows until it mostly worked.  There are definitely some weird fits and starts in that particular quilt but everyone sees the pictures and no one sees the weirdness.

I was still learning while making this quilt and chose to keep adding random strips to the pictures in this one.  It is vaguely log cabin style but it is mostly just weird angles.  I trimmed each block to the final size and then sewed them together just like they were 'normal' blocks.