Cookbook #178: Elam Biggs Favorites, Elam Biggs, Grass Valley, CA, 2009.

We stayed at the Elam Biggs Bed and Breakfast Inn while visiting family in Grass Valley in 2009. The breakfasts there were amazing! Fruit, juice, eggs, sausage or ham or bacon, and breakfast pastries, served at a fancy table setting. All homemade and wonderful. It was so pleasant to sit and chat with other guests as Elam showed us his card tricks. The rooms are ornately decorated with antiques. A great stay!

I couldn’t resist buying one of the little booklets of breakfast recipes that they offered. Seven years later, though, and I haven’t cooked a single recipe from this booklet. The reason is that they are a little more calorie-laden than we usually have for breakfast (when not on vacation). Elam Biggs Favorites has sat on my shelf as a souveneir of our visit, rather than as a “cookbook”.

There are only eight recipes in this booklet, so it won’t take long to decide which to make for this blog:

• Dutch Babies (my chosen recipe, below)
• Corn Flake Potatoes (hash browns, mushroom soup, sour cream, cheese topped with cornflakes and baked)
• Breakfast Omelette (butter, eggs, flour, baking powder, green chiles, cottage cheese, Jack cheese, baked in the oven)
• Stuffed French Toast (sourdough bread, cream cheese, raisins, milk, eggs – start the night before)
• Brunch Enchiladas (flour tortillas rolled around ham, onions, green chiles, and cheese, topped with eggs and half-and-half and baked – start the night before)
• Scalloped Corn (canned corn, butter, eggs, sour cream, corn muffin mix)
• Overnite Strawberry French Toast (bread soaked in eggs and milk overnight, next morning put strawberries and bananas in a pan and cover with the soaked bread and bake)
• Elam’s Eggs (cheese and eggs baked in a ramekin)

I decide to try “Dutch Babies”. These are Dutch pancakes, or pannenkoek. Many versions are available on the web – basically, they are a mixture of eggs, milk, and flour poured into a hot buttered pan and baked. They puff up and then fall, leaving the edges fluffy and the middle gooey and rich. You can serve them with powdered sugar or fruits or syrup. I found 4 clipped Dutch baby recipes in my old “clips” database – and noted that I made them once and loved them. They have always intrigued me, but they rarely fit into our eating pattern. Time to change that!

Below is my adaptation of Elam Bigg’s recipe for Dutch Babies.

Dutch Babies
serves 2

• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/4 cup butter

Put the eggs in a blender and blend about half a minute. Then, with the blender open, add the milk and then the flour and blend another half a minute. This batter can rest a while if your pan is not yet ready.

Choose a pan that holds 2 quarts and is at least 2 inches in depth. Add the butter and heat the pan in a 425˚ oven until the butter melts.

Remove the hot pan from the oven and pour in the batter. Put it right back into the oven and bake for 20-30 minutes, or until puffy and the edges are well browned.

Here is my Dutch baby right out of the oven:

As it cooled the middle fell (as expected). As soon as it was cool enough to eat, we cut chunks and smeared them with fresh peach jam and enjoyed. Very eggy and very buttery. I think you could use less butter (and save a few calories), but this Dutch baby tasted great as is!

Note

Elam Biggs’ directions for other sizes of Dutch babies:

• 4 eggs, 1 cup milk, 1 cup flour, 3 quart pan
• 5 eggs, 1 1/4 cup milk, 1 1/4 cup flour, 4 quart pan
• 6 eggs, 1 1/2 cup milk, 1 1/2 cup flour, 5 quart pan
• ramekins or any size pan: fill one-quarter full with batter

Cookbook #53: Knudsen Recipes for greater food value. Knudsen, Knudsen Creamery Co. of California, 1953.

Knudsen is a California dairy product company. Currently it is owned by Kraft Foods. When I grew up in our Southern California home in the 1950s, our milk, cottage cheese, sour cream and other dairy products were usually the Knudsen brand. My mother acquired three pamphlet-cookbooks from Knudsen; this 1953 one is the oldest of the three.

This is the first cookbook I’ve come to in which I can’t find a single recipe to try. A coffee cake using prepared biscuit mix and no spices; cream cheese cookies with a lot of butter and watercress; codfish and cottage cheese casserole; casserole a la tuna; chipped beef rarebit; summer soup with chopped cucumbers and cooked beets in a cold mixture of buttermilk and sour cream: I say yuck just reading the titles. Oddly, a recipe for fried bananas is in the main dishes category. Who could trust a book like that? Many recipes are overly laden with butter and sour cream.

The cookbook stresses the health benefits of dairy products, especially yogurt, hoop cheese, and buttermilk, and includes a calorie chart that’s a whole two and a half pages long.

My mother tried the raisin pie and marked it “pretty good”. That’s the only recipe she tried from this book. One more than I’ll try!

Here is the recipe I consider about the worst in this book – Wiener Cheese Floats:

To satisfy my obsession with cooking a recipe from every cookbook that I cover in this blog, I will share a couple of my own long-time breakfast recipes that are variations on two recipes in this book: Cheese Blintzes and Cottage Cheese Omelet.

When I have leftover crepes, I often make something very similar to these blintzes for breakfast. I call them Cottage Cheese Crepes. This is a one-person recipe:

• 2 crepes
• 1/4-1/2 cup cottage cheese
• cinnamon to taste

Heat a non-stick pan, then wipe it with a small amount of oil or spray with non-stick spray. Spoon cottage cheese down the center of each crepe and sprinkle with cinnamon. Roll them up and cook in the pan until lightly browned on both sides and the cottage cheese is melting. Sprinkle with more cinnamon if you like. (Note that I skip the sour cream and butter in the Knudsen recipe, lessening calories.) I drizzle my cooked crepes with a little lite syrup.

The Cottage Cheese Omelet calls for separating the eggs, combining the yolks and cottage cheese, then beating the whites and folding in the yolks/cottage cheese.

I make something a whole lot simpler using the same ingredients. I take an egg and mix it with 1/4 cup cottage cheese and cook the mixture like scrambled eggs. I have these about once a week, and have for years. I’ll call them Cottage Cheese Scrambled Eggs.

• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup cottage cheese
• green onions, chopped (optional)

Heat a non-stick pan; brush with a little oil and wipe clean. Break the egg into a bowl and add the cottage cheese (and onions if you wish). Mix with a fork, then pour into the heated pan and cook until the egg mixture sets.

I like to serve these with a muffin and some orange juice. Sorry the photo is kind of crummy. It was very early, and pre-coffee, and I wanted to EAT! No time to play around with camera settings.

And the muffin? That’s my own recipe for banana muffins.