Author Archives: Renate Valencia

PB&J breakfast

Grilled peanut butter and peach preserve sandwich

You’ve seen the lowly PB&J elevated in recent time by food people everywhere.  From Peanut Butter & Co., a restaurant in the West Village of Manhattan devoted to the 60’s lunchbox classic, to magazine features adding all kinds of crazy ingredients to the mix.

I’ll be honest with you:  I can’t stand peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  My mother would never have packed one for me as a kid because she knows it would have ruined my day.  As a adult, however, I realize that the problem was crappy peanut butter and bad bread, which I have since made adjustments for.  Also, these sandwiches must be griddled.

I like to keep it simple by not adding a whole lot more than good, organic peanut butter, real peach preserves and a good bread, like Vital Vittles’ Sliced Real Bread, which gets a nice crunch, and a little butter for griddling.  The only other things that I might add are sliced bananas or a little grilled ham.

Here’s what you do to make grilled PB&J sandwiches:

1).  Melt a tablespoon of butter in a pan that does not stick, over low heat.

2).  Spread a good amount of peanut butter on one slice of bread.

3).  Droop a dollop of peach preserves on top.

4).  Gently press on the top slice of bread.

5).  When butter is hot, but not burned, gently lay in the sammie.  Cover and keep on LOW flame.

6).  After about 3 minutes or when bread is browned, gently turn over with tongs or spatula, first adding a little more butter if the pan is completely dry.

7).  Cover and leave on low flame for a couple of minutes or until browned on that side.

8).  Remove from pan, cut in half with sharp knife without burning yourself and eat.

Elsie the Cow’s cookbook

Botsford, Harry. Elsie’s Cookbook. New York: The Bond Wheelwright Company, 1952.

I remember Elsie the Cow from my childhood in the 1960’s, when she showed up in all kinds of advertising pamphlets – made to look like “real” children’s books – we were given in school to extol the many health properties of milk.   The Borden Company must have spent big on all that targeted advertising back in the day, and people were not as sensitive to companies taking advantage of children as a captive audience and laying who-knows-what on them.

Elsie, created as a cartoon character in the 1930’s based on a real cow  purchased by the Borden family,  is still around as the Borden/Dairy Farmers of America spokescow.

I thought this cookbook would be corporate nonsense, but it’s actually very good.  Then again, milk is a more versatile subject for a cookbook, than, say, Cool Whip or Jell-O.  There are classic sauce and potato recipes here, and there is no reason this book could not stand as one of a cook’s workhorses when it comes to cooking with dairy products.  Sure, if has some scariness, as all cookbooks from that period do, but it’s minimal.

All in all, a highly usable piece of corporate advertising.

First pages of Elsie’s Cookbook

The new Berkeley Bowl

Pasture butter and Acme rye bread from the new Berkeley Bowl

Matthew and I are not yet at 100% from our recent illness, but after two weeks we needed to get out of the house.  Since we had not yet checked out the new Berkeley Bowl (or, I should say, its newly-opened second location, Berkeley Bowl West) at 920 Heinz Avenue, we thought we’d head over there since we needed to pick up a few things for the weekend anyway.

This location is wonderful.  Although we were approached by political advocates for signatures, we were not overcome by numerous groups at the same time, nor by panhandlers.  This is Berkeley, so you have to be able to deal with this kind of thing, but I prefer to shop without being approached, so I was very pleased about not having to make a mad dash from my car to the store like I do at the Shattuck location.

It’s a very nice, modern market with wide aisles but very much like the Shattuck location, so Berkeley Bowl shoppers will feel at home here right off the bat.  There is a separate building that serves as a cafe with a Peet’s Coffee, and it is connected to the main store by a covered walkway.  There’s an inside garage (can you believe THAT?), so rain will not touch you whether you shop or have coffee at Peet’s.  Nice.

I got the suspects that Berkeley Bowl excels in:  fresh fruit and vegetables, good bread, pasture butter, sushi (the store-made sushi is really, really good) a couple of pecan sticky buns with so many pecans I don’t know how they make money on them at $1.50 apiece, and a large piece of frozen sashimi-grade albacore at $7.99 per pound.

I’m embarrassed to say how much I spent but I am typing from a home with a full larder.

Matt and I had a thick slice of Acme rye spread with salty pasture butter when we came home.  There is nothing better than a cup of tea with good bread and butter.

Gay cook book

Hogan, Lou Rand. The Gay Cookbook. Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965.

Here’s an interesting cookbook loaned to me by my friend, Paul.  This is a crazy book, combining the kitsch of 60’s cooking in all its urbanity and every gay stereotype known to humankind.  I haven’t been able to find much about it yet, but it seems to have been done as high camp.  Case in point is “swish steak.”  The cover alone is worth the price of admission.

Ebony cookbook

De Knight, Freda. The Ebony Cookbook. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1973.

This is one of my favorite retro cookbooks.  The 1973 version is not easy to find, and I was lucky to have paid only 5 bucks for it at Half-Price Books in Berkeley, one of my favorite places to buy old cookbooks – second only to library book sales.

There are some great biscuit and quickbread recipes here, as well as all the comfort food standards, like chicken and dumplings.  This is my go-to book when I want to make an easy, delicious, frosted cake on a whim, since there are numerous recipes that won’t have you turning your kitchen upside down.

If you love African-American cooking (and who doesn’t?), this is a must because the recipes are the real deal.