File holds more than recipes
| • | 'Nothing fancy' recipes are family delights |
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
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| In her sunny Kailua kitchen, Joan Osborne rolls out her trademark meatballs, a dish typical of her favorites: It goes together ahead of time, makes use of shortcut products and can double as dinner or a snack.
Photos by Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser Joan Dowsett Osborne 88, Kailua, homemaker, swimmer, family matriarch Weeknight standby: "Creamed tuna with rice and peas. Pour in a bowl. All my kids still love it. You gotta make a good cream sauce, and the secret is onions." Cookbook I can't live without: "the file" — her card file of recipes; "Sunset's Easy Basics for Good Cooking" (1982); vintage copy of "Hilo Women's Club Cookbook" Shining culinary moment: "When I get the hot dish, the salad and the bread all ready at the propitious moment — a rarity." Worst kitchen disaster: the time a guest was allergic to the shrimp curry she prepared. Inspiration: her ever-hungry late husband, Lloyd. Kitchen secret: To make a block of cheese last, dip cheesecloth in white vinegar, wring out and wrap cheese. |
Stains and tattered corners tell of how much these typewritten 5-by-7 cards have been used.
Names next to the recipe titles tell of a life full of friends who baked cookies for each other's children, shared dinners together and took dishes to the same potlucks.
Notes in the margins tell of a cook who keeps making improvements and alterations until the recipes bear her own special touch.
And the sparseness of the instructions tell of someone so familiar with basic cooking techniques that a well-chosen word or two speaks volumes to her — a scribbled "350/20" stands in for "bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes."
The recipe for her signature dish, a kama'aina-style curry, includes no cooking instructions at all — just ingredient amounts.
Osborne's "office," as she calls it, is the kitchen her late husband, airline pilot Lloyd Osborne, designed for her when they moved into their Kailua home in 1964. It has a picture window looking out to the water, built-in appliances, spacious counters, roll-out drawer storage, a low seating area that serves both as a breakfast nook and a desk where she can make phone calls, a walk-in pantry, laundry and storage area, and a pass-through to the covered patio where they did a lot of their entertaining.
To a cook, it's a dream space. But cooking wasn't always her dream.
Osborne, 88, was born and raised in Honolulu, an athletic, active young woman who would rather go swimming than spend time around the house. She recalls being invited to a bridge lesson hosted for teens by a well-meaning matron; it was held at the Outrigger Canoe Club, and all young Joanie Dowsett could think as she looked longingly out the window was that she'd rather be out on the water than stuck inside learning to say "two no trump."
She still goes swimming several times a week and competed in master's swimming programs for 20 years, well into her 70s. But she has learned to love the kitchen, too.
When in 1938, at age 22, she married a young aviator, she didn't know a saucepan from a spatula. A dry-as-a-bone sense of humor, still a trademark, got her through the early years.
Her motivation for learning to cook, she says, "was 6 feet tall, terribly good-looking and always hungry. He'd come in the door every day and say, 'Hi, honey, what's for dinner?' — at which I'd turn blue and cringe."
She got her hands on the "The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook" — "I'm so old I predate 'The Joy of Cooking,' " she says now — and plunged into the recipes before reading the introductory material. "I didn't even know what to 'fold in' meant, but I persevered."
She first mastered the white sauce. "We had four dinners — creamed tuna with onions, creamed Spam (when I got tired of baking it with a clove stuck in the top), and creamed chipped beef, lovingly called 's--- on a shingle' in the Army. With a hard-boiled egg added, it was really a grand dish." They also had cream sauce on every vegetable that would sit still, and she learned to make cream soups, too. Her husband took to calling her "Joanie 'White Sauce' Osborne."
Later, her signature dish, the curry, would also be based on a cream sauce. The first time she tried to make the curry, from her grandmother's recipe, the sauce was thin as soup and she had no idea in the world how to thicken it.
"What did you do?" she is asked.
"Served it." Pause. "With lots of rice."
She would serve the curry so often that one friend once burst out when the familiar condiments made their appearance on the table, "Don't you know how to make anything else?"
Later, she learned about chickens. And chicken, she says, "goes on forever." The chicken segment is by far the thickest in her recipe file.
The file is indicative of her generation — one in which busy mothers managed households and entertained frequently, embracing the convenience of shortcut products and worrying not at all about fat, salt or sugar. That curry of hers requires slow cooking in a double boiler over the course of several days. Her famous meatballs are topped with a sauce made from a Knorr mix. The casserole that defines the holidays for her family involves two cheeses and three cartons of sour cream.
The Osbornes had four children — three boys and a girl — and she had them up on a chair helping mix meatloaf or cookie dough, a towel tied around their necks, when they were as young as 3. She didn't want them coming into a marriage without any knowledge of the cooking side of things.
But even her direct and shortcut-oriented style of cooking seems rather elaborate by today's standards, when many people eat takeout for half their daily meals and go to restaurants for much of the remainder of their daily bread. She didn't want to prepare her curry for a photo session because, she said, "I'm practically the only person left whose got time to bother with it. It's too much work." (But we did get the recipe.)
Now widowed and both a grandmother and a great-grandmother, Osborne hasn't learned to cook for one, but she has learned to buy lidded glass storage containers at Daiei that allow her to cook a full recipe, then portion it out and freeze for future meals. Her freezer is full of neatly stacked, labeled containers. "My middle name should be 'Pragmatic,' " she says, "I'm so given to the ordinary and the easy."
Which explains why her favorite dinner napkins, when she has the family over for a casual meal, are washcloths: "I buy 'em on sale because they wash nicely, and who wants to iron?"
Her advice to beginning cooks: "Don't do as I did. Get a good cookbook and read the instruction pages before you get into the recipes."
• • •
'Nothing fancy' recipes are family delights
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| "Superior meatballs" are mainstays of Joan Osborne's repertoire. |
The first is for a simple baked meatball that doubles as main dish or pupu.
Superior Meatballs
- 1 pound ground beef
- 1/2 pound spicy ground pork sausage
- 1 egg
- 1 package Good Seasons garlic salad dressing mix
- 1 tablespoon diced bell pepper
- 2 teaspoons parsley, minced
- 1/2 cup onion, chopped
- 3 tablespoons soft bread crumbs
- 1/4 teaspoon allspice
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/8 teaspoon pepper
- Knorr packaged beef gravy mix
Mix all ingredients. Chill 2 hours or overnight.
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Use a one-fourth cup measure to dip up meat mixture. Roll between hands lightly into a thick log, then pinch off rounds to make meatballs — three rounds to a log.
Place on a greased baking rack. Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes; check for doneness.
Meanwhile, prepare gravy mix according to package directions.
Place meatballs on serving platter and drizzle with gravy mix. Serve as pupu with toothpicks.
For dinner, make larger pattie-type meatballs and serve in casserole dish, accompanied by hot rice.
As dinner, serves 6; as pupu, serves 12.
Per serving (as dinner): 370 calories, 29 grams total fat (10 grams saturated fat), 120 milligrams cholesterol, 1,500 milligrams sodium, 7 grams total carbohydrate, 0 grams fiber, 3 grams sugar, 21 grams protein.
"I am of the crisp-cookie persuasion," says Osborne, and these thin, crackling cookies are very much to her taste. She often makes up a batch of these or other cookies and drops in on her children and grandchildren. "I've never been turned away," she says, wryly.
Cereal Cookies
- 1 cup butter
- 1 cup oil
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon milk
- 3 1/2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup crushed cornflakes
- 1 cup rolled oats
- 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
- Decorative sugar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream together butter, oil, sugar and brown sugar. Add vanilla, egg and milk.
In a second bowl, mix flour, baking soda and salt. Stir into wet mixture. Stir in cereals and nuts.
Roll into balls between palms and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Flatten well with fork dipped in sugar. Sprinkle with colored sugar.
Bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes. Makes 5 dozen cookies.
Per serving (1 cookie): 140 calories, 8 grams total fat (2.5 grams saturated fat), 10 milligrams cholesterol, 120 milligrams sodium, 15 grams total carbohydrate, 1/2 gram fiber, 7 grams sugar, 1 1/2 grams protein.
Osborne is known among her friends for the following recipe, one that involves considerable time and work. It worked well for her when she was raising four children and still trying to entertain, because much of the work is done ahead of time. She keeps several of the condiments — crumbled bacon, peanuts and coconut — always on hand in jars in the freezer. And the cooked chicken, lamb or shrimp can be frozen, too.
Hawaiian Curry
- 7 tablespoons margarine
- 7 tablespoons flour
- 7 tablespoons curry powder
- 3/4 quart milk
- 3/4 quart coconut milk
- 1/2 cup grated fresh ginger
- 4 1/2 cups chopped onions
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 4 cups cooked, cubed chicken or lamb, or shelled shrimp
Condiments: Peanuts, crumbled hard-boiled eggs, bacon bits, minced green onions or chives, shredded unsweetened coconut, mango chutney.
In the top of a large double-boiler over medium-high heat, melt margarine; whisk in flour and curry powder. Slowly whisk in milk and coconut milk. Stir in ginger, onions and garlic.
Turn heat down to medium or medium-low, just enough to keep sauce at a very low simmer. Cook 1 hour. Cover and refrigerate.
The next day, cook for another hour in the same manner. Cover and refrigerate. The third day, cook for another hour. Working in batches, process in food processor or blender until smooth.
Return to pot, add cooked meat or seafood, and heat through. Serve with hot rice. Serves 8 to 10.
Per serving: 520 calories, 37 grams total fat (21 grams saturated fat), 75 milligrams cholesterol, 220 milligrams sodium, 25 grams total carbohydrate (5 grams fiber, 13 grams sugar), 28 grams protein.
