Time with an Old Dear Friend....Post Views...14,419

      AKA.....time for a baking day of cranberry, nut, orange bread..YUM!
      This bread is a long time tradition for me.  It comes from an old time, tried and trusted friend....  
My Better  Homes and Garden 
cookbook....I don't know how long we have been together....I think it was a wedding present 48 years ago. Like a trusted friend, it has been with me through many celebrations, family meals, lonely days, rainy and freezing days, hot days, too much to do days, not enough to do days, cookie days, how do I cook this meat days.
      Now here in the PNW she is a loyal companion, allowing me to ignore her and then come running back to her when yearning from the past overtakes me.  She doesn't mind being stained with a plethora of ingredients from sticky fingers, having pages lie torn out and even missing a few, being stuffed with extended family recipes that are not originally hers, having her pages browned from age spots and her cover being permanently coated in blemishes of dirt, fingerprints and scattered food particles. 
     I did not realize till this very morning how much she means to me, how much I rely on her, how much security she has given me over the years and into now. Like a sheltering tree she has just been there for whatever mood I'm in or culinary need I have.  

   Today I draw on one of her reliable treasures....cranberry, orange, nut bread. YUM!  It my favorite of the  harvest season. Back in Wisconsin where the cranberries were the bounty of the bogs, buying them meant that the first frost had come, the geese were in their V formation to fly south and everyone knew the nippy chill of autumn would soon morph into many months of frigid air. Whoa!  Sure glad I am out here in the PNW. 
     But today as a chilly torrent is deluging our neighborhood, I am soothed with the busyness of home baking.  Since it is a rather long messy process I make several loaves during one session. That is.....multiply 4 times this recipe..... 

       
First problem....realizing that even after 2 years I have not unpacked my handy food chopper..... 

Maybe the little "bullet" will do....and it did....

Some processes still require good old fashioned technology....grating orange peel.....

Mixing eggs, oil, orange juice and peel....










Yeah!  portions like grandma use to make....
      Oh, wait......That's ME......

















PRE-OVEN

                POST-OVEN





                                      

Loaves to freeze and loaves to give as gifts...

And a loaf ......

Yummy to eat....smothered in butter....oh, Yah.....


You all come for a visit, a story and a snack, you hear?






   

 This has been a good 2 "old dear friend" days in the life of Grandma G.

    "He [Jesus] said to them, 'Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old'."