Recipes From The 1920s | Chicken Pie | Cherry Pie | Gluten Free | 52 Sunday Dinners| Week 3

I don't know if you just saw all that, but we are currently in the midst of a windstorm after the big snow blizzard here and we keep going in and out of power so that's also adding kind of a fun element to this menu. There's gonna be all sorts of reasons why some of this turned out strange. Hi friends and welcome back. We are now at week three of the 52 Sunday dinners project. Here is what we're having today. Today's menu includes a chicken pot pie, tea rolls, mashed potatoes, which we are skipping again this week because mashed potatoes are on just about every menu. We will be doing the mashed turnips. It also calls for cucumber pickles, which we are skipping and I will explain why when we try everything out. The salad portion is a fruit salad and strawberry gel, which is really just a combination of the two and it's a fruit jello salad. Then for dessert we'll have cherry pie and as always coffee. If this is your first time joining us, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. My name is Ashley and I'm a registered dietitian and I have a love for everything vintage and food. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what we're doing here in this whole 52 weeks of Sunday dinners, go ahead and refer back to week one where I give a little bit more of an explanation on kind of the mission and purpose of this whole project. Those of you that have been following along for the last, I don't know, close to between 20 and 25 dinners so far, there's about to be kind of a major change coming to this whole project. I've been looking for some answers to some medical questions for, well, we're going on between 15 and 20 years now that I've been seeing different specialists and doctors and no one's been able to give me an answer. I've been seeing a dietitian now for about a year and a half and we're starting to get down into some niche testing and answers. Long story medium length, we've gotten at least one answer and there's still some more testing to do, but the first step in fixing some of the issues that I have going on is to cut out gluten, which is a little bit of a wrench thrown in here because just about every recipe has some sort of all-purpose flour, bread flour, cake flour. There's gluten in just about every one of these recipes. I have a plan for how to solve this and I think I'm gonna go about it three different ways depending on the week and if you'd like to go ahead join me in the kitchen, I'll explain a little bit more as we cook. I don't think that gluten-free flours were a big alternative in the 1920s. However, on weeks that I don't have anybody here available that is willing to be on camera and can also eat gluten to try some of these recipes, my plan is to either make the recipe with gluten-free flour, which is what we're doing this week with everything. We're gonna experiment, work with some things and I know this isn't ideal for most of you, but I hope that some of you who have celiac disease or some other sort of reason that they can't have gluten, hopefully this is an outlet that maybe you haven't seen people do before. I know I've not really seen any historical cooking done with gluten-free flours before because historically I don't think it was available and so hopefully for those of you that are in a situation similar to mine right now, maybe this is something that is nice for you to see or helpful for you to see and if you want to try and follow along with these recipes also, you can see maybe what works, what doesn't work, what flours work with different things, which I'm sure you already know that because you've probably been doing it a lot longer than I have, but that's that's the plan for that route. The other route that I would like to take is to, if I have somebody here who can eat gluten and is willing to be on camera, I'll just have them taste it. I'll make it as it was meant to be made and like if Tori is here, I'll have her try it since she can eat it and I'll be reaching out to a few friends and maybe some other people that I think would be willing to try things on camera and would be a good fit for you guys to meet and see if they'd be willing to give their opinion to things. The third option is if I have some people that I know that can eat the recipes with the gluten in it but they're not willing to try it on camera but they are willing to try it and give me verbal feedback or text feedback on what they thought of the recipes, then I will give the feedback to you via that way. So I'll just take what they said and let you know what they thought. I know a lot of that is, you know, seeing people's facial expressions, body language, that sort of thing is really important feedback, but we have to work with what we have here and that's what we have. I have a fourth solution as well and I'll talk about that one a little bit more when we sit down to dinner. I have put spoons underneath of these because they aren't level and I think the lobster here might be a little unlevel still, but at least it is sturdy and I don't think it's, yeah, it's not going to fall over at least as we put it away to cool. Maybe we won't need that little lobster. I might just be eating the fruit salad out of that lobster. For this recipe it calls for a sponge starter or a sponge bread I believe and I have heard of sponge candy. Watson's Chocolates in Buffalo and Niagara Falls makes a fabulous sponge candy, but a sponge bread? I'm not sure that I knew what that was or how to start it, so this is one I also did decide to look up online first. This week I don't have somebody to try these recipes with me and I think I just want to try some things differently I suppose. Try some with gluten-free flour, try some with regular flour. Those of you with celiac or other medical reasons to cut out gluten, maybe you'll appreciate this. Those of you that don't have to, I can understand your frustration if you are wanting me to follow these recipes precisely. Here's another one that I was uncertain about. I did look up what a bread sponge was, that way I could see what exactly I was doing so we didn't ruin it completely. And the one I went with was the I guess the drier one because it doesn't say to add any additional flour or anything like that and so I think it was more important that this be I guess kind of more of a dry dough than a batter. And then I also looked up tea rolls and every tea roll recipe that I found didn't start with the sponge and so I guess I'm just a little unsure how I'm supposed to mix these ingredients in. Should I cut them in with a pastry cutter? Should I mix them in with a spoon or my hands or maybe even knead them in? It doesn't talk about kneading but should I be kneading this? I'm not sure. The shortening is throwing me off because I feel like I should just knead it with my hands but that shortening seems like it should be cut in. Okay this egg has made this exceptionally wet. There's no way this is right and I'm again wondering just like with the pie crust is the flour a problem here? Is it not absorbing enough liquid or do we need just a little bit extra of it to make up for the lack of wheat flour? I don't know but I I'm not sure. Again with changing the variable of the flour I can't know if this is the intent and I can't imagine that it is and if it is not the intent I can't know if it's the recipe that's a problem or if it's the flour that's a problem and I know I'll get to know that eventually and learn a little bit more but in the meantime I'm gonna sift a little bit more flour over this. I know this can't be right but we're gonna go with it and we're gonna see what happens when we try it this way. For this pie crust we are again going to try it with gluten-free flour which I know throws off the whole idea that I may improve my pie crust skills because our friend Cindy has very lovingly not only sent me a recipe that she uses along with instructions and some troubleshooting with if I'm experiencing this issue maybe I need to do this to fix it. She also sent me a video showing step by step exactly how to fix my pie crust and what it should look like and I was super excited because I knew I was gonna get it right this time with her help and with this practice. I know I'm not really sure if it'll turn out the same with the gluten-free flour but we're gonna try it and I guess we'll just see kind of how it goes. I've measured out by grams all of the ingredients so that it takes at least one issue or one possible problem out of the equation here and we're just gonna see using the recipe and method Cindy sent if it will translate with this gluten-free flour. Using the recipe with this flour it is exceptionally sticky and I think I probably need a good bit more flour. Probably I should have remedied that prior to adding the water and I should have cut in some more flour. However we're here now I'm realizing it now I'm gonna sprinkle a good bit more flour over the top on the bottom around the sides as we bring this together. I'm gonna try and work a little more flour in there while I guess working it as a little as possible with my hands and hopefully it'll be just a little bit less sticky and more of the consistency that we want it to be. We're gonna separate it put it in plastic wrap and let it rest. I'm gonna let it rest in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes or my intention is 30 minutes and then when I get back around to it and remember that I'm supposed to be working on the pie crust it'll be at we'll just say it'll be at least 30 minutes until then. Do we think this will work out? We're gonna dip it in warm water hopefully it will release from this mold and we will finally have a gelatin recipe that works. Well I think we need to soak it a little longer. Okay we let it soak a few more seconds. Let's try it again. Three, two, one. Oh I think we let it soak too long. Oh no. Okay it's not the worst. Maybe soaking it two or three seconds less would have been better but it's time to try everything and I'm sure some of you are really anxious to see how everything turned out this time and I have to say the chicken pie doesn't look too bad. I'm hoping that it tastes as good as it looks. The tea rolls they kind of look like turkey or chicken meatballs. They definitely, let me show you those, they do not look like rolls and the texture definitely is very off. I did not, I kept adding more and more and more and more flour to them and they never hit a consistency where I could have kneaded them and or rolled them out at all. I did more of like a drop biscuit kind of thing for them and so I know that this is nowhere near what it should have been and I I know it has to do with the flour that I used but I'm also wondering if, as I said multiple times earlier, if it's something to do with the recipe as well. I don't really understand the use of the sponge first and then adding those other ingredients to it after and maybe the sponge would have been different if I would have used regular all-purpose flour. Speaking of the way that some of these turned out, this leads me to my next kind of announcement for how to solve some of the issues that are now going to come up based on my medical history and necessity moving forward. I've been kicking around an idea for the last several weeks and this change in my diet I think has really solidified that I I hope that it's a good idea and that is that I I'd like to start a Facebook group for the discussions to continue. The comment section is excellent and several of you have been emailing me back and forth and so those conversations we've been able to build on those and that's great and I love that we now have a relationship through that discussion and comments but I think it's really important that you guys are able to form your own discussions and relationships outside of me as well. You have a lot in common and you have a lot to talk about and I think all of you would benefit from getting to know each other a little bit if you want to and so I'm going to put a link in the description below for the Facebook group that I'm going to create and I really encourage you guys if you decide to follow along with some of these recipes show the pictures of them if you want to share how yours turned out if you did something different with it if you change the recipe a little tell us about it show it to us and if you have memories that you want to share and talk about based on some of your foods that you remember and things that you wish that maybe you would have known before but didn't get a chance to ask ask it there maybe somebody there knows but I think the whole point of fostering a community is great but I think it's stunted here and I think we could really expand that community presence and mindset and bonding and getting to know each other through a separate group. Now if you think that's a terrible idea that's perfectly fine you don't have to join you don't have to join the conversation or anything like that you can just continue watching along if you like and participate as much or as little as you want to but I hope you continue to stay and if you decide I hope you continue the conversation outside of here. With that let's get to trying this food because I am starving. Check that out it doesn't look too bad let's try a little bit of it. I want you to be able to see what it looks like cutting into it a little bit hmm that looks like it might be a little underdone although you know if you've been here very long you know I kind of like mine underdone a little although it maybe not maybe it just is kind of a different texture like that let's go with the outside there just in case. I also know that the recipe says mashed turnips next to the mashed potatoes it says to slice them and cook them in very little water at no point does the recipe say mash them nor does it say to add milk or anything like that and maybe it is implied that they should have been mashed afterward and mixed together but I kind of like them sliced like this and so I'm gonna leave them sliced but if you're following along and want to mash them at home that's great. The chicken certainly could have used more gravy it looks like the gravy kind of got swallowed up in there and it's not looking exceptionally dry but it doesn't look nice and rich and thick with the gravy so I think it could have stood for a little bit more but let's I think I want to try the biscuit topping first with this grain-free flour it doesn't smell any different than a regular biscuit to me you know as far as biscuits go this might be slightly sweeter maybe a tiny bit grainier but overall not a bad substitute if I did not know that these were gluten-free I don't think that I would be able to tell I think I would just think this was a biscuit and move on and not put any other thought into it so the recipe I used was actually from online and as I normally do things I didn't completely follow the recipe and so if you really want to know more email me reach out to me and I'll send you the link to the recipe that I used and tell you maybe some of the few tweaks I did to this but yeah gluten-free biscuits not too terrible with this flour let's try it with the chicken and the gravy the chicken smells really nice it smells like chicken and biscuits and that tastes really good it tastes very comforting it's very it's a nice appropriate warm meal for right now if you remember my electricity has been going in and out this whole time it is blowing like crazy there are things blowing over all over the place around here it's wet mix of wet snow snow rain sleek kind of mix with hugely giant winds it is not nice out there it's really nice to have this comforting chicken pie now these biscuits tea biscuits let's just see what happened kind of looks like a meatball on the inside too it smells very very yeasty I think most people will find this unpleasant I don't but after you chew it for a moment or so it starts to get almost slimy it kind of like I'm eating doesn't taste it feels like I'm eating okra without the snap of the outside whatever this flour mix is it has something in it that is just a little bit slimy I think when hydrated and I noticed that when I was mixing it and even washing my hands and feeling on my fingers I thought maybe it was the egg or the lard or something making it that slippery and kind of slimy but I'm now thinking it's the flour in this I don't think it's unpleasant it's not bad but it's it's nowhere near a t-roll I don't you can't even use your imagination and pretend it's a t-roll this is just some sort of gluten free ball of something it's not bad but I don't I wouldn't recommend it I wouldn't recommend using this for anybody at home I'd say stick to regular flour for this maybe or find a different recipe or show us in Facebook oh you know what you know what that tastes like I don't remember us using baking soda that tastes like a pretzel a little bit the crust on the outside the softness of the inside it almost reminds me of a hard pretzel not hard pretzel a soft pretzel a hundred percent that reminds me of a soft pretzel it even tastes a little bit like it which makes zero sense because there's no baking soda in it that I'm remembering I don't know mystery the turnips are great if you like turnips of course you can't go wrong with this recipe it's delicious I like them sliced we again we could have mashed them up but I think they are a little bit better sliced like this I think this is great something I think I forgot to mention is the pickles I did plan on making the pickles this time however when I looked at the recipe it's a recipe for sweet pickles not dill pickles and I hate sweet pickles I don't know a single person that likes them and so I knew that if I made the sweet pickles that everything would have just gone to waste I wouldn't have even been able to give them away to anybody weighing the cost of skipping them in this menu versus wasting food and throwing it away I personally felt that it was a better choice to just leave it off the menu this time and I guess I'm also considering as you guys have been discussing with me a little bit in altering these menus if I want to somewhat that the women in these days picked and chose kind of what they wanted off these menus and also adjusted things for their taste and so while I will try to keep things as close as possible to the original intention sometimes I'm going to skip things sometimes I might change things if there's something that I know I dislike and there is nobody that I know in my immediate vicinity that I could even give it away to okay now this isn't particularly hugely jiggly maybe a little bit but it's pretty full of fruit in here I think I'm gonna go let's go here if you can see what that looks like inside but we have our salad here our salad course and it's supposed to be served with whipped cream I am I don't know if you can see this if it's in frame or not but I whipped up some whipped cream in a little I have a little ninja milk frother there's the whipped cream and the salad let's give this one a try definitely smells strong it smells strong like strawberry jello and I can smell the walnuts as well this one is not bad now there is a particular difference in this jello salad compared to several of the other gelatin salads that we've had in that there's no mayonnaise in sight in here and you know what this one works this one is pretty good for me I think if you get away from the idea that jello salads are kind of a weird throwback I just I whenever I hear about jello salads I just think of well I always think of Christmas vacation and cat food being stuck inside of it but also just weird combinations and I think most people make fun of jello salads and there's not much positive discussion around them and really this isn't bad at all it's kind of good I like the differences in the textures I like how the gelatin holds it all together and adds a little bit of a different flavor to it there's a nice crunch with the walnuts in there there's a lot of fun different textures with the fruit you bite into an orange or a piece of pineapple and it's a little more juicy you bite into the banana and it's a little more creamy I don't know I don't I think there's a reason that they have a bad reputation but just like all stereotypes of everything not all of them are bad and probably most of them are good there's just some really really strange awful ones that give these jello salads a bad name but yeah I would say this this actually is pretty decent this isn't the most beautiful looking pie crust I've ever seen but I think for all the challenges we're facing it's not the worst but let's find out the texture and flavor before we make any more judgments I cut a second piece after the first one and put the first one back because it was pretty ugly and messy this one is it's okay it's definitely homemade yeah we'll say that it's very crumbly the crust while also being like it it wants to hold together and stay together but it's also pretty crumbly and I don't know if there is maybe for this flour that was too much shortening maybe we needed to double the flour but what we're gonna get there we're gonna get to know pie crusts and gluten-free pie crusts better I'll perfect the regular pie crusts and feed them to my friends that can eat them and I will perfect this as well but let's taste it let's see how it translates when we eat it yeah the crust smells like any other crust I don't know if you can hear the wind but it is absolutely howling out there anyhow the crust smells like any other crust that I've ever made before or had before I can smell the cherries but definitely smell the crust more than the cherries the filling is very good these cherries that I used were delicious I got them from Aldi and there's a ton of sugar in there so that's great the texture is wonderful the middle is great the crust doesn't taste bad but I think maybe I needed a little more filling compared to the crust and maybe that's because the filling that I used would have been for a 1920s pie and would as we've discussed before this pie pan is I don't know probably from like the 80s or 90s it's much bigger than a 1920s pie pan would have been so and the crust recipe that we used was from Cindy you sent it to me from the Betty Crocker cookbook and I I don't know what year that would have been but maybe that was for a larger serving size as well so maybe for this it would have been less pie crust and maybe the filling would have been a little deeper in a smaller pie pan I'm not sure but the crust isn't it doesn't taste bad but it doesn't taste great I think I taste a lot more shortening than I do anything else it it just kind of tastes and feels a little heavy and so we're just gonna have to keep experimenting but you know for the first time and all of the challenges that just got thrown at us here I'm gonna say this this wasn't too bad we're almost 25 meals in and I feel like I went from maybe having the confidence of my skills improving to today we started in on meal 3 and it's almost like starting over new and learning from the beginning again with these types of foods and that's kind of a really interesting contrast where I feel like my skills are leveling up a little bit I'm still of course gonna make mistakes but definitely leveling up confidence is leveling up with this type of cooking and then all of a sudden BAM let's throw an obstacle in there and you know what that's life that is life all the time and this is no different this is mimicking life pretty well I'm taking the mindset that instead of this being a negative obstacle it's giving me the opportunity to reach out to some other people for maybe some help in trying some of these foods and maybe I'll bond more with them and get to know them better maybe we'll learn things about each other that we didn't know before and it'll give us an excuse to see each other more often and yeah I think that's all I have to say about that okay I changed my mind I figured out what the cherry pie reminds me of I took another bite of it and it it tastes saltier than regular pie crusts and as I kind of moved into the rest of the piece and was looking at it watching the texture of that pie crust kind of crumble and change a little bit this reminds me more of a cherry crumble than a cherry pie and I think if I frame my mindset around a cherry crumble instead of it being a cherry pie well this is great this turned out wonderful as a cherry crumble so let's pretend it was cherry crumble and not a cherry pie that's what I think I would tell my guests that it's a cherry crumble maybe I would cut it in little squares or something we got it we have to work with the positives of what we have here and that's what we have and that's what we're going with in general overall this meal I thought wasn't too bad even imagining what it would have been like if we would have had regular biscuits rolls pie crust the foods really went together I think they were mostly pretty warm comforting middle of winter foods and I think they really I think they went very well for the season that they are in there was a little bit that I found lacking though which rolls into the nutrition portion I wasn't impressed with the lack of vegetables and I know if we would have had the cucumber pickles that we would have had you know kind of a vegetable there then we have the turnips but I think it really could have used a little bit more in the vegetable section our salad was again a fruit salad but struck me more as a dessert than fruit and or more of a dessert than salad I guess it was very high in simple carbohydrates a very starchy meal there was protein at the beginning there with the chicken but overall I think great for I guess keeping some meat on your bones in the wintertime and if people were out doing a lot of outside work I'm not sure what outside work other than plowing they would be doing in the winter but I I am very lacking on information in that so maybe they needed a little bit of extra carbohydrates to get them through all of the snow and whatnot I know just just walking to the duck pen and feeding the ducks today and coming back in all of that sleet cold it was I was working way harder doing it today than I am on a clear day so okay you know I want to give them that I think it really could have used a little bit more in the fruit and vegetable section and maybe we could have pulled back a little bit on some of the starches cost-wise this meal should not have been too expensive so the chicken that I got I got a whole chicken it was $10 the there was a few fruits potatoes the cherries would have been I'm not sure how much they would have been back then the chairs were probably the most expensive part of this meal if the flour was all-purpose flour now the flour that I bought I am extremely lucky that I lived near a lot of discount stores some bent and dent type stores I live near a sharp shopper and if you don't know what that is go ahead look it up it's great discount store but one of the Benton dent stores that I went to I think they do several I think they do a lot of Amazon returns so they get really cool foods that are not typical for this area that I live in they had several different types of gluten-free flour and I believe I showed to you the packages to you earlier maybe I went and looked them up how much I would have paid for them and I think one of them was 22 or 23 dollars and the other one was $13 and I used all of both bags for this meal so if if I would have paid full price for that if you like what you saw this week and would like to continue seeing more please consider subscribing it looks like after reviewing my analytics last week it looks like about half of you that watch regularly are not subscribed and if you don't want to that's perfectly fine but if it's something that just hadn't crossed your mind yet and you think okay how can I help continue this project or have this project reach more people the more people that subscribe to this channel the more YouTube wants to put it out there to more people and I think the more people that we can reach the better and if you want to see what happens next week tune in Friday starting at 3 p.m. Eastern Time and we're going to take on making Bavarian cream see you then