RECIPES BEST FORGOTTEN

Celery seed. It just occurred to me I don’t have any celery seed.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
My mother-in-law made stews even in summer—beefy concoctions with chunks of potatoes, parsnips and turnips. She peeled carrots and sliced them into the pot along with onion and celery. It was a hot, time-consuming job. them
At lunch (the big meal of the day) she served big plates of the stew with sliced bread, butter and homemade jam. For dessert, there was always a bowl of canned plums and a sugar cookie or two.
I tried to make stew like Mom Harvey did. I used beef cubes and frozen stew veggies—they were already cut up. And I used celery seed instead of celery. My stew was okay, but I don’t imagine any of my kids will brag about it.
The sacrifice was missing.
And the pride in doing something well.
The kids we older parents foster are from a gas-and-go generation. A single-serve microwavable world measured in gigabytes and milliseconds.
Their parents are, too.
That’s where we come in. We remember waiting for the TV to warm up before the picture came on. We remember when, if you wanted mashed potatoes, you had to mash them yourself—after you peeled and boiled them. When you bragged to the neighbors that you mowed your lawn in perfect diagonal lines. We remember when summer was a time for kids to play and get bored and secretly wish for school to start.
I decided to teach my foster children the value of taking pride in hard work. We made homemade cinnamon rolls.
It was fun at first. We sifted flour and heated milk and yeast and butter and sugar. We stirred it together and waited for it to form dough.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have put in that extra half-cup of milk,” one said.
“Aw, that didn’t make any difference. I saw you do it and I dumped a little more flour in to make up for it.” The other child held up his dough encased hands. “But I’ll bet this would go faster if we put the dough in the blender to mix.”
“You’re not mixing,” I told them. “You’re kneading.”
“Needing what?”
“I put in extra salt. So that isn’t the problem.” The sweet faced nine year old grinned.
“No,” said the other child. “And we don’t need any more yeast. I dumped in all three bags.”
“You put in three bags of yeast?” I asked.
“Yeah. It said fast-rising, but I waited a whole minute and nothing happened. So I put it all in.”
I took the bowl and covered it with a clean dry dish towel. “Let’s just let it rest.”
“Already?” said the oldest. “I’m not tired yet.”
“Imagine that,” I said.
After five minutes, the kids were elbow-deep in dough again.
“Didn’t I tell you to let the dough rest,” I asked them.
“It was bored,” said the little red head.
“Dough doesn’t get bored.”
“You said it got tired,” he replied.
“I never said the dough was tired.”
“Well, you said it had to rest.”
“Go out and play.” I told them, covering the bowl again.
“Play what?”
“In the street,” I mumbled. Go play in the street.”
But after a quick nap, I felt better and I called them back in. We flattened the dough out, covered it with sugar and cinnamon and rolled it up again. We sliced it and put it in pans, and we baked it.
It made 144 cinnamon rolls—lead-heavy and chewy as an old tire. We gave cinnamon rolls to the pastor, to the neighbors and to the boys’ Sunday school teachers, none of which spoke to us for a month afterward.
I suppose one should choose his projects (and his battles) with care. I guess we often remember the Good Old Days as being brighter than they were.
At any rate, here is a perfectly acceptable alternative for homemade rolls. Make them in disposable pans and share them with everyone.

Four tins of biscuits ( they often come four to a package)
Margarine
Sugar
Cinnamon
Butterscotch pudding mix
Walnuts, pecans, peanuts—whatever suits you

Melt the margarine in a bowl. Meanwhile, open the biscuit tins and separate the biscuits. Fill a large flat bowl with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. Make the biscuits into balls and roll them in the margarine, then in the cinnamon-sugar. Put them in a cake pan
( bundt pans work best) starting at the edges and working in. Leave a circle in the center empty. When you have three rows, sprinkle on some of the pudding mix and a few nuts and repeat with another layer. When you have used all the biscuits, pour some of the left-over margarine on the top and sprinkle with remaining sugar mixture. Bake at 350 degrees until the roll tops are brown and the middles are set. ( about thirty minutes)
Place a plate over the pan and invert it. The rolls will pull apart in single servings. THIS IS VIRTUALLY NO FAIL. KIDS WILL LOVE THEM.