Pass-along

Most of you know why we’re a little late with this blog post.  Glen Ellen, where our home is located, was hit hard by the Sonoma County wildfires which broke out on Sunday night, October 8.  The devastation throughout the area is mind-boggling.

Though our house was not burned, Glen Ellen was under mandatory evacuation orders for almost 2 weeks. During that evacuation time we spent one night with a Sonoma friend, Lynne, and then a week in San Francisco with our daughter and son-in-law.  They also took in our 2 Siamese cats, Ono Moore and Choco Latte,  and our Aussie, Oakley.  How fortunate we are to have such supportive friends and family.

When we got ready to leave our house, not knowing what the outcome would be, we opted to take the painting above as the piece of art we most wanted to save.  And it’s not even an original.  But somehow it speaks to the occasion.

And now that we’re home, the blog post that we were almost ready to send out – “Pass-Along” – seems more important than ever.  When push comes to shove, what is it that we most want to preserve and pass-along?  Worth thinking about.  See Andy’s Corner for what he brought with him that Monday morning when the fire was approaching us.

Until the year 2000 I had never heard of the term “Pass-Along.”  But I didn’t grow up in the South.  That summer, in Baton Rouge, my neighbor Katie brought me a butterfly weed – Asclepias tuberosa, as I’d have called it in my MiniBlooms days.  It was from her brother Joe’s home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  Pass-alongs are plants which thrive in old Southern gardens and, because of their hardiness, are easy to give to others.  They’re usually not sold in nurseries because they may be too common or too weedlike.  Well, that’s not quite true.  In Northern California today everyone is trying their best to help out the Monarchs and you can find butterfly weed almost everywhere.

Long story short: the only plant I’ve ever had long enough to be considered tough enough to be a pass-along is the hoya, a houseplant, that’s sitting on our back porch. The plant came from my dad’s first law partner, Mortimer Stone – who went on to become chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court – in 1953.  When Judge Stone passed away in 1978, my mom and dad inherited his hoya.  When my dad passed away in 1998, I got it. My brother is demanding a cutting from it as we speak.  And I’m thinking I’d better root a few cuttings for my kids.

I’ve decided that since Pass-along plants generally seem to elude me, recipes will be my Pass-along – something easy and special to give to others.  Selecting Pass-along recipes to share on BigLittleMeals was a piece of cake (not to say there are going to be cake recipes!). It had to be Swedish Pancakes from my maternal grandmother, Annie Carlson, Pumpkin Pie O’Brien and Cinnamon Bread from Mom Hill, my paternal grandmother, and Sloppy Joe’s from my mother.  Sorry there are no recipes from the men in my family. Until we got to Andy, male cooks in the family were few and far between.  How times have changed.  Moss and Silas, our grandsons, pictured below, started cooking early!

My mom’s parents, Gus and Annie Carlson, immigrated from Sweden.  Gus left Stockholm and came to the U.S. in 1886 when he was 23 and Annie, whose home was in Ryssby, Sweden, arrived here in 1890, when she was about 15.  They returned home to marry, sailing back to the U.S. out of Liverpool on the SS Lucania in 1901 (we have the Ellis Island copy of the ship’s “Manifest of Alien Immigrants” with their names).  Both Gus and Annie passed away before I was born, but Annie’s Swedish pancakes have always been an almost-weekly breakfast in our home.  Naturally, we’ve passed along the recipe to our children and grandchildren.  Moss, our 12-year-old grandson, already knows how to make them.

Born to Swedish parents, my mom wasn’t much of connoisseur of Italian food.  But the recipe she fixed a lot when my brother and I were growing up was some sort of variation on both a Sloppy Joe and a pasta sauce.  It goes either way – authentic or not – and is simple and delicious.  And for a fun little history on Sloppy Joes, see Food for Thought.

My dad’s mother, Mom Hill, was quite a cook.  It’s amazing how many recipes cards I have that are in her hand-writing.  Though we love her pecan cookies and her whole wheat bread and her rice casserole, our do-over-and-over again recipes are her Pumpkin Pie O’Brien and her Cinnamon Bread.  Both of my Hill cousins and now their children make huge batches of the bread every Christmas to give as gifts.  An unequaled Hill Family Pass-along.