More notes from a country kitchen 10/29/12

By Vicki Christianson

Fri, Oct 26th, 2012
Posted in All Columnists

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With school in session the kids are assigned book reports or papers on certain notable figures or papers on world events. Their biggest source of information today is the Internet. Boy, what I wouldn’t have given for the Internet back in my day! When we got an assignment that involved doing a paper on a specific topic, our main source of information was the school library. The best source for any topic was the “World Book Encyclopedia.” Each letter of the alphabet had uts own volume or book. Information from around the world could be found in those books.

Salesmen used to go door to door trying to sell the World Book Encyclopedia. Many college students made money during the summer months peddling those books. You could buy one volume or letter of the alphabet at a time if you couldn’t afford the entire collection all at once. If you couldn’t find what you needed in the encyclopedia, you asked the librarian and she would start looking in the card catalog for a certain book or books that might help you with your topic. Current event topics could always be found in the daily newspapers, or you could watch the nightly news with David Brinkley or Walter Cronkite on your black and white television set.

The library had all the major newspapers available for you to read every day. Other items that helped with the report were magazines like Time and Newsweek. During your study hall you could sign out of the study hall and go to the library to do your research. You had better behave while in the library or the librarian would send you back to study hall! Hopefully you had a study hall, otherwise you had to go to the library before school or right after school. That made it tough for kids who had to ride the bus. When it came time to finally write the paper you had to use lined paper with a good pencil or pen. No “word document” on the computer with an attached printer! Those poor teachers who had to try and read everyone’s writing! That was a job in itself!

Since it is apple season I dug out my very old and very good Apple Crisp recipe. I actually made some last night.

Apple Crisp

Peel and slice about 12-15 apples of whatever kind you have.

Combine 1 ¼ cups white sugar, 3 T. flour, 1 ½ tsps., cinnamon and ½ tsp. salt in a bowl. Put ½ of the apples in a 9x13 pan. Sprinkle with ½ of the sugar/flour mixture. Put remaining ½ apples on top and cover with last ½ of sugar/flour mixture.

Combine 1 cup brown sugar with ½ cup softened butter or margarine and ½ tsp. salt. Stir in 1 ½ cups flour, ½ tsp. baking powder and 1 cup oatmeal. Mix all together until crumbly. Sprinkle this over the apple mixture. Bake uncovered 50-60 minutes at 350 degrees until apples are tender. Serve with ice cream or cool whip.

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