As soon as I mentioned Mac and Cheese in my last blog, I knew I had to make it – just one of those things you get in your head and it won’t go away until you deal with it. You have to try Grace’s Mac and Cheese (page 42)! When we included this recipe in the cookbook, I was kind of wondering who would actually use a recipe for mac’n’cheese, but this has turned out to be one of the most popular recipes in the whole book…because it includes Grace’s “magic” ingredient that pushes the whole thing over the top. Plus just add a slice of tomato and a spring of parsley, and voila! - you have a gourmet dish that provides incomparable comfort!
I’m plotting my next project, Butter Tarts are calling me but I might have to call on Deb to provide that extra ingredient – that indefinable family instinct that Grace managed to pass along to her. My butter tarts are good, but Deb’s are beyond good!
Mac & Cheese
Another lockdown…how are you planning to spend this one? At least the warm weather has arrived, sort of, so getting out is a lot more pleasant than during the winter. But today I just wanted comfort food…I didn’t want homemade bread or healthy homemade soup or a take out from a restaurant, I didn’t really know what I wanted. And then it hit me – who is the undisputed Queen of Comfort Food? It didn’t take long after leafing through Grace’s cookbook for me to settle on her amazing Chocolate Cream Pie, what could possibly more comforting? Okay, maybe the Mac and Cheese, maybe the Dutch Apple Pie, maybe the hearty chili…lots to choose from.
But today it’s Chocolate Cream Pie, so light and chocolatey with Grace’s perfect pastry cradling that wonderful rich chocolate custard smothered in whipped cream…think I need another piece!
Stay tuned, I plan to comfort-eat my way through this lockdown!
Do you remember Grace’s? Admission time for me, one of the book’s co-authors, I don’t remember Grace’s! Over the past 4 or 5 years as we’ve been working on the book and listening to people’s fond memories of Grace’s I feel as though I’ve come to know her and what made the restaurant so special, but sadly, my experience of Grace’s is all second hand. I came to Guelph in the late 70s to attend university, and I was living in Fergus for the first few years I was here, so really did not get to know much about the Royal City. By the time I moved to Guelph, Grace’s was long gone. But more than 3 decades after the restaurant closed I continue to be amazed by the number of people whose memories are triggered by the picture of that humble little clapboard building that we have included on our poster display.
We’ve started attending fall markets and craft shows to promote the book (see our calendar for a full schedule), and wherever we go people want to stop and talk about Grace, the restaurant and the way Guelph used to be. We knew when we started this project that lots of locals still had fond memories of that time, but I don’t think we anticipated just how many people were touched by Grace in a way that has so strongly survived the passage of time. We look forward to our ventures out to the local sales and the chance to share memories and stories with all of Grace’s fans, both the old and the new ones we’ve converted with the publication of this book. Hope to see you at one of our events!
Sometimes it’s really hard to believe that mom is gone; every time I make her pastry I can still feel her presence behind me guiding me and I can hear her voice telling me not knead it too much, don’t add too much flour – you will add that when you start rolling the pastry for the pies.
I often reflect back to those days when it was so busy at the restaurant, when all the truckers arrived in the morning for their breakfast before heading out on the road. They would stop in again on the way back for their coffee and piece of pie, or sometimes a quick burger.
The Brock Road students would pop over every day for their fries and gravy. Mom knew exactly when they would arrive and dad would say “get ready, they’re coming!”. The kids would line up at the register to order their fries and gravy, and sometimes a soda, before sneaking back onto the school grounds. Those were the days.
Mom’s recipes are the best and I often chatted about doing something with mom’s worn out cookbook; now that same old cookbook is gracing the cover of a brand new cookbook! So much baking and testing, and I don’t think we gained a lot of weight during this process – thank goodness for Zumba!
Mom will always be with me as I bake or cook. I have now taken on her role, adding and changing recipes depending on how I feel that day. I miss her and my dad every day and thank them for a great opportunity to grow in a restaurant environment and for giving me the confidence to improvise in the kitchen the way mom used to.
I know that Deb had it clear in her mind how all of Grace’s recipes worked, but sometimes when she provided them to me, the directions were…what shall we say…a tad on the sketchy side. A flurry of email questions would ensue, ranging from “What oven temperature should I use?” to “Can you let me know the quantity of the ingredients and how to put them together?” (this last in response to a recipe she sent that consisted of ingredients only, no quantities or instructions).
The very first recipe I tackled was Grace’s donuts. I started the deep fryer up and proceeded to follow the instructions for the donut batter. It seemed weird and glue-y…I tasted the batter thinking it should taste yummy like cake batter, but it tasted awful. If I hadn’t already heated the fat in the deep fryer I would have pitched the batter then and there. However, I thought I might as well fry some up and see how much worse things could get. They took about 4 minutes to cook, I dumped them onto a paper towel and rolled them in cinnamon and sugar. Then I made Alex eat one, no way I was going to try it. A look of surprise crossed his face as he declared “Hey, they’re good!” So I had one, then another and another, they were good! Called Deb and made her come for her first official taste test, sat her down with a cup of tea and a plate of warm donut balls covered in cinnamon and sugar. When she bit into the first one, a misty-eyed look came over her face as she said “Oh this is just like sitting in my mom’s diner!” Nailed it on the first try!
Is it okay to like your own book best of all?? I’m a bit of a serial cookbook buyer, I love leafing through them and looking at the pictures and impulsively buying them if I see one or two recipes that look interesting. I doubt if I have used more than two recipes in any of the cookbooks I own. And yet I already routinely use about a dozen of the recipes we’ve included in Grace’s cookbook.
A big part of writing this book was taking the recipes that Deb managed to decipher from her mom’s dog-eared book, the handwritten notes and her memories of working with her mom in the diner. Those various clues then had to be cobbled together and translated into a draft recipe, which was then tested to see if we’d forgotten an important ingredient or completely misunderstood a crucial step. Cooking sessions would be followed by subjecting Deb to the dreaded taste test, whereupon she would give it a thumbs-up (translation: “Tastes just like my mom’s!”), or thumbs-sideways (translation: “Tastes okay but isn’t like my mom’s”). For a thumbs-sideways we would try to figure out how our version was different and how to fix it, then test again until we got it right.
When we finally got things right, I found myself going back to some of Grace’s recipes over and over again, wishing they were already gathered together in a book rather in assorted files on my computer. I know this is going to be the most used cookbook in my kitchen…yes it’s our “kid” but I don’t mind saying I still like it best!
Fries and gravy never seemed to me like a natural or particularly tempting combination, and I can honestly say that in my whole life I managed never to have experienced the whole fries and gravy “thing”. Until recently that is.
When we started on Grace’s cookbook project, people started popping out of the woodwork with their fond memories of Grace, the diner and their favourite dishes. Grace’s fries and gravy was mentioned over and over and was the subject of one particularly vivid message from a former Brock Road School student (the school was next door to Grace’s). Apparently, the kids from the school regularly sneaked over during the day to grab an order of fries and gravy, which would be reluctantly shared with the kids who were on lookout duty at the edge of school property. The student went on to describe how in his subsequent life he tried fries and gravy at many different places, but none matched Grace’s. He concluded with the hope that we would be supplying the gravy recipe in the cookbook. (You will find the whole story in the “Memories” chapter of the book.)
Well, we hadn’t really planned to include her gravy recipe in the book, Grace’s gravy was very simple and basic, but given the back story we figured we kind of had to re-think that decision. So Deb gave me the recipe, I made the gravy. It seemed fine, but as I’ve never been much of a gravy fan, I still wasn’t really “getting” it. I figured what I really needed to do was get some nice hot crispy fries and cover them with gravy. Off I went to the local diner for an order of fries, still piping hot when I got them home. Poured Grace’s hot beefy gravy over the fries and had a taste…
OMG!! I get it! Fries and gravy! I can’t believe I’ve gone my whole life depriving myself of this gourmet treat! (But you’ll still never get me to try snails, no matter how much gravy you pour over them!)
