So…  Are ya watching Mad Men on TV?!?

It is pretty much the only show I am watching.  I don’t care about Real Housewives of anywhere, I haven’t seen Dancing With The Stars since Victor’s cousin Kelly won the first season, and the rest of it really is a vast wasteland…

But Mad Men?!?  Brilliant.  I get to relive my childhood every week.  It’s a lot of fun.

So…  I thought another bit of fun would be to dust off my Mom’s Cook Books from the ’60s and see about recreating some of those fun and fabulous meals from yesteryear.  Oh my goodness gracious some of the recipes she collected!

It’s really been a hoot going through them.  I have quite a few I want to make, but tonight I thought I’d start off with something really simple.  It was a chicken pie with a rice crust.  With turmeric. How exotic!  I really resisted adding things to this  and switching things around.  The only real change I did do was to saute the onions, celery, and bell pepper before stirring it into the sauce.  I just had to.  Otherwise, it was made as written!

I tried to make it look just like Mom would have…

And it really did look great just before going into the oven…

Alas… It did not slice into neat and lovely slices.  It completely fell apart.

But it really did taste good.  The predominant flavor was the turmeric from the rice.  I really would have jazzed up the filling and definitely would have added cheese to the filling.  But…  It was fun the way it was.

And then we had dessert!

My mom was Queen of Desserts.

We had dessert every single night.  Sometimes it was just cookies, often cake, but she also did lots of bars and other things she could make a lot of and cut up for six kids.

These were the Chocolate Chip Coconut Bars.  I think at some point I have had all of the various bars pictured.  These just called my name, today.

Very simple to pull together.  And what’s really nice is they’re not overly-sweet.  A nice balance.

The recipe called for chocolate chips and – OMG – I was out!  I had white chocolate chips, but that just wouldn’t do.  I chopped up a bit of semi-sweet chocolate bar.  Mom would understand.

We also ate them from glass plates – unheard of in the ’60s in our house.  Melmac reigned supreme back in those days.

We did have glass in the house, though…  Like Mama’s salad bowl with matching cruets…

We used it for our fruit salad…

On Sunday – Mother’s Day – I’m making her famous Chinese Casserole.  Besides Mother’s Day, it is also her Birthday.  She would have been 86…

I think it’s a fitting tribute…