Gobs … You Know You’re from Western Pennsylvania if …

 

 ORGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2, 2016 · UPDATED DECEMBER 16, 2018

NOTE --- I think this has been one of my all-time most read blog posts, so it had to be reposted on this new site asap!  :)

Johnstown, Pennsylvania – my hometown – is known for many things. There are the beautiful rolling mountains; its world famous floods of 1889, 1936, and 1977; Glosser Brothers Department Store; the legend of Morley’s dog;  Coney Island Hot Dogs; and of course … home of the GOBS. For those of us from Western Pennsylvania, this term conjures up a chocolately-sweet-creamy sandwich memory that is the sheer definition of childhood in this part of the state. All it takes is one little bite of these yummy cake-like confections, and youthful mayhem carries you back to barefoot summer days playing “Kick the Can” until it was dark enough to catch fire flies.

Gobs ready to go!

Every family in the area seems to have at least one semi-secret gob 

recipe. I say only semi-secret because recipe swapping is also a bit of a tradition among these Western PA folks, and they happily share everything they own. Just recently, when going through some of my Mom’s recipe books and collections, I came across a hand-written copy of one such recipe. I don’t recognize the handwriting, but I believe it may have been one of her sisters – I am guessing Betty or Helen – or her sister-in-law, Naomi. I am hoping some of my Lugar Clan cousins can identify the writing.

And — since it IS the holiday season, which means it is ALSO baking season, I figured I would take this vintage recipe out for a spin. PS~~~ they are as yummy as I remember, even in December without fire flies, and no one to play Kick the Can with me.  The steps listed below are as they appear on the paper, but a printable version is available at the end of the post (you’re welcome).

Cream together 2 cups sugar and ½ cup Crisco (side note – there are very few recipes that I keep in my arsenal that I actually use Crisco or shortening and not a substitute as it is not the healthiest ingredient out there. However – THIS is one of them).

Add 2 eggs  and 1 cup milk…

… 1 cup boiling water … and 1 teaspoon vanilla.

 

Sift together 4 cups flour, ½ teaspoon baking powder, ¾ cup cocoa. (Another side note – yes, that is my assistant James, taking a brief sifting break from his homework, which is seen resting with his pencil nest to the bowl – a Mom’s gotta multi-task).

Add flour mixture to sugar mixture. Blend well.

Drop by spoonful onto ungreased cookie sheet. The batter will not spread much, so you can place them fairly close together – I did about an inch apart. I also lined my sheets with parchment paper, and found this really was an unnecessary step (again with the side note – sorry for the shadow … I did not inherit my father’s photography skills, nor am I able to make nice round mounds of the batter, as evidenced below…)

Bake at 450 degrees for 5-7 minutes.

The left tray just came out of the oven, the right tray is awaiting its baking turn.

To make the icing:

Place 1 cup milk and 5 tablespoons flour in a sauce pan on the stove. Heat until thick, stirring constantly to avoid burning.

Once thick, remove from heat and allow to thoroughly cool. THIS IS IMPORTANT! Don’t get so excited to put your gobs together that you don’t let this get completely cool or your icing won’t set properly (yet another side note — trust me – I have learned this by experience).

Once cooled, beat in 1¾ cups powdered sugar, 1 cup Crisco (again with the Crisco! What is it with vintage recipes and Crisco?!), ¼ teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Beat until creamy and fluffy.

Spread between your gob cake rounds. I am always kind of skimpy on icing at first and then heavy handed at the end when I still have a lot left in the bowl, so I now ice one side without putting the “top on. That way, I can add more icing to the lighter ones when I know I had enough to cover them all.

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GOBS

Creamy vanilla icing sandwiched between two palm sized chocolate cake rounds - a bite of Pennsylvania heaven!

 Course Dessert

 Cuisine American

 Prep Time 35 minutes

 Cook Time 15 minutes

 Total Time 50 minutes

 Servings 54 approximate count

 Author from Leona's hand written collection

Ingredients

Cake round ingredients

• 1/2 c Crisco
• 2 c sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 c milk 1 c boiling water
• 1 t vanilla
• 4 c flour
• 2 t baking soda
• ½ t baking powder
• ¾ c cocoa

Icing Ingredients

• 1 c milk
• 5 T flour
• 1 ¾ c powdered sugar
• 1 c Crisco
• ¼ t salt
• 1 t vanilla

Instructions

Cake Rounds:

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Cream together sugar and Crisco.
3. Add eggs, milk, boiling water, and vanilla.
4. Sift together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and cocoa.
5. Add to mixture
6. Drop by spoon onto cookie sheet.
7. Bake 5-7 minutes at 450 degrees.

Icing:

1. Combine milk and flour in a sauce pan. Cook until thick, then let milk cool.
2. Once cool, add powdered sugar, Crisco, salt, and vanilla.
3. Beat until creamy and fluffy.
4. Spread between two of the cake rounds.

So — do you have one of these semi-secret gob recipes? Is there a trade family secret ingredient? Do tell ….

Two of my three assistant floor cleaners waiting for me to drop something…where there is cooking, there is spillage…

 

Ancient Family Secret Revealed (aka my Banana Tea Bread)

BY CHRISTINE · ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 12, 2020 · UPDATED MAY 10, 2020

Banana buying in my tribe works out similarly to the chip to salsa ratio theory — it never seems to get the right balance. One week I buy 6 bananas and they are gone within three hours. The next week, I buy six bananas and four of them will ripen to that dark brown “I won’t even touch it to throw it away” color.

So – finding a great Banana Bread recipe was just my frugal way to make my mother proud and not let good food go to waste! I started using this recipe years ago from the Stahl Mennonite Church cookbook, and found a few important tweaks to make an already AMAZING recipe my own.

The recipe already had sour cream as a secret ingredient, which I believe really makes this bread stand out from other recipes. Personally, I am a HUGE fan of Daisy brand due to it’s clean and simple ingredients – cultured skim milk, cream and salt. My tribe is not crazy about nuts in any baked goods, so I leave those out.

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MY personal twist which we think really kicks this up a notch is using frozen bananas. I just take those ugly brown ones from the counter that the rest of my crew ignore and throw them in the freezer. When there are four or six in there, I will take them out, thaw them in their skin on the counter, and make giant batch of this recipe I have learned the hard way if I only make one batch it would be gone in less than 30 minutes after baking (really – I am not exaggerating — I have watched each one of my kiddos chop off half a loaf and walk off with it in hand to devour)! Freezing and thawing seems to really bring out the banana’s natural sweetness, as well as help to get the banana truly distributed throughout the batter. They look pretty ugly, but they taste amazing!

These loaves also freeze quite well, or make mini loaves to distribute to neighbors during our new coronormal. ENJOY!

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Banana Tea Bread

Two secret ingredients make this the best banana bread you will ever have!

 Course Dessert

 Cuisine American

 Prep Time 20 minutes

 Cook Time 1 hour

 Servings 1 loaf

Ingredients

• 1 cup mashed bananas (freeze then thaw) about two
• 1.5 cup sifted flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup softened butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 cup sour cream

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grease and flour loaf pan.

3. Mash the banana.

4. Cream butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a large mixing bowl.

5. Mix together flour, soda, and salt. Add to butter mixture with bananas and sour cream. Mix until well blended.

6. Pour into loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes to an hour (check with a toothpick at 50 minutes).

7. Try to let cool before cutting (my family has trouble waiting that long).

Lebanese Grape Leaves - Back to my Roots

 

In the midst of uncertainty and turmoil, sometimes it does the soul some good to return to our roots. On Thursday, I had the good fortune to have a medical appointment in the home of my caregiver due to COVID-19. I happened to notice her garden in the back yard, with a large beautiful grape vine arbor ---- and being my Mom's daughter, of course asked to gather a few dozen leaves for dinner!

This recipe originates from my Mom’s St. Mary’s Orthodox Church cookbook, which is our ancestral church. Really — my Dad’s family and a dozen other Lebanese families started this church. Mom added a few of her own tweaks, which are lovingly written in her handwriting in the margins.

As a kid, grape leaves were always my favorite of all the Lebanese dishes (my brother’s favorite was kibbee). They were the ultimate finger food, as I would swoop in between our gathering family, grab one, and rush off to continue playing, It wasn’t uncommon to see one of us kids holding it like a cigar as we would take a bite to resemble all of our Dads and Uncles in their after dinner smoking habit.

Mom had an amazingly keen eye for spotting grape vines from what seemed miles away at great speeds – not exaggerating! Many family voyages driving the mountainsides of Pennsylvania were interrupted when Mom would tell Dad to stop the car and turn around because of a grape vine on the road side. Knowing the delicious delicacy that would be the fruits of his compliance, he ALWAYS turned around.

There is an art to picking grape leaves. You want to pinch off the leaf stem right where it comes off the vine. The earlier in the spring/summer season you pick them the better, and you want leaves that are a lighter green and slightly larger than your hand. If you use older or darker green leaves, they a noticeably tougher.

When cooking the grape leaves, you need to make sure the plate you place on top of the layers is heavy enough to hold the rolled leaves securely in place or the may unravel. I have been known to go find a heavy rock to weigh down my plate if needed (and yes – I make sure to wash and clean the rock first!)

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Lebanese Grape Leaves

Mihsheh Warok Inib Lah'm

 Cuisine Mediterranean

 Servings 60 leaves

Ingredients

• 2 dozen grape leaves
• 1 cup rice, washed
• 1 pound ground lamb can substitute ground beef
• 1 tsp salt more or less to taste
• 1 tsp allspice more or less to taste
• 1 tbsp lemon juice more of less to taste

Instructions

1. Place clean grape leaves aside.

2. Mix together rice, meat, and spices and blend well with hands.

3. Take one grape leave at a time and place one tablespoon of filling across leaf and fold sides away from you.

4. Arrange stuffed leaves in pan – you want them tightly packed – and alternate the direction with each row.

5. Sprinkle salt on tops, cover with a heavy plate, and cover water to the top of the plate. Add a heavy splash of lemon juice.

6. Cook covered on medium heat for about 40 minutes to an hour or until rice is done.

 

The Power of One

 This election cycle has truly been one for the record books - and seems to dovetail perfectly with this Twilight Zone of a year we call 2020. Several Saturdays ago, like many nights since the COVID pandemic took hold here in the US, I was out on the couch trying to get at least four hours of sleep - a luxury in 2020 that I cannot seem to get in my room (I might get two hours there at the most on a good night). With Planet Earth laying its soft media glow across the room in the night, the steady soothing voice of the British narrator gently wafting to my tired and 2020-war-torn ears, laying under the warm green comforter that is always like a comforting hug of my childhood from my Mom and her best friend Aggie although both are so very far away - I could often lull off for at least an hour or two surrounded by my furry pack.

It was the weekend Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. I must have dozed for at least a little while, with my brain in overdrive, as I literally rolled over while opening my eyes to the dat, grabbed the notebook app on my phone, and began talking/typing the thoughts below (unedited from that morning's mind musings):

So many of life's most important lessons are taught to us through childhood stories and children's literature. In fact, entire scholarly careers have been built around understanding the correlation between children's stories and cultural literacy, and that many eupahmisms used in news media are lost if one does not know the childhood textual reference. But I digress as this is much more intense than intended for this musing ...

Remember Dr. Suess and his Whos in Whoville?

Whether you were a fan of the Grinch or Horton, they both have something in common - Whos in Whoville. In both stories- down in Whoville, at critical times in their life stories, they lifted their voices and were heard.

In How Grinch that Stole Christmas, it was a chorus singing as the sun rose on a new day. Despite arising to find all they owned gone - their voices rose up and they were heard all the way up to the top is the distant mountain- Mount Crumpit. It was such a shock to the Grinch at his perch on Mount Crumpit because the Grinch thought he had beaten them. He wanted their spirits to be broken, yet they joined hands and sang out - and they were heard.

In Horton Hears a Who, no one but Horton believed The Whos existed. The Whos entire world was about to be plummeted into nonexistence- a vat of boiling oil. The Whos tried everything so they could to be heard. Despite all their yelling and hollering and hooting and banging and clanging - their voices still were not heard. And then- one final Who- a young Who who always felt he couldn’t make a difference, finally lifted his voice to join the cacophony and be heard. ONE TINY YOP - a yop that reverberated and broke through all the barriers- barriers that could not be broken until that single final voice joined in - and SAVED THEM ALL.

It saved the nonbelievers in Horton's from taking millions of lives unknowingly, riddling them with guilt and shame when they realized the errors of their ways. It saved all The Who’s in Whoville that didn’t think they needed to speak up and be heard - that they could just go on living their lives ignorant of the world beyond themselves. That ONE YOP made all the difference in their life and death, and SAVED THEM ALL.

To all of you who have given up in things changing. To the younger generation that feels like whatever you do it’s not going to make a difference so why bother. To all of you that say you are not crazy about either candidate so you will just sit this one out and see what happens. To those of you thinking, “I am just one person. The odds are stacked against me - my ONE VOTE can’t make a difference .... “

Remember!

Remember that single YOP.

YOU can BE THAT YOP.

YOU can BE THE DIFFERENCE- the one that changed how this story we are currently living ends.

Vote.

Vote early.

VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT because IT DOES.

Learn more on how you can get out to vote here and here.