Georgia and New Jersey

Ok, when you think of Georgia, can you think of anything else besides peaches?!   Luckily, it is the right time of year to get good peaches here in Massachussetts.   We made a peach torte for dessert using the basic fruit torte recipe from "Elegant But Easy."   This is a great recipe;however, you must use real butter, and have a heavy hand on the sugar and cinnamon for the topping.  

I lived in New Jersey for awhile, and I always think of good red sauce Italian food for that state.   But I couldn't come up with a specific red sauce dish that was really local to NJ.   Instead, I came across a number of discussions about Italian hot dogs, which are a favorite dish there.   Descriptions of the hot dogs said that they are served in a "pizza bread roll" with fried onions, peppers, and potatoes. 

The big question was, what is a pizza bread roll?   I couldn't find any recipes on the internet, but I did find various descriptions saying that they were "sort of a fat pita".  That description, plus the name, leads me to think that they are rolls made out of pizza dough.   So that's what we made - rolls from pizza dough, filled with a hot dog, onions, peppers, and potatoes.  We cheated an made oven fried potatoes instead of deep fried, but they worked well.  I thought it would be strange to have potatoes on a sandwich, but I really liked it!

Massachusetts and Connecticut

Massachusetts is easy, because that's where we live.   We made brown bread and baked beans for our meal.   The catch on making the brown bread is that it should be steamed, not baked.   This was traditionally done in a large tin can such as a coffee can.  But who has coffee can's these days?!   The coffee we buy comes in cardboard cans.


I almost gave up and decided to bake the bread, but then I noticed that it can be done in a slow cooker.  Voila!  We put the bread batter into a casserole dish, covered it with a lid, and put it in the slow cooker surrounded with water.   Worked like a charm.

We did cheat on the baked beans since we were pressed for time and don't have a pressure cooker.   Rather than starting from scratch, I used my mom's old recipe for doctoring canned baked beans.   First you drain the beans, then cook them with onion, green pepper, bacon, ketchup, mustard and brown sugar.

Connecticut was a fun find.   There is a cake called "Election Day cake" or "Hartford Election cake" that originated in Hartford back when women did not yet vote.   It is a yeast coffee cake, not too sweet, with fruit and nuts in it.  We used golden raisins because we had dark raisins in the brown bread.  The cake is usually made in a tube pan, but we made a half recipe in a loaf pan instead.

An amusing point to this meal is that our bread had leavening normally used for cake (baking soda) and our cake had leavening normally used for bread (yeast)!