Cookie Sheet Chocolate Fudge Cake

Mixe together: 2 cups sugar, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon baking soda

Heat 1 cup water, 3 tablespoons cocoa and 2 sticks margarine.
Pour over sugar-flour mixture while hot. Beat well.
Add 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1/2 cup buttermilk and 2 beaten eggs.
Mix well, batter will be very thin.

Bake at 400 degrees in a cookier sheet/ sheet cake pan for 20 minutes.

Icing:

Boil together 1 stick of margarine, 3 tablespoons cocoa and 6 tablespoons buttermilk about one minute. Add 1 box powdered sugar and 1 cup nuts. Mix and spread on hot cake.

Pecan Pie

This is Brian's mom's recipe.  Brian always says she wasn't much of a cook, but she can make sweets!
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup light corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup margarine (melted)
3 eggs lightly beaten
1 1/2 cup pecan halves
9 inch unbaked pie shell

Stir sugar, corn syrup, salt and vanilla into margarine.
Blend in eggs and stire in pecans.
Pour into pie shell
Bake at 350 degrees or until done.

Brian's Mom's Potato Chip Casserole

Brian and his girls love this. I think it's tooooooo salty.

1 can tuna drained
1 can mushroom soup
1 bag potato chips

Mix all together. Preheat oven to  350 degrees. Bake for 30 minutes.

Brian's Mom's relish recipe

So much of our family memories involve food. I thought I should start adding in recipes with the memories.
This is Sandy, Brian's mom's, relish. I haven't tried it yet, but I think I will this summer.

12 large cucumbers
6 green peppers
6 onions

Chop all together. Put handul of salt on mixture and let stand one hour. Drain and put on stove and add 1 1/2 pints vinegar, 4 cups sugar and 1 teaspoon celery seed.
Boil for 20 minutes.
Drain.
Put in jars and seal.

The recipe doesn't say if she water bath cans... hmmmm I better ask.

Grandma Dorothy's retirement letter

One upon a time ...

We had snow... bunches of snow. Snow days, snow icecream, sledding snow, shoveling snow... snowballs and snowmen. We built forts and igloos and played outside until we were wet to the skin. Then we went inside and laid our things out to dry in front of the fireplace and drank homemade hot chocolate made with milk from Bossie our milk cow.
And when our clothes were dry we went out again. I sorta miss snow...

Chris the dog's house at Granpa Dave's 1977

Grandpa's cows

The house in valley snowy day 1977

Pine tree in Grandma and Grandpa's yard 1977

 

This is my grandpa Ferris H. Parker Sr. As far as I know this is the only picture we have of him. On the back of the picture it says the cat's name is Blue Boy. I only met my Grandpa Ferris one time. He came back to Ohio once for a family reunion. I was pretty little. I remember riding in the car on the way to Ohio. I didn't feel good. My ears hurt. Somewhere along the way we stopped for lunch and I got spaghetti and meatballs. Dad argued with mom about whether I should be allowed to have something so messy. A really big napkin solved the problem.

I remember meeting my grandpa Ferris at the reunion. I thought he was big, and scary and had a really big cowboy hat. I remember the wind blew the cowboy hat off his head. He was bald. He was mad that the hat got away.   I remember hiding under the porch swing because I was scared of him. I was scared of him because my dad had told us stories about him. How  he was a hit first ask questions later kind of parent. How he abandoned the family when my dad's mother died in child birth. As a little girl that was enough to convince me I didn't want anything to do with him. That was the only time I ever saw him. We didn't hear anything more from him until Dad was called to go to his funeral some years later.

This is the only picure I have of my dad when he was a boy. It's my dad, Ferris Harmon Parker Jr. on the left and his brother Larry on the right. Dad had lots of siblings I remember Larry, Bobby and Rosella. I met some of the others but those three are the ones that I remember. Dad said they were so poor that he only had one pair of pants and Aunt Rosie would beat him up and steal his pants. Then he couldn't go to school.

My dad didn't have a very easy early life.