Made in the traditional southern style, this Peanut Brittle is guaranteed to deliver the delicious taste of fresh peanuts smothered in a sweet, crunchy brittle. These tasty treats are sure to bring back memories of your Grandmother’s kitchen.

www.vernalisapartypage.com

Fried pies are a Southern tradition and came about as a way for frugal cooks to use every bit of food. According to How to Eat Fried Pies by writer Paul Lukas (April 1, 2006, The New York Sun), "Fried pie history is sketchy. Before cold storage and imports made apples available year-round, lots of folks sliced up their fresh apples and then dried them, which was an effective means of long-term preservation. According to the book Apple Pie: An American Story by Southern food historian John Edge, "Many of those dried apples ended up in fried pies. From dried to fried—nice."

The fried pies at the Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View are one of the most popular food offerings at the park.

Recipe courtesy Shirley Blackwell, Ozark Folk Center State Park.

Roasted Apple Crisp©
Apples—whether or not they are in pie—are as American as you can get.

We have an orchard here on the Resort property that we are restoring that is more than a hundred years old. In fact some of the local historians say it may well have been around when Stonewall Jackson himself was hiking through these mountains near his home at Jackson’s Mill only 15 miles north of here.

That orchard was my inspiration and it convinced me that our signature dessert should feature apples. The apples in this crisp are baked the way my grandmother did hers—there’s no sugar added; she caramelized them in their own natural fruit sugars. I developed the recipe after I visited the Bruderhof—it uses their granola. Then I made some adaptations of my own—the lavender whipped cream.

Hope you enjoy this New Appalachian favorite.

Granola
One of our staff grew up in a Bruderhof—a German Utopian Community—in upstate New York. When we visited his family, we were very impressed with the wonderful food. It’s not surprising that almost everything they eat is from their land where it is organic and “slow grown” (no hormones or genetic engineering) to conserve both the earth and their health.

At the Bruderhof all but two meals a week are eaten communally and one breakfast we had Mother Rachel’s granola. It was in its way as down home as our Appalachian fare, and so I decided we should incorporate it into our menu here at the Resort.