Friday Friend Recipe #169 - Orange Sherbet

Come with me as I continue to countdown my Friday Friend Cookbook!

What is it, you may ask?

In a nutshell...
About 18 years ago, 50 of my closest friends and family, who had been on an e-mail forum with me, sent in recipes in different categories and we compiled a cookbook.
I decided to count those down!
Why?

Because  one night I was looking thru the cookbook and I said, "I should make every recipe in here for my blog"
The Handyman--who thinks he knows me better than I know myself, said,  "you'll never EVER do that."
Well,  maybe I will!  Maybe I'll show him!

Which brings me to recipes #169

 My Mom's Orange Sherbet

When I was little my mom would take my brother and I to Thrifty Drug and we would get a cupful of Orange Sherbet.  Thrifty Drug had a soda fountain/counter and we would sit on the stools and spin.  They were red, I remember this and if we touched underneath the counter we would feel a wonderfully marbled surface (under-surface I guess, but you understand what I mean, right?)--little did I know that people had been sticking their used gum under there for years!

I don't know if my mother was shopping, getting her prescriptions filled or what, but I remember it being just me and my brother and orange sherbet.  Yum.

He has no recollection of this at all.

But I remember it as if it were  yesterday.

He should feel very lucky he has me to help him remember his youth!

He does remember my mom making homemade orange sherbet tho!  Summer time if we weren't off on a picnic we were having backyard bbq's.   The Western kind, not the Southern kind, which is true BBQ.  I don't know how Westerners got into the habit of replacing BBQ with Grill.

In the summer, my dad was always grilling something on the BBQ, I mean on the Grill!!  Outside!  On the patio.

And my mom would make homemade ice-cream or sherbet.

It's one of those recipes you must decipher. 😀

We always knew my mom was sentimental, but when she passed away, we found out just how sentimental she was.

She saved everything. Our house was not messy, but we had a deep dark basement from and she had lots of trunks and cedar chests to store treasures. We found some sprigs (sheaths?) of wheat from the ranch her parents had owned.

The ranch she sold in 1989. 

Her grandparents had homesteaded it, my grandma was born on it, got married on it, raised  her children (my mom and her bother) on it. My mom used to have to ride a horse into town on Monday morning, then stay the school week at her paternal grandparents, then ride the horse back on Friday afternoon.

The ranch.

  It meant a lot to her.  It was hard to sell, but there were no more ranchers in the family.  It had to be done.

Now I have the sprigs of wheat...and the signed document from Harry S. Truman deeding the land to them.

I guess I am sentimental too.

When my mom passed away and I kept some very nice things from her home...some antique furniture, some vintage serving dishes, etc.

But the 'not so nice' things I kept?  The weird things, that should have been tossed out things I kept? 

I use all the time in my kitchen today.

Except for the pancake (or hotcake, as my mom would say) griddle.  I never use that--it's purely sentimental.

But I can remember cold winter mornings, my mom making us hotcakes for breakfast. She  used Crisco--she took a paper towel, scooped up some Crisco from the big blue can and slathered it on the griddle--so the hotcakes had slightly fried, crispy edges. And they were buttery and brown and SO GOOD!!

The Tupperware measuring bowl with handle and the old measuring spoons have survived so long I can no longer read the measurements, but I still use them.

The green (also Tupperware) colander--(sigh) well we didn't have a garbage disposal when I was growing up so we used the colander as a garbage bowl.  That's where all my potato peels went when I was getting them ready to boil,  that's where the  onion skins went and the ends of carrots and celery, egg shells,  the pits of peaches and the core of apples. Then it all went into the garbage can.

I spent hours in the kitchen with my mom and she didn't even love to cook that much--it was just what a wife and mother did back then.

We laughed in the kitchen together and cried in the kitchen together.  Well, okay I cried, (my mother wasn't a big crier) when I wanted to learn to make pie crust RIGHT NOW! As she was leaving for a date with my dad.

She went on her date and to this day I can't make a decent pie crust!

I blame her.

She would understand that completely.

I miss her.

Maybe I will make up some hotcakes on that old grodie griddle this weekend!?

Memories are nice.

That's my story!

Recipe # 169 is posted!

Only 125 left to go.

(I am praying that my math is right!)