Kitchen Notes
Lynn shows it on camera; these notes write it down — the amounts, the order, and the tips she gives as she goes, each linked to the moment in the video where she says it. 26 so far.
The store-bought staples Lynn makes at home instead — heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk, pancake syrup, the mixes.
Buttermilk is one of those things a recipe needs a cup of and the store sells by the quart, so Lynn makes hers. The quick way is one cup of whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar, left to sit about five to ten minutes. The second way starts with three-quarters of a cup of sour cream filled the rest of the way with milk, and she says that one is good when you are baking a cake.
When a recipe calls for heavy cream and there is none in the refrigerator, Lynn makes her own from two-thirds of a cup of milk and five tablespoons of butter. She warms them gently and tempers a little of the melted butter into the milk first so the milk does not break. One batch should make around a cup, and if you want it to look like the carton you buy, she blends it until it whips.
Lynn keeps pancake mix in a jar so a Sunday morning never depends on a box from the store. The mix is three cups of all-purpose flour with baking powder, sugar, salt and baking soda stirred through it. To cook, she takes one cup of the mix and adds a cup of whole milk and one egg, then lets the batter rest before it hits the skillet.
Lynn makes pancake syrup out of pantry sugar and water in the time it takes to cook waffles. The ratio she works from is two cups of sugar to one cup of water, with two tablespoons of real butter and a pinch of salt cooked right in. She boils it hard for four minutes with constant stirring, then takes it off the heat and adds vanilla and maple extract. It thickens as it cools and thickens even more once it has chilled.
Lynn made this batch for a camping trip, because a powdered creamer does not have to be kept cold in a cooler. It is one cup of sugar blended down into powder, one cup of powdered milk, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of coconut oil, all run through a blender until the oil disappears into the powder. She uses one tablespoon in a cup of coffee, or two if you like more milk in yours.
Lynn keeps one kind of flour in the house and makes the other three out of it. Self-rising is a cup of all-purpose with baking powder and salt sifted through it, bread flour is a cup with two tablespoons taken out and two tablespoons of cornstarch put back, and cake flour is fourteen tablespoons of all-purpose plus two tablespoons of cornstarch. She has been testing them and says they work good.
Lynn has made sweetened condensed milk two ways on camera, and both come down to sugar, water, and powdered milk. She cooks the sugar and water until the syrup goes from foggy to crystal clear, whips air into it until little foamy bubbles form and it turns white, then blends in two cups of powdered milk. The larger batch makes the same as buying two cans, and she says the quick version takes about ten minutes.
Filling the pantry the way Lynn does it, one jar at a time.
Lynn cans Great Northern beans to fill the pantry for winter, and the part she keeps coming back to is the step before the jars: looking the beans a handful at a time instead of pouring them straight out of the bag. She mixes one brine for the whole batch, four gallons of water to a half cup of salt for 21 jars, puts a piece of bacon in each jar, and processes them for the 90 minutes dried beans take. She ends with 21 jars for nights when supper has to be fast.
Cowboy candy pickled eggs are boiled eggs put up in a sweet-hot jalapeno brine, and Lynn keeps this one to what she calls the basic version so you can adjust it however you like. The brine is two cups of apple cider vinegar with a cup and a half of white sugar plus molasses, cayenne, garlic powder, and turmeric, heated until the sugar dissolves. She does not process the jar in a canner in this video: it goes in the back of the refrigerator for about a week before anybody eats one.
Lynn makes old fashioned fried apple pies out of jars of apples she canned the year before, starting by checking the seals two different ways before she opens anything. She cooks the apples down with a whole stick of butter, a cup of light brown sugar and cinnamon, mixes a crust with grated frozen butter, and fries the pies slow but good and hot. She says herself it is a lot of work, and that it is worth it at the end.
Apples had gotten expensive, so instead of letting a dish pan of them go to waste Lynn cans them in a syrup she mixes from two cups of sugar per gallon and cinnamon. The peeled slices wait in three gallons of ice water with a cup of lemon juice so they stay crisp and do not brown while she cuts. She packs the jars a little tight because the fruit shrinks as it cooks down, and the batch fills 18 quart jars.
What's for supper when there's a family to feed tonight and not much time or money to do it.
Lynn cooks a whole supper out of dried pinto beans and white rice, and says up front she is doing it the cheapest way possible. The beans go in with plain water instead of broth and a little leftover ham from the freezer, and she shows a quick-soak trick for the nights nobody remembered to soak them. The rice becomes a red Mexican-style rice she toasts in bacon grease before any liquid goes in. The whole supper is on the video page.
Lynn cooks two cans of green beans down in a cast iron skillet the way her granny did, and says it takes only four things besides the beans. The two people usually leave out are a tablespoon of white sugar and a quarter cup of bacon grease. The technique is cooking every bit of the juice out, until the skillet nearly dries and the beans start to sizzle. Watch her do it on the video page.
Lynn makes sausage gravy for biscuits starting with one pound of fresh pork sausage, built in the same pan she fried it in. Most of the video is spent on the step people rush, frying the flour two to three minutes so the gravy does not taste like flour. Whole milk goes in a little at a time until it thickens, and she says not to walk off once it does. Watch her build it on the video page.
Home from work and short on time, Lynn oven-fries chicken thighs in a cast iron skillet instead of standing over the stove for an hour. The step that ties the whole supper together is scooping out some of the seasoned flour before anything gets breaded, so the green beans and the gravy are seasoned before she gets to them. Canned green beans cook down in bacon grease alongside, and the drippings become chicken gravy. The full supper is on the video page.
Lynn fries potatoes and purple onion in a cast iron skillet the way her mama did, and the reason she made the video is that hers used to come out crunchy and hard. The fix is a fourth of a cup of water added partway through, which steams them and lifts the browned bits off the bottom of the pan. Whatever is left, she says, is good the next morning with gravy and a biscuit. The whole thing is on the video page.
Home from work and in a hurry, Lynn puts a whole supper on the table in about 45 minutes: hamburger steaks in gravy, plain mashed potatoes, and a small peach cobbler. Most of it is the order she works in, starting with frozen patties thawing in a low skillet while the potatoes boil and the cobbler bakes. Nothing in it is fancy, and she says so. The whole supper is on the video page.
The cleaners Lynn mixes up herself, and what she uses them on.
Lynn cleans her blinds right where they hang, spraying Scrubbing Bubbles straight onto the slat instead of taking the whole thing down to soak in the bathtub. She lets the foam sit about 10 to 15 minutes, wipes it off with a paper towel from the top down, then goes back over the slat with a washcloth with nothing on it but hot water. She says it still takes some time, but a lot less trouble than taking the blind down and putting it back up.
Instead of buying Dawn Powerwash, Lynn refills the bottle with a cup of water, four tablespoons of Dawn and two tablespoons of alcohol. The alcohol is not optional in her recipe, because without it she says the little sprayer will get stopped up. She puts her cost at about 50 cents a bottle and uses it on dishes, countertops, stoves and the inside of the oven door.
Lynn turns blue Dawn into a laundry stain paste with dish soap, pure baking soda and hydrogen peroxide, mixed until it is almost like a toothpaste. She scrubs it into the spots with an old toothbrush, and in her white-clothes video she gives the ratio as a tablespoon of Dawn, a tablespoon of peroxide and a tablespoon of baking soda. On dark colors she swaps the peroxide for plain filtered water instead.
When the ants start coming in, Lynn mixes a bait from two things already in the kitchen: two teaspoons of white sugar and two teaspoons of baking soda, stirred together in a solid lid. She says the sugar is what draws the ants to the lid and the baking soda is what does the trick, and that you should expect it to take probably a day or two.
Lynn makes the blue cleaner everybody calls the miracle cleaner, but she cuts the Dawn back, using 1/3 cup of Dawn to 3/4 cup of white vinegar because the usual half-and-half version gives her bubbles for days. In a second video she mixes three tablespoons of borax with lemon juice to scrub the marks off her old cast iron sink, finishing with a couple of drops of blue Dawn.
Chicks, the garden, and the desserts that come out of that kitchen.
At one week old, Lynn goes back through the chicks she hatched to see whether she got boys or girls. She works from two signs on each bird: the wing feathers, which is a way Travis showed her, and whether tail feathers are already coming in. Out of eleven chicks she ends up counting nine hens and two roosters, and she says she will look again as they grow. Each bird she picks up is shown on the video page.
Lynn makes a cinnamon roll cake in a cast iron skillet, so there is nothing to cut out. A thicker than usual batter goes in the skillet, a brown sugar and cinnamon mixture gets mashed together with a fork and swirled through it, and the whole thing bakes at 325 for around 35 minutes. She says it tastes just like a cinnamon roll except it is a cake, and the full walk-through is on the video page.
Lynn stirs a box of sugar-free strawberry Jell-O into thick yogurt to make a fluffy dessert she describes as three ingredients and packed with protein, and she is counting the water as one of those three. The dissolved Jell-O has to cool right down before the yogurt goes in, and the whole thing sets in the refrigerator in two to three hours into something she says is sort of like a mousse. The full walk-through is on the video page.
Lynn takes the little round crackers people put in soup or oyster stew and coats them in a homemade brown sugar caramel, then salts the tops and bakes them. She says the whole thing takes around fifteen minutes, and she is making hers to set out at a cookout and to bag up as gifts. After about ten minutes of cooling they turn crunchy rather than soggy. The full walk-through is on the video page.
Ask it in your own words and get the answer from Lynn’s videos, with a link to the moment she shows you.