CRAIGSVILLE – When the Craigsville Planning Commission solicited recipes from the community, they expected to receive mostly dinner meals.
After a few weeks, they received hundreds of recipes for everything from biscuits, beans, rolls and casseroles to possum and frog legs.
“In Craigsville, we realized we love dessert,” said Janice Oakley, chair of the Craigsville Planning Commission and manager of the library station. “I thought there would be more main dishes, but the dessert corner is the largest.”
Hundreds of recipes come together to help fund Craigsville Town events
The 240 recipes have been compiled into the Craigsville Community Cookbook, which is now available for pre-order. Oakley said the idea came from the Pentecostal Holiness Church. The church created a cookbook as a fundraiser, and after seeing the success of that project, the Craigsville Planning Commission decided to do the same.
“We have a very small budget. We always have big ideas and all the things we want to do, but we just don’t have the budget to do them,” Oakley said.
The commission is discussing whether to expand the annual Craigsville Fall Festival or add fireworks and refreshments to the Fourth of July event. Funds are not dedicated.
Oakley also recalled checking out a similar cookbook at the Goshen Public Library.
“Someone had created a Goshen cookbook, and it was in the library. There were so many of them that I remember taking them home and taking lots of pictures.”
The book is also old, Oakley said. “You know, a lot of the people who had nice little recipes up there are no longer in this world. This is kind of their legacy.”
Along with the News Leader’s rigorous coverage of government action, including tax hikes, body cameras, public land under development and utility rate hikes, find out if a cookbook sponsored by the Craigsville Planning Commission is worth the price. There’s only one way to tell.
Some recipes require first-person narration to describe the dishes.
A visit to the grocery store is the first
Cooking starts with a trip to the supermarket. I grabbed one of her smaller two-tier shopping carts and stopped awkwardly as a woman yelled into her cell phone. Your phone is eagerly converting what you’re saying into text.
First, let’s get some beans. Despite the weather, I’m wearing a forest green sweater from my alma mater, Marshall University. The reason I wear this happened after I stared at the shelf for 5 straight minutes while googling what butter beans were. An older woman stopped and told me that her granddaughter was playing in college. She didn’t say which sport, before asking if it was the same school as the home of We Are Marshall. That’s how I often present it outside of West Virginia.
She said she had just gotten off liquid food and was trying to buy solid food for the first time in a few weeks. No, she doesn’t know what she’ll make yet, but all possibilities are exciting to her at the moment. She pointed to lima beans, but Google told me it was the same as butter beans. We bid her farewell and thank her for her help.
Check out and return to your friend’s house. I’m still looking for an apartment in Staunton or Augusta County, so I’m staying in a friend’s spare bedroom during the week. My friend Alex came in and out of the house on Thursday and told me it was okay to make noise in the kitchen as long as I didn’t make any noise during her work calls. Gordie, one of his cats, has no such obligations and continues to meow while I get ready.
Calico beans are baked
The first recipe, calico beans, is by Dana Dill. He chose this for two reasons. I’m from New Orleans and I always bake jambalaya the same way I bake it at the end with dill recipes. Secondly, I had only heard about calico cats and wanted to know if the name was correct.
This is the only section where I give cooking advice. My favorite method is to cut the onion in half, slice perpendicular to the layers, and angle the knife to follow the natural curve. The resulting dice are more uniform than any other method I’ve tried.
Eat a pinch of raw onion while grilling ground beef and bacon. I always do this when cutting onions. The first bite of onion is perfect. I’ve already given up on the second bite. By the time you finish your first bite of raw onions, the second bite is just too intense to be worth it at all. Once the meat is finished, remove the fat and canned beans, add both to the bowl, and add the onions to the pot. If you’re trying to get golden brown onions and they turn out translucent, you probably have too much water in the pot. Mix everything with seasonings and put in the oven.
Alex eats lunch and slips outside to mow the hill in the garden. This raises an important question for reporters. Can I expense this? Jeff, can I expense the cost of materials? Please let us know if the material costs in the estimate below can be included as expenses.
“Is it you or the onion that’s making me cry?” News-Leader editor Jeff Schwaner wrote while editing this article.
I don’t know what that means. I debated internally whether to include specific cooking instructions in the interview and decided it would be better to leave them in the cookbook.
A desperate attempt to make pudding into cream puffs with a pipe
The second recipe is for cream puffs. Susan Wilcher sent the recipe to the Craigsville Community Cookbook in her honor, her grandmother Cornelia Johnson. I may be a great cook, but pastries aren’t in my wheelhouse. I’m worried that I won’t be able to reach the standard that Ms. Wilcher and Ms. Johnson would have set, but reviewing the instructions reminds me of my chemistry lab classes in college. The instructions are specific and include what textures to look for. perfection.
Put margarine and water in a pot and bring to a boil. Add the flour and mix well before the high heat burns the dough. Once it comes together, remove from the heat. Instead of using a stand mixer, mix the eggs one by one by hand.
Once it has a velvety texture, drop it by spoonfuls onto a greased oven tray. Alex came in for water and said they needed to use foil as they would definitely stick to the tray and went back outside. Remove the velvet puff pastry from the spoon and return it to the bowl, place the foil on the tray and spoon again.
What excites me about cooking is not the individual recipes, but the timing of everything when making multiple dishes. For example, when you finish rolling the puff pastry, your calico beans are only half-finished. I’m not sure if baking them at the same time will ruin the pastry, so I remove the beans, air out the oven, and start making the pastry.
I write in 30 minutes. The lawnmower ends outside. I asked Alex if his wife Gabby had an Icing Piper. Don’t think so, he said, and went upstairs to get the grass from his face and clothes. I’ve searched all the shelves and can’t find anything I can use. Maybe I should have asked this sooner. Remove the cream puffs that have turned golden brown and let them rest. The beans will return to normal.
The silverware drawer contains funnels, plastic straws, and chopsticks. Pass a straw through a rubber funnel with a rubber band and place the pudding inside. Push the straw into the pastry and press in the pudding. It works as expected.
Alex comes down the stairs and looks on with a confused expression. He opens the drawer above his head, reaches behind some spices and pulls out a bag of chips. I silently pick up his bag.
This is the only place I change the recipe. No one in the house drinks or uses dairy-based milk, so I didn’t feel like buying a gallon just for pudding. I get a vanilla pudding cup instead. It took him 30 minutes to fill up on the pastry, and he had multiple failed attempts at piping. This also means you don’t need to let the pastry rest overnight before sampling it.
Alex and I have both and they are perfect. The dough is light and crispy, not too sweet, and the contrast with the pudding inside is exquisite. Alex bit hers one in half and dipped the other half into the chunks of pudding that I had left on the baking tray from my plumbing failure.
The beans will come out a few minutes after you pipe the pastry. The top was a slightly burnt brown, the same color and texture I want in jambalaya. Alex and I both have bowls.amount of cassap [sic] Since the recipe includes brown sugar, I thought it might be much sweeter than it actually is, but I guess a lot of the sugar was broken down during the cooking process. The recipe is loaded with beans, beef, and bacon, and somehow manages to be light. I have a second cup.
Where can I get the cookbook?
Oakley hopes the printer, Fundcraft Publishing, will send the first 200 copies to the town by Mother’s Day. She also thanked everyone on the planning committee and the small number of volunteers who helped put the book together.
The Craigsville Community Cookbook is available at the Craigsville Public Library, both priced at $15 and available at checkout. To pre-order the cookbook, email tocvaevents@gmail.com.
Lila Bordelon (she/her) is the News-Leader’s public transparency and justice reporter.Do you have story tips or feedback? Emails are also welcome. lbordelon@gannett.com.Please subscribe at newsreader.com.
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