A Groundhog Day Menu (1971)

Cue up the Pennsylvania Polka! For the 2nd year in a row, I have decided to delve into my copy of Gourmets & Groundhogs (1971) to properly celebrate Groundhog Day.

Click HERE to see my 2016 post about this cookbook and the history of Groundhog Day (and a pretty good shrimp recipe)

And to do so, I referred to a favorite Groundhog Day menu from Miss Gretchen Green of NYC.

I do not know why Miss Gretchen Green was such a Groundhog enthusiast, but it is nice that she was a hospital volunteer!

I sure as hell wasn’t going to make this entire menu, so I chose the Blue Grass Bread and the Reveille Soup and ran with it. Mostly because booze was an ingredient in both.

I am going to assume that the Blue Grass Bread is called that because one of the ingredients is bourbon. As in Kentucky Bourbon. As in the Blue Grass State.

Kentucky is the Blue Grass state…right?

Whatever. 1/4 cup of Jim Beam was enough to make the batter smell reaaaally boozy.

Sadly, my toaster oven over baked it a bit. The top was really hard. And more than a golden brown. Whoops.

Now the soup!

I did a little research, “reveille” is a signal sounded on a bugle or drum to wake personnel in the armed forces.

So it makes sense to have this on a Groundhog Day menu since you have to get up at the crack of dawn to be ready for the Punxy party. Although nothing about this really yells “GET UP!” to me. But it has vodka in it!

Now, I am going to put it out there, flat-out, no lies. I was being super-lazy. So instead of getting out the immersion blender–I already had the KitchenAid mixer out! I just used the beater attachment to blend (?) it together.

Probably not the best decision. The result was super-thin; so I threw in more greek yogurt. Eh. That really didn’t do it. I reread the recipe and noted that it said to serve very cold, so I threw it in the freezer for a bit. I thought that’ll thicken it up!

Right?

 

Or maybe not. It did thicken slightly. But it was still watery.

To round out my Groundhog Day menu, I went for the scrapple, without actually going with scrapple. In my fridge I had a bottle of  Dogfish Head’s Beer for Breakfast which includes scrapple as one of the ingredients. From their site:

A stout tricked out with all sorts of breakfast ingredients including Guatemalan Antigua cold press coffee, Maple syrup harvested from Western Massachusetts and for the quintessential Delaware breakfast touch – Rapa Scrapple and their secret blend of spices.

2-row Applewood smoked barley, Kiln Coffee malt, Flaked oats, Roasted barley, Caramel malt along with additions of Molasses, Milk Sugars (lactose), Brown Sugar, Roasted Chicory lay the foundation for this malty, breakfast-themed concoction. Enjoy huge notes of coffee in the nose and savory layers in the flavor.

I hated it. Absolutely hated it. I don’t mind coffee at all. And I like scrapple. I think it was the roasted chicory that really killed it for me. Anyway, I couldn’t drink it. And I typically drink anything.

So here it is–my Groundhog Day menu of over-baked corn bread, watery pea/vodka/yogurt soup, and scrapple shit beer.

UPDATE***in 2018 I finally made it to Punxy to celebrate Mr. Sauce, Esq.’s birthday!!! It was 9 degrees and lightly snowing when Phil made his appearance.