Tag Archives: Bread

Pumpkin Quick Bread

Desserts and Cakes, , ,

Name: Marcia Brumit Kropf
Class Year: 1967
Country of Residence: U.S.A.

Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory? 

Halloween is a fun family holiday in the U.S. When I started celebrating the holiday with my children, the first step was to carve our own pumpkin. We then roast the pumpkin seeds and make pumpkin bread from the flesh we removed when making the jack-o-lantern. This is a reasonably healthy pumpkin bread recipe and has been much loved for decades by my children and now my grandchildren. And it’s a wonderful activity to do together.

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Persimmon Bread

Desserts and Cakes, , ,

Name: Eleanor Chang
Class Year: 1978
Country of Residence: United States

Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory? 

In Hong Kong where I grew up, Hachiya persimmons are almost always eaten raw. There is nothing like the superb delicate taste of a sweet persimmon. Often, we have to wait weeks for them to perfectly ripen to almost mushy for eating as the unripe fruit would make your mouth pucker. To help hasten the ripening process, the persimmons would be stored in the container along with the rice. Around Lunar New Year, persimmons are particularly popular as they are considered auspicious for the new year and dried persimmons are offered to guests or as gifts. 

After coming to in the U.S., persimmons did not appear on my radar until I moved to San Francisco. The local Chinatown grocery markets not only carry the Hachiya persimmons, they also have the Fuyu variety which I had  not come across before. It was then that I found out that persimmon trees grow in America, but most of the time, the fruits are left hanging on the trees to look like ornaments for the holidays. 

I bought the “Beard on Bread” cookbook to learn how to bake and found that it included a recipe for persimmon bread. The ingredients made it sound like it is for a fruitcake until I baked it for the first time. That was the start of a very beautiful relationship! For the last 20 years, I would start baking persimmon bread around Thanksgiving to serve at parties and to give as holiday gifts to friends and family. Everyone seems to want more of this “fruitcake.”

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Bagels

Home Cooking, , , ,

Name: Deborah Wild
Class Year: 1997
Country of Residence: Georgia

Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory? 

I couldn’t afford to splurge on sandwiches from Tailgate while being a student at Mount Holyoke, but cream cheese bagels and orange juice more than once got me through those all nighters during exam time. Bagels ever since have remained a comfort food for me, but I ended up in a part of the world where none could be bought and for many years I did without in the belief that making them was far too complicated. Yet, after marrying a foodie, having learnt to gut fish and chickens, I came across this recipe and thought: “This doesn’t sound so complicated, let me try.” And indeed it wasn’t. I still need to perfect the art of forming them evenly, but they have become a big hit in our house and served as centrepieces for brunches more than once.

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Masala Chicken Bread

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Name: Qudsia Ali
Class Year: 1995
Country of Residence: Saudi Arabia

Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory? 

I really like bread and testing different bread roll recipes. I have come to really enjoy the versatility of the Turkish Pogaca dough. The yogurt in this dough makes the bread nice and soft. Here I have taken a slightly spicy chicken mixture as a filling in making a stuffed bread. This recipe will make 2 large or 3 medium sized breads. This can be enjoyed with tea or eaten as a meal with a nice salad on the side!

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Cranberry Orange Sweetbread

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Name: Corinne Morgan
Class Year: 2013
Country of Residence: United Kingdom

Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory? 

This is a recipe that was created by my great great grandmother and has been passed down through my mother’s side of the family, which has not had a son in 5 generations, so this recipe has always passed from mother to daughter. I made this recipe for a recent board gathering for the Mount Holyoke Club of Britain, where it was very popular. Upon telling my mother and grandmother about the great reaction to the recipe, they laughed and admitted to it also being their go to recipe whenever they needed to bring a food item to a gathering. Hopefully, this recipe can one day become your family’s old reliable as well.

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Homemade Bread (with kefir based sourdough)

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Name: Rossella Di Palma
Class Year: FF 1999
Country of Residence: Italy

Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory? 

Since the lockdown started, Italians began baking bread at home. This quickly made impossible to find brewer’s yeast and high quality flour. I do not normally eat bread, but since my mother does, I wanted to try to make bread at home, with a bread machine first and baking it in the oven later.  Given the fact I could not find any yeasts at the supermarket, I decided to try using the kefir I grow daily.

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