For some reason, I recently had a hankering for Chocolate Mayonnaise cake, a staple in our house when I was growing up. If you're not familiar with it, it's a wonderfully moist chocolate cake that was created, according to food legend, by the wife of a Hellman's mayonnaise salesman to help increase his sales. Although it may seem like an odd ingredient, the mayonnaise is used in place of eggs and oil, making it handy to throw together with just a few pantry ingredients.
It was probably one of the first cake recipes that I could make on my own (by age 11 or so), carefully following the directions on the back of the Hellman's Mayonnaise jar. I thought that I'd be able to find the recipe online, but it proved to be a bit of a challenge. None of the current recipes matched the one I followed years ago (most used a cake mix). I knew that original recipe called for boiling water, because it was the one step that always made me nervous as I poured the hot water in a measuring cup.
As with many good things, a cherished recipe resulted from an accident.
I felt my big toe push a hole through my fishnet stockings as I stepped on the gas and drove south on Fairfax. I nibbled on the broken corner of my dark red thumb nail and made a right turn onto Pico Boulevard. I thought about lighting a cigarette to calm myself but didn’t.
What a perfect time to declare it to be New England clam chowder week because the temperature here in Maine has been zero degrees at night and the wind has been a howling! Recipes for chowder are pretty personal around here. Some old salts would never use rendered bacon fat to sauté their onions in, they'd stop listening to you, roll their eyes and turn up their noses. Salt pork is how the old timers started chowder, period. Quahogs, not likely, either.
When ever we go out for barbque, I always, choose baked beans as one of my sides. There is something so satisfying and so comforting in eating a dish like this along with my tri-tip sandwich and a double portion of asian slaw.