One-Bowl Blueberry Dinette Cake

My mom has a 1970s copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook, tattered and faded from its original poppy red to a very dingy-looking orange, a testament to its frequent use in her kitchen. I think it was a wedding present.

Some of the recipes are distressingly canned-soup-centric, but others are terrific and (I think) much more practical for the home cook than many modern cookbooks aimed at the average American housewife. Dinette Cake is a cute example of this practicality. It's based on the "economy cake," which excludes both rich ingredients like cream and butter, both of which were rationed during WWII, and time-consuming techniques like creaming and sifting -- Rosie the Riveter didn't have time to be a pastry chef! But it's smaller than the typical cake, scaled down to serve a small family or two couples, so it's perfect as a weeknight treat for the grownups or a coffee accompaniment for unexpected guests.

A dinette cake is meant to be casual, homey, and not-too-sweet. Recipes abound on the interwebs, so I borrowed a little of this recipe and a little of that, combined it with what I had on hand, and came up with a very tasty cake that will work for breakfast tomorrow as well -- plus, I made it low maintenance by using one bowl and one spoon. Simple! Oh, and I used butter instead of oil because I don't have to save up ration coupons to get the Real Deal, you know? You can use oil if you prefer, but it won't be as yummy!

1/4 c. butter
1 c. sugar
1/3 c. milk
1/3 c. yogurt
1 egg
juice and zest of half a lemon
1/4 t. nutmeg
1/2 t. salt

1 1/2 c. flour
2 t. baking powder

1/2 c. fresh blueberries

Preheat oven to 375 Fahrenheit In a large microwafe-safe bowl, melt butter. Add sugar, milk, yogurt, the egg, lemon zest and juice, nutmeg, and salt, and mix thoroughly. Add flour and baking powder and mix thoroughly again.

Grease an 8x8 baking pan or #5 cast iron skillet, pour in the batter, and bake for 30-40 minutes or until a pick inserted into the center of the cake comes out with a few moist crumbs. Cool slightly and serve with whipped cream or ice cream.

Frugal frugal frugal

When I was growing up, we lived on a pastor's salary while my mom stayed home. So... you do the math and figure out if we were the kind of family that ate out three or four times a week. Hint: no.

We had a garden. We bought ingredients instead of prepared food and cooked all our meals from scratch. We bought beef once a year from a local rancher. We didn't waste food, ever.

For my mother, it wasn't such a stretch. She, like many in my parents' generation, was raised by folks who grew up during the depression, whose frugality wasn't an affectation, but a characteristic learned by bitter necessity. But somewhere in the prosperity of the last thirty years, my parents' generation struggled to pass the skills of frugal living and frugal eating along to my generation. And for many people my age, we had little motivation to learn those skills. In times of unparalleled economic growth and national wealth, it seemed unnecessary to many of us to learn how to bake our own bread, how to plant a garden, how to make a roast chicken stretch into three meals, how to can and preserve food.

But I'm blessed to have a stubborn mother whose dad was the youngest of eleven and grew up on a farm. Gardening, baking, canning, and generally saving money were second nature to her. I basically grew up in her kitchen. And now that we seem to be in for a long haul with this recession, I'm more glad than ever for that fact. I can bake bread (and I do!). I can make delicious meals with frugal ingredients. I can home-can produce and beans. And these skills are saving me money.

I was talking with my awesome, gorgeous sister-in-law last night and, on the topic of stretching grocery budgets and feeding ourselves and our loved ones with less meat and more love, I said, "By golly, if our grandmothers could do it, so can we!"

Too often what hinders people (especially women) in my generation from really mastering domestic frugality is just plain fear: fear that it's too hard, that it's not worth it, that we really can't do it even if we try. But that's just not true! We can do everything our grandmothers did to steward our finances and care for our families. We truly can.