When I visited the Randolph home of Pat Kibbe in July 2000, she was happy to be spending the summer with her three children, Maureen, Patrick and Michael, who were 7 years, 4 years and 5 months old. At that time the special education teacher was on summer break from Temple Elementary School in Kennedy, where she is still employed. She has not been able to teach so far this school-year since she has found herself the recipient of a double lung transplant in September at Cleveland Clinic. The dedicated teacher, who loves the students in her Temple class, as well as those in her Sunday School class at East Randolph United Methodist Church, will remain at the medical facility or nearby, for four to six months.

Her condition, pulmonary hypertension, created the need for Mrs. Kibbe’s transplant. For several months prior to this, she slept while being connected to an oxygen supply and later needed to wear an oxygen tank while carrying out her daily responsibilities as a teacher.

Maureen, is now a nurse at UPMC Chautauqua, Patrick works at Beaver’s Dairy Farm and Michael attends Jamestown Community College. Their dad and Pat’s husband, Lloyd Kibbe, is employed at Ahlstrom-Schaeffer Electric Corp.

I have chosen Mrs. Kibbe’s recipe for Wacky Cake from her seventh grade Home Economics class at Frewsburg Central School. When the class made this recipe, her group of four mistakenly measured soda with a tablespoon rather than a teaspoon.

Cathy Uhl, pictured with daughters Christy and Sheri, prepared nine recipes featuring maple syrup when she made an appearance on the recipe page in 2001. Photo by Jack Berger

“We had created a volcano that erupted in the oven and the teacher kept us after school to clean up the mess,” she recalled with a smile.

A gofundme.com account has been created for the Kibbe Family.

Another Randolph visit took me to the home of the late Grant Ormond where his son, Ron and Ron’s son Jason had prepared some food for the picture. All three men have a passion for cooking. The eldest Ormond recalled his mother encouraging him to cook when he was a young man to help satisfy his enormous appetite. Throughout the years he and his wife Jean worked together canning and freezing the bounty of their one-acre garden.

Ron Ormond told about his mother enlisting her three sons help in the kitchen as they were growing up.

“Since I was a fussy eater, my mother told me I needed to learn to cook for myself,” said Ron, whose wife Denise said was an excellent cook and did most of the cooking in their home.

This photo of Pat Kibbe and children Maureen, Patrick and Michael taken in 2000 by the late Jack Berger captured Pat’s jovial personality. Pat is currently the new recipient of a double lung transplant and will remain in Cleveland Clinic or nearby for 4-6 months. A gofundme.com account has been created. Submitted photo

At the time of the interview in June 1999, the youngest of the three men, Jason, had earned an Associate’s Degree in culinary arts and another in baking production and management. He had started cooking with his dad when he was 10-11 years old and by the time he was a Senior in high school, was working from 4-7 a.m. in his uncle’s pastry shop and was helping him with catering jobs.

Grant Ormand has passed away and Ron and Denise now reside in his home, where Ron has plenty of time to cook since he retired from his position of Superintendent of Public Works for the village of Randolph. Jason Ormond is still practicing his passion, as a dietary manger at an assisted living home in Lansing, Michigan.

Dee Dee Hansen of Jamestown and Marilyn Sticek of South Dayton, come to mind when I think of beautiful Christmas cookies. Mrs. Hansen’s flare for decorating her home and the presentation of her cookie trays left me awestruck.

“Everybody says their mother was the best cook or baker, but my mother truly was,” says Mrs. Hansen. She has carried on her mother’s tradition of baking a wide array of Christmas cookies by presenting every holiday visitor a box to enjoy.

She shared her mother’s Cream Horn recipe when she was featured in December 2008.

The late Vinnie Calarco served under General George Patton. It would be hard to find a more thankful man. Photo by Beverly Kehe-Rowland

“For me this was my mother’s signature recipe. I had a hard time deciding to share this, but I thought ‘what would Betty Lou do?’ She was such a giving person, I know she would share the recipe.”

Mrs. Sticek not only made beautiful cookies, but had a routine for organizing holiday tasks. She had her shopping finished and wrapped by Labor Day, her cards mailed the day after Veteran’s Day and she began decorating her home the day after Halloween.

Mrs. Hansen and Mrs. Sticek may have won the award for beautifully decorated cookies, but I’ve yet to meet the person who could compete with Kathy Ayers when it came to decorating her Lakewood home for the holidays.

Imagine a home with 17 beautiful Christmas trees, Santa Clauses everywhere, wreathes and lighted candles, including the bathrooms, all tastefully put together, and you have a vague idea what I found when I visited Mrs. Ayers in 1999. She had simplified her decorating routine by storing the room’s decorations within that room. Five hundred guests were expected to tour her home that Christmas season.

Knowing Cathy Uhl had a plethora of recipes using maple syrup, but also knowing she was extremely busy helping her husband, Harry, in the sugaring process while caring for a large family, I suggested a simple solution. When I arrived in early March 2001, I expected to see a pitcher of maple syrup next to a plate of pancakes or waffles for the picture. To my surprise, not only had she prepared nine recipes, her husband was standing at the stove cooking pancakes and sausage links and they had a wooden trough full of snow set up on the deck for a jackwax presentation.

The Uhls were the third generation to boil sap in the sugar house Cathy’s grandfather built in 1923 on their Randolph Town property. Her husband started helping his father-in-law and son in 1963, several years before marrying the man’s daughter.

“We do it mainly to keep the tradition going,” says his wife of the operation they still do with the help of their four children. “We try not to change anything unless we have to. We often have supper in the sugar house when we’re boiling syrup.”

Since then, the family took down the old sugar house. In 2004, as a senior their son Cody was able to take afternoons off from school to build the new building as a project for an agriculture class.

“We hated to do it, but when the wind blew the walls would shake and they were afraid to be in it. It had a dirt floor that would get wet,” Mrs. Uhl said recently.

WWII veteran Vinnie Calarco had to be one of the most grateful people I have ever met.

“I’m so thankful just to be here and for my family. I wake every day and thank the Lord,” said the 80 year old owner of Calarco’s Restaurant in Westfield.

In 2011 he told about how thankful he was to be married to his wife Charlotte, a union that lasted for nearly 70 years by the time he passed away. He was also extremely grateful to have survived the war, in which he served under General Patton in the Third Army 89th Division. He was 19 years old when he landed on Omaha Beach, France in 1943.

“On the first day I landed, seven days after D-Day, there were bodies of young boys my age still floating in the water. None of us ever said ‘when I get home’ because we didn’t know if we would.”

“We liberated one concentration camp. You have no idea what humans can do to other humans,” he said as he went on to tell about his experience in Germany. “General Patton was the greatest. I loved him. If we had people like him today, we wouldn’t be where we are now. If the U.S. treated WWII like this war, we’d be speaking Japanese and German.”

One of Vinnie’s own very time-consuming recipes is included, reflective of his Italian heritage.

I featured Linfert Meyers, head chef for the former Tom’s BBQ Pit in 2003. Meyers began cooking when he was seven years old and said he could prepare a full Southern-style meal by the time he was eight, thanks to his grandmother, who he resided with in the state of Florida.

He went on to cook at a seafood restaurant, a Shoney’s, where he could not use his own recipes and at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, California, where he was the first chef to be hired without a culinary degree. While working at the five-diamond hotel, he had the opportunity to cook for famous personalities such as Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown and Dom DeLuise.

All of the following recipes have appeared on the page over the past twenty years, but I thought they deserved to be repeated. I have included a dish using game, an original Italian meal, a southern-style dish, some sweet treats and a dish that combines meat with sweet.

Wacky Cake

Pat Kibbe

Mix in ungreased 9-inch by 13-inch pan-

3 c flour

2 c sugar

6 T cocoa

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp soda

Mix three holes in dry ingredients and then add-

2 tsp vanilla

2 T vinegar

12 T vegetable oil

Pour 2 cups water over all and mix well. Bake in 350 degree oven for 25-30 minutes.

Rolled Stuffed Venison

Ron Ormond

(Use a top or bottom round roast for this method. The meat should be no more than one-inch thick. Butterfly, if necessary.)

6 slices bacon

1 medium onion, chopped

1/2 c celery, chopped

1/2 c carrot, chopped

1/3 c seasoned dry bread crumbs

2 tsp parsley flakes

1/4 tsp salt

1/8 tsp pepper

3-4 lb boneless deer, antelope, elk or moose roast, up to 1-inch thick.

3 slices bacon, cut in half

Fry 6 slices of bacon in large skillet over medium heat until crisp. Remove from heat. Transfer to paper towels to drain. Reserve 3 tablespoons bacon fat. Crumble drained bacon and then set aside. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Cook and stir onion, celery and carrot in reserved bacon fat over medium heat until tender. Remove from heat. Stir in crumbled bacon, bread crumbs, parsley flakes, salt and pepper. Spread vegetable mixture evenly on roast and then pat firmly. Roll up jelly roll style, rolling with the grain of the meat. Tie with kitchen string. Place in roasting pan. Top with remaining bacon slices. Roast 22-30 minutes per pound to desired doneness.

Betty Lou’s Cream Horns

Dee Dee Hansen

Crust:

2 sticks margarine

1/2 c cold water

1 T sugar

1 T shortening

2 1/2 c flour

1 egg yolk

Mix by hand. Roll out thin and cut into 4-inch strips. Put on stainless steel rollers and bake until lightly brown at 350 degrees about 15-20 minutes. Pull off rollers. Fill when cool.

Filling:

1 1/2 c milk

6 T flour

1 c shortening

1 c margarine

3 1/2 c powdered sugar

12 T marshmallow cream

In a saucepan, mix milk and flour. Cook on low heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat when it comes to a boil and thickens. Refrigerate until completely cool. Beat shortening and margarine until fluffy. Gradually add powdered sugar and marshmallow cream. Add refrigerated mixture and beat until fluffy. Fill shells. Dust with powdered sugar.

Apple Pork Chops

Kathy Ayers

6 pork chops

Salt

Pepper

1-2 cans apple pie filling

2 tsp instant chicken bouillon granules

1/8 tsp cinnamon

Brown pork chops. Sprinkle each with salt and pepper. Combine pie filling, bouillon granules and cinnamon. Pour into casserole dish with pork chops. Cover and bake at 250 degrees for 3 hours.

Maple Pecan Squares

Cathy Uhl

Crust:

1 1/2 c flour

1/4 c brown sugar

1/4 c confectioners’ sugar

3/4 c margarine

Filling:

2/3 c brown sugar

1 c maple syrup

2 eggs, beaten

2 T flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 c pecans

Combine ingredients for crust. Mix with fork until consistency of cornmeal. Press into 9-inch by 13-inch pan. Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees. While crust is baking, make filling by combining brown sugar and maple syrup in a small saucepan. Bring to a simmer and continue simmering 5 minutes. Pour slowly over eggs, stirring constantly. Stir in remaining ingredients, except nuts. Pour mixture over baked crust. Sprinkle with nuts and bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

Beef Tripe in Tomato

Sauce with Pork Hocks

Vinnie Calarco

4 lbs tripe

1 c oil

5 cloves garlic, chopped

1 onion, chopped

2 T parsley

2 tsp oregano

4 pork hocks

1 can tomato juice

2 lg cans tomato puree

Salt and pepper, to taste

1 hot banana pepper, chopped

2 T sugar

2 c chick peas

Cut tripe into 1-inch squares. Wash in cold water and salt. Soak tripe in cold water for a half hour. Rinse and add clean cold water. Place in large sauce pan. Cook on medium heat for 30 minutes. Remove tripe from pan. Rinse and add new water and continue procedure for three changes. In a large saucepan, combine oil, garlic, onion, parsley and oregano. Cook a few minutes on medium heat. Add pork hocks and for an hour or until tender. Add pork mixture and tomato juice to tripe. Heat over medium heat, adding more juice, if needed. Cook for 45 minutes and then add tomato puree, stirring well. Add salt, pepper and banana pepper. Simmer for 1 1/2 hours and then add sugar. Add hot water, if more liquid is needed. Add chick peas just before done. Cook until tripe is just tender, not tough.

Red Beans and Rice

Linfert Meyers

2 lbs dried red kidney beans

2 c yellow onions, chopped

1 bunch green onions, chopped

3-4 cloves garlic, finely sliced

1 bunch parsley, chopped

3 lbs good smoked sausage, cut into 2-inch lengths (smoked ham or ham bone may be used)

Salt and pepper, to taste

3 qts cold water

Soak beans overnight. Drain and add beans to a large 8-10 quart pot. Add enough of the cold water to cover beans. Add onions and garlic. Bring to a boil. Cook one hour. Add remaining ingredients and more water, if necessary. Simmer 2 hours or until beans are soft. Remove 2 cups of cooked beans without liquid and mash well. Add mashed beans to pot, stirring until combined. Add water if beans are too dry. Serves 8.