Grocery Life June 16, 2014

 

tyson baseball tournament 1
Tyson’s Tournament Team

Grocery Life June 16, 2014

By Tom Butler

Good afternoon from Butler and Bailey Market. I hope everyone had a good Father’s Day weekend! We had a busy weekend at our house. My son, Tyson, was chosen to play in a baseball tournament this weekend so he had a game on Friday night and two games on Saturday. My daughter, Lauren, was gone to an overnight camp most of the week and came home Saturday. My wife had a baby shower to attend Saturday and then we had a going away party for some friends at our house Saturday night.

 

Lauren at camp
Lauren getting off the bus from camp

 

 

I talked about pecan crisp cookies in the last blog and our friend that gave us the recipe brought them to the party Saturday night. Those things are good! We all started eating them as an appetizer before dinner was served. I decided to make thumbprint cookies to see how they stacked up against the pecan crisps. Thumbprint cookies have been my favorite since childhood. When I was a kid, I grew up going to the Bearden Shopping Center with my mom. At that time White Stores was the grocery store in the center. There was also Whiteway which was variety store, Coffin Shoes which is still there, the Green Stamp store, Crenshaw’s Children’s Shop, Henderson’s Drugstore, Nancy Lynn Fashions, C&S Dry Cleaners, and Wade’s Bakery.

Wade’s Bakery is where I was introduced to thumbprint cookies. I remember getting two quarters a week for my allowance when I was a kid. It was always spent at Whiteway on some kind of toy or at Wade’s Bakery on thumbprint cookies. I can still vividly remember going into the bakery and asking how many cookies I could get for my two quarters. I also remember having to decide which colors of icing I wanted on my cookies. The cookies are really small, you could eat them in one bite, and I remember just nibbling on them on the way home to make them last longer. I have great memories of all the shops at the Bearden Shopping Center. We all knew the shopkeepers and they all knew us as well as who our parents were, who our grandparents were, and at Wade’s Bakery they probably knew the colors of cookies I was going to pick out before I told them. In those days there was no mall or internet so my family did most of their commerce in one little shopping center in Bearden.

The Rocky Hill Shopping Center and the businesses in close proximity remind me a lot of the ones I grew up with. We are all local, family owned businesses and you can just about meet any need with a walk up the sidewalk or across the street.

I hope all of us doing business in Rocky Hill are giving you experiences that produce the same fond memories that the Bearden Center did for me. Those were my “good old days.”

Here is the recipe for the thumbprint cookies. I actually have three recipes that all claim to be Wade’s Bakery’s. There are probably a lot more than that floating around. This is the one I used Saturday and it seemed to be pretty close to my memories.

Thumbprint Cookie Recipe

Cookie

  • 1/2 Cup Shortening
  • ½ Cup butter
  • 1 Cup Sugar
  • 1 Egg
  • 1 Tsp. Vanilla Extract
  • 3 Cups Plain Flour (Sifted)
  • ½ Tsp. Salt
  •  

Icing

  • 2 Cups Confectioner’s Sugar
  • ½ Tsp. Vanilla Extract
  • ½ Tsp. Salt
  • Water
  • Food Coloring

 Cookie Instructions

Beat together butter & shortening until soft, add sugar gradually continuing to beat until mixed. Add egg, vanilla, and salt and mix. Add flour slowly and continue to beat until mixed. Portion out dough and roll into logs about one inch in diameter. It might help to refrigerate before doing this because the dough can get really sticky. Slice into ½ to ¾ inch rounds and place on greased cookie sheet. Press thumb into the center of each cookie making an indention. Bake at 400 degrees for 7-10 minutes. You want the bottoms to slightly brown but the tops should not.

Icing Instructions

Put confectioner’s sugar in a bowl and slowly add water while stirring. It takes very little water so go slow. You can always add more sugar if it gets too thin. Get a consistency to where it will barely drip off of a spoon. Mix in salt & vanilla. Once mixed add food coloring. I usually separate icing into two or three bowls so I can make more than one color. Fill in indention of cookies with icing and you are done. This recipe will yield 4 to 6 dozen cookies.

Thumbprint cookies
Thumbprint Cookies

These things are not real easy to make but once you do it a time or two it becomes easier. When the kids help me, we always have to make a lot of different colors for the icing so don’t let them help unless you have all day.

We are starting the second week of our two week ad this week. Last week I was really promoting our prime Ribeye steaks. This morning Ashley, our meat manager, told me we sold a ton of them. He then said, “you know we didn’t make any money on them.” I guess I need to quit promoting things we don’t make money on? Maybe I should promote lottery tickets. Somebody in Knoxville made a lot of money on one of them last week. Well, we don’t even sell lottery tickets, so I guess I will just keep promoting the things I love to eat and the things you tell me you love to eat. It seems to have worked so far.  Have a great day!

Thanks for letting us be a part of your community,

Tom Butler

Respond to tom.butler44@gmail.com

 

 

 

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