Find A Recipe

Find the recipe to keep funding

GOOGLE A RECIPE for lemonade and find a textbook example of simplicity: Water, lemon juice, sugar ... easy enough for a kindergarten student to make with minimum adult supervision.

So the idea of setting up a lemonade stand to protest the elimination of full-day kindergarten – as Crestwood School District parents did Wednesday – is as fundamentally cohesive as glue mixed from water and flour.

The stand, complete with grinning children holding up hand-lettered signs (“keep Crestwood great!”) drew attention to school board plans to cut full-day kindergarten in an effort to fill a financial shortfall created by Gov. Tom Corbett’s plan to hack state education funding with a chainsaw.

Other efforts to mitigate the damage from the cuts have been tried: Revisions of Corbett’s proposal by the state Legislature, a push for Harrisburg to use part of an unexpected $540 million surplus this year to reduce the cuts, talks between teacher union and school board to freeze teacher pay.

But all this is the equivalent of adults complicating the recipe for lemonade. The answer is simple: State mandated and funded full-day kindergarten.

Research relentlessly shows such a move pays huge dividends in child development and learning.

Our collective failure to guarantee full-day kindergarten suggests too many of us were deprived of that opportunity.

Retro Find: The 1971 Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library | Apartment ...

Because the collection was released by Betty Crocker, many of the recipes include packaged Betty Crocker brand ingredients rather than from-scratch instructions. The Cheeseburger Pie recipe, for example, starts with "1 stick or ½ packet of our pie crust mix." Of course, it then goes on to fill said crust with one pound of cooked ground beef and half a pound of cheese, so the packaged crust may be the least of eaters' worries.

Similarly, the towering pink pile that is Crusty Salmon Shortcakes uses Bisquick biscuits and a can of the ubiquitous condensed cream of mushroom soup mixed with a can of salmon. I've included the recipe below, should you want to try it. Please send pictures if you do.

Vegetables in Betty Crocker's world in 1971 were inevitably frozen or canned, seasoned with only a little instant chicken bouillon, salt, or the reserved water from another canned vegetable. And boiled, always boiled.

Dessert remains the least changed. Lemon chiffon cakes and black-bottom pies look as good today as they did 40 years ago. I hope to age as gracefully as a key lime pie. Instead of, say, the Ladies' Seafood Thermidor.

Believe it or not, I won't be keeping this treasure trove. Instead, it will be a belated wedding gift to my friend Annie Shannon, who has been veganizing the Betty Crocker cookbook for the past couple years on her blog Meet the Shannons . No word yet on her progress in making a vegan version of Pizza with a Hamburger Crust.

Have you ever stumbled onto fascinating recipes from the past?

Career Opportunities in the Food and Beverage Industry

Where Did I Find That Recipe???, A Journal to Your Inherited Family Favorites

The recipe writer's handbook

Vegetarian Times

The Best Light Recipe: Would You Make 28 Light Cheesecakes to Find One You'd Actually Want to Eat? We Did. Here Are 300 Lower Fat Recipes Tha