Cookbooks bring out old-fashioned flavor.

Byline: Home Cooking by Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

DOROTHY O'NEAL, a resident of the Hawthorne Park Retirement Community in Eugene's Bethel area, has produced two cookbooks since she retired in 1992.

"It's a hobby," she said. "It's a thing I planned for many years as a retirement project, and that's what it turned out to be."

The first cookbook, "Recipes and remembering," contains 507 family recipes that she collected during her married years. It was published in 1997.

"Then I had enough recipes left over that just a few years later I decided to do the second book," she said.

The second cookbook, "Then 'til Now," published in 1999, is a collection of 430 recipes and short stories of family history that she thought her grandchildren would like to know.

Western Printers in Eugene printed the cookbooks. She had the company set the type for the first cookbook, but she purchased a computer so she could do her own typesetting for the second.

She sells the cookbooks for $10 each. She can be reached by phone at 688-3292 or by e-mail at [e-mail].

"I've been married for almost 52 years, and these are things I picked up along the way," O'Neal said. "I was a 17-year-old bride and I knew almost nothing about cooking. So my worst failures were definitely the first few years I was married. And on top of that, I was trying to do it on top of a wood stove, so that made it even harder. But once I got the hang of it, I discovered I really enjoyed it."

O'Neal is a retired administrative secretary and her husband, Bob, is a retired long-haul truck driver. They have three children and six grandchildren.

Specialty: "I don't know that I have a specialty. I just cook very basic things," O'Neal said.

"I'm not a gourmet cook and - I guess you could probably say that I'm even an old-fashioned cook.

"I really like to use fresh ingredients. I make all of my own seasoning mixes. And I like to just really do things from scratch. I very seldom buy a packaged box of anything."

How she began cooking: "I began in 1950 because I had gotten married and my husband was accustomed to eating three times a day," she says, laughing.

"But, unfortunately, he was accustomed to better things than he got the first two years. But I eventually learned," she said, and her husband apparently kept his humor. "In fact," she said, "at one time, he told me that I must idolize him because he got so many burnt offerings."

O'Neal said she didn't get any instruction from her mother and she said that's one reason she made a point of teaching her own daughter to cook.

"My mother and my grandmothers were all excellent cooks, but they were all very busy women," O'Neal said. "And my mother never really had the time to give me any kind of instruction. Anything I learned I just learned by watching, and I hadn't watched enough. So I really had a lot to figure out on my own. There were some miserable messes, but it got better."

Her biggest cooking success: "When our daughter got married 17 years ago, she wanted a wedding cake that was different than most wedding cakes. And I had a fermented fruit recipe that she really liked, and so I made enough of that for almost 300 people.

"I had 9 gallons of fruit fermenting in my house. I baked all the layers and froze them, anyone we had even a passing acquaintance with had some of those layers in their freezer. I just had them farmed out all over, and the day before the wedding, I gathered them all up.

"On the morning of the reception, I made my icing and put everything together at the reception site. It was a wonderful success, but it's a good thing we only had one daughter - I've not made that cake since."

The recipe is included in O'Neal's first cookbook. The fermentation process takes six weeks. The recipe calls for a cup of peaches and a cup of sugar to stand at room temperature for two weeks. Then a cup of crushed pineapple and another cup of sugar are added, and the mixture is allowed to stand for two more weeks.

Finally, two 6-ounce jars of maraschino cherries are chopped and added along with their juice and a third cup of sugar, and the mixture stands for another two-week period.

At the end, the fruit is chopped and added along with nuts to a cake batter and baked. A favorite when her daughter was growing up, the cake is pale pink in color, moist and studded with pieces of fruit.

O'Neal said she has never figured out a use for the fermented juice. "I never found anything I could mix it with that made it palatable," she said.

Her biggest cooking failure: "Well, I don't know. I've had a lot of them through the years. I guess I don't remember any one thing.

"When our daughter was dating the man who became her husband, I tried a new casserole recipe one night. And it was inedible. I had to fix something else. It had Tater Tots and something else in it, and it was ghastly. And they remind me of that from time to time.

"I'm famous for trying new recipes," she said. "When the kids were all home and we'd sit down at the dinner table, if my husband would see something he didn't recognize right away, he would say, 'Mama must have a new magazine.' Because I'd try new recipes all the time."

Her favorite cookbooks: "I think, probably, my favorite basic cookbook is a 1979 Pillsbury that I have," she said. "I refer to it all the time for really basic recipes.

"But I have a large cookbook library and the Amish cookbooks are my very favorite. I love their recipes. Their cooking is very much like mine has always been. It's pretty basic and they rely a lot on things they can and preserve themselves. And I've done that over the years, too."

Why this recipe was chosen: "I chose this recipe because I think this time of year, most of us have leftover turkey in our freezers, and this is one of my favorite ways to use it."

Sour Cream Turkey Enchiladas

2 cups sour cream

2 cans condensed cream of chicken soup 

2 to 3 cups chopped cooked turkey

1 can (8 ounces) mushroom pieces, drained

1 teaspoon chili powder

1 can (4 ounces) chopped green chilies

1/3 cup onion flakes

1/2 tablespoon salt

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon pepper

10 small flour tortillas (approximate)

1/3 cup grated Cheddar cheese

Mix sour cream and condensed chicken soup together. Spread 1 1/2 cups of the mixture in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish.

In a saucepan, combine the cooked turkey and other remaining ingredients except the tortillas and cheese with 1 cup of the sour cream mixture. (Reserve the final portion of sour cream mixture to top the casserole.) Cook the ingredients in the saucepan over low heat until hot.

Soften flour tortillas by heating in a frying pan without oil.

Place 1/4 to 1/3 cup of the hot mixture down the center of a tortilla. Fold the ends and sides in, and place seam side down in the prepared baking dish. Repeat until the dish is full of enchiladas (about 10).

Spread the reserved sour cream and soup mixture over the top of the enchiladas. Sprinkle with grated cheese and bake at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, or until bubbly and hot all the way through.

Serves 4 to 6.

To nominate a cook for this feature, mail it to: Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; fax it to 338-2813; contact Jim Boyd at 338-2363, or [phone]; or e-mail it to [e-mail]. Include the nominee's name and phone number, your name and phone number, and why you think he or she is an interesting cook.

CAPTION(S):

Dorothy O'Neal holds two self-published cookbooks that she filled with family recipes.