Edited to add...

As it turned out, the meeting was not so horrific. I guess either I misread the agenda I was e-mailed, or they were not clear: I read it as "We will be deciding upon scholarship recipients" which means reading through many, many application packets and then arguing the merits of the different people, and usually someone is dissatisfied.

Instead, it was "We have already evaluated and tabulated everything, here are the people who earned the top scores, say something if you disagree" and no one did. So that was a relief.

And now I'm home. And the sauerkraut-kielbasa (well, I actually used turkey smoked sausage...) thing was better than I hoped it would be. (Not that I lack confidence in my own cooking...if you can call this recipe cooking...but my previous experiments with commercial sauerkraut were a disappointment. It could be that I used a "better" brand (Vlasic) that comes in glass jars, or it could be (what I think is more likely) that the long cooking gets rid of the harshness inherent in commercial sauerkraut.)

It's super simple: take as many small redskin potatoes as you want, wash them, peel a strip around the middle, put them in the bottom of the slow cooker. Add the sauerkraut. For every pound of sauerkraut, add a tablespoon of brown sugar and a teaspoon of caraway seed (I used fennel because I didn't have caraway, same difference, pretty much). Cut up a smoked sausage of some kind on top of this. Add a bit of water if your sauerkraut lacks liquid (mine did not). Cook on "low" for 8 to 10 hours. The potatoes are surprisingly good - I'm not a big fan of potatoes as "just" potatoes but here they pick up some of the sauerkraut flavor.

I also had some of my leftover good dessert from Sunday. This is one of my all time favorites but I had never made it for myself because I thought I didn't have the right sized container for fixing it, but then I realized my Pyrex glass 2-quart bowl was just right. (My mother always makes this in a yellow Carbone casserole dish that I think she must have got as a wedding present - or at least, that dish has been around as long as I remember kitchen stuff. And I admit, I kind of covet it...I should go looking on Amazon or somewhere to see if they're still made and still available*)

(*I forget sometimes that I, like, have *money* now and can *buy stuff* if I want it. I really should look for a nice stoneware casserole in that size; I don't have one)

It's a lemon cake pudding - one of those things where you mix it all up and then it "magically" separates into a fluffy cake layer (kind of like an extremely light sponge cake) with a pudding layer under it. I think the hot-fudge version of this is more famous, but I vastly prefer the lemon one - it's very light and not overly sweet. And if you can get good lemons - the ones I got from Green Spray last week were very good lemons - it's an excellent dessert.

It's a Marcia Adams recipe, from Cooking in Quilt Country:

1/4 cup butter
1 teaspoon lemon rind
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, separated (put the whites in a separate bowl, one you can use an electric mixer with)
3 Tablespoons lemon juice
2 Tablespoons flour
1/4 cup Grape-Nuts or generic equivalent
1 cup milk

Soften the butter and cream it with the lemon rind. Add the sugar gradually and beat well. Beat the egg yolks a little, then add them to the butter-lemon rind - sugar mixture. Mix well. Then add the lemon juice, flour, grape-nuts, and milk, and mix that all well.

Beat the egg whites. You want to beat them until they form a soft peak. (The original recipe isn't clear about that but I was able to call my mom and ask.). Add about a cup of the other mixture to the egg whites and GENTLY fold it in (you do not want to collapse the beaten whites). Then add that back to the rest of the butter/sugar/lemon/Grape-nuts/milk mixture and gently fold it together.

Pour it into a greased dish that will hold at least 5 cups, and is at least 3" deep. Place the dish in a larger dish filled with hot water (a bain-marie, if you want to use the fancy-talk term) and bake in a 325 degree oven. The original recipe suggests an hour and a half, but my mother told me it NEVER takes that long - mine took about 35 minutes. You want the "cake" to be just golden brown on the top and the thing not to quake TOO much when you jiggle it. (It sets up more as it sits and cools).

Marcia Adams suggests serving this with half-and-half but I find it to be very good just on its own. As I said, this is one of my all-time favorite desserts and now that I know I have the right equipment to make it, I can make it more often.

I also found it not that hard to make - certainly less mess and less of a pain than that darn dirt cake - but then again, as I was working on it, and thinking, "This is really no harder than making a cake from a mix would be" I realized that I was, to use a term I kind of dislike, stuck in my own "privilege*" - that I had grown up knowing how to do things like beat egg whites, and what it means to "cream" two ingredients together, and how you fold stuff carefully into egg whites so as not to collapse them - so because I have those skills, it really is no more trouble to me to make this than it would be to make something from a mix. But it would probably not be so for others. (Though if a person is willing to experiment and learn and maybe put up with a few failures**, they can do it too)

(*Though a privilege that doesn't necessarily come from wealth or status but from having a parent who knew how to do these things, cared about passing that knowledge on, and let me hang out in the kitchen with her and try stuff out.)

(**It's probably easier on the ego to have your big cooking failures as a child. I remember a cake I baked once where I misread the recipe and put in baking SODA rather than baking POWDER...my mom, bless her, tried to eat part of a piece and after I tried part of mine, I was like, "It's okay if you want to throw it out..." At any rate, that was a mistake I never made again.)