Food. So many traditions are tied to it. The smell of certain dishes cooking can conjure up memories of bygone days. Recipes passed down through generations ties families together. Many times food defines a culture. For Mormons, especially those with pioneer ancestors, just mention the Lion House and you are more than likely to hear, “Their rolls are so good!” or “We had our wedding luncheon there.”
Built by Brigham Young in the 1850s as a residence for for his family, The Lion House has been used now for decades as a venue where good food is served in a historical setting creating memorable occasions for many families and visitors from around the world. In a new cook book from Deseret Book, Dining With the Prophets, many of The Lion House’s legendary dishes are shared. Yes, you will find the recipe for the famous Lion House Dinner Rolls!
The book is divided into three sections to share not only The Lion House’s signature recipes but favorite dishes of the latter-day prophets as well as pioneer staples. My kids were excited to flip through the book and read personal stories about each prophet and why they liked a particular food.
Throughout the book photos of period artifacts displayed at the Lion House are shown alongside the recipes: a bell used to call the Young family to dinner, a sugar jar, a silver tea service, and even an old wooden high chair and toy china dolls. We also enjoyed seeing old photographs of the Lion House both inside and out.
We’ve made the orange rolls every year as one of our General Conference traditions. This Saturday we will be making Thomas S. Monson’s Swedish Meatballs to eat between sessions of General Conference. My kids are very excited!
You can win your own copy of Dining With the Prophets courtesy of Deseret Book! Just leave a comment telling me a memory that involves food – either good or bad. Giveaway ends Sunday, Oct. 5th at 5pm PST.
My grandma kept a huge, 5 gallon tin of cookies stocked at Christmas. Now, that I’m all grown up, I love making bunches of cookies during the holidays for my family.
I had corned beef in the first month of pregnancy with my youngest and it did not go well. I still can’t even look at it.
My favorite memory involving food has to be my family Christmases! After my dad passed, it was what we looked forward to as kids! The smells and aromas!!
I have so many wonderful memories of food as I grew up surrounded by wonderful cooks. I still remember wonderful roast beef Sunday dinners at Grandma’s house with aunts and uncles and cousins. They didn’t happen every week, so when they did they were certainly special!
I’d sure like to win this cookbook. That you for the giveaway opportunity.
We make the depression era “crazy cake” every year for birthdays. I have eaten this cake for as long as I can remember.
When I was 18 I lived with my older sister (she is 21 years older than me) for awhile. She always hung Mormonads in a frame in her house. She had one up for several months. Well, one day she made bread. It was amazing bread! I remember eating it and thinking, “I could live just on this bread.” Then I turned around in the kitchen to discover she had changed the Mormonad to “Men shall not live by bread alone…” She had changed it just as a coincidence, but I could not stop laughing. That is my funniest food memory and my memory of the best bread I have ever eaten.
I remember eating popcorn on Sunday nights with my family. My dad would make it (or some other treat) and we would all have some together! This book looks great! 🙂 Thanks for the chance to win a copy.
Eating at Limoncello in Little Italy, Boston, MA last year with my husband after having just walked the entire freedom trail. What a fantastic day!
When I was a little girl and sacrament meeting was in the evening, my dad brought home the leftover sacrament bread and we had bread and milk (with the milk in a bowl soaking up the bread) for a night time snack. I believe several of the prophets liked bread and milk too.
Mine has to be the christmas cookies shared each year.
Making cookies with the sisters missionaries and my children for the Branch gattering. We had so much fun. It was a mess but in a good way.
I have many great memories around the table eating great food. Today I was thinking about the first time I make dinner in a pumpkin. It’s become a tradition that we all love. This book is a wonderful giveaway! 🙂
We would travel from CA to UT to Visit my gradparents annually. Trying to strike up a conversation around the dinner table, my preadolescent self asked “What ever happened to that rooster you had?”
To this day, I do not know if they were teasing me that we were eating him – as the menu was chicken!
My favorite, fond memory of food is making Baklava from scratch with my Dad as a teen during the Holidays. The painstaking process of spreading each layer of phyllo dough with butter and cinnamon nutty goodness is still fresh in my mind. My Dad was so careful with the sheets of dough and we could only use orange honey. I enjoyed the lengthy process and never have had Baklava that was that delicious. I am sure my Dad would say it was because we used orange honey and didn’t cut any corners! Serious patience and serious goodness all wrapped up in a crunchy scrumptious dessert.
I’ll share a different one than I did on FB. When I was a kid our area got a new institute director and my mom babysat his kids while they were house hunting or moving in, I was little, that detail is a little blurry but one detail stands out. My mom fried up liver and onions and bacon for dinner. I couldn’t believe she would make such a horrible dinner when we had company and especially when the company was little kids. I was the same age as the institute director’s oldest son. Well we sat down for dinner and I was completely shocked surprised when those little boys loaded up their plates and ate it up. They declared they loved liver!!! what ??? ew?
My grandpa used to babysit us after school and we lived with him a couple times. I remember helping him cook dinner. There were many afternoons that we sat side by side on the couch peeling potatoes and watching “Jeopardy.” At first I would beg to peel and was very slow about it. Grandpa bought a second peeler to speed up the process 🙂
What an amazing book!! The only thing my mom craved while she was pregnant with me was lemon meringue pie, and consistently in each of my pregnancies I crave it too. Go figure!
My grandmother always made swedish fruit soup to bring in the new year. I now make it as soon as fall hits. I love it and my memories of her that it brings back so much!
Fondue on New Years. Love and home.
My grandmother made DIVINE cinnamon rolls! I have tried numerous times to duplicate the recipe, but so far they don’t taste the same. We also make Yorkshire pudding that is handed down through our family, but instead of the traditional gravy as is done in England we put butter and sugar on ours.
My grandma’s famous cinnamon rolls. She made them every year at her Christmas party. We make them every year for general conference!
Everything my grandmother made was tasty. I don’t know how she did it, but even if she just opened a can of pudding, it was the best pudding ever! She could butter bread better than anyone I knew. It is the simple things. Food doesn’t have to be fancy to illicit fond memories. I miss her and her listening ear!
When I was a little girl my mom made some pureed split pea soup with ham chunks in it. And it was the most awful thing I had ever tasted in my life! (At least to a little girl) I was told that I had to eat it no matter what. So I took it into my room, opened the window and dumped it out for a dog or cat to come lap up. And then I pretended I ate it all up. My mom never knew, I was happy I didn’t eat it and I still can’t eat Split pea soup to this day!
What a fun book! We have lots of food traditions. We love our cinnamon rolls and orange rolls for General Conference…looking forward to those on Sunday morning!
I enjoyed reading the comments from other people…I could never drink orange juice while I was pregnant. It tasted so good when I had my baby and was able to drink it again!
How fun! My memory about food is recent. Our sweet German friend Andrea just came to visit for a week with the sole purpose of lightening our load. She did laundry and drove kids around and did dishes. . . and cooked for us. Oh, she is a good cook! She made German food (including a Kaesekuche!) and Greek food and just left us with such a feeling of love and comfort. What a blessing!
My favorite memory of food is on holidays. Having the my cousins, aunts and uncles over. All the fun and great food. We still have turkey on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I don’t know about this year because my father just died and my mom has been wanting to change that because he has always liked it the way his family did it.
I remember years ago when my parents would go somewhere and leave us with a babysitter the big treat would be macaroni and cheese from a box! We never had it otherwise.
Several years ago, we had taco salads the night we carved pumpkins for halloween. We brought the pumpkins indoors and put them on the table after dinner. One of my daughters saw a sliced olive that had fallen off her plate and popped it in her mouth. She got a disgusted look on her face and spit it out. We quickly realized it was not an olive, but a black slug that came in on one of the pumpkins. Eeeeewww! But our family still laughs about it.
Our family likes a chicken and rice casserole with onion soup mix in it. We were feasting on the smell and anticipation of dinner, everyone gathered around the table with fork in hand. I pulled the steaming casserole from our gold enamel oven and, on it, was a crisply-cooked black cricket standing right in the middle. After our horror subsided, I spooned the cricket off and dished up the plates. Instead of chicken and rice casserole, we now (fondly) call it ‘cricket casserole’. It now grosses my kids out (they were little then) to think that they ate casserole that was garnished with a cricket.
First memory that came to mind, my mom making me eat fish. I plugged my nose the whole time trying to eat it and then it all came back up. 🙁 She never forced me again. 🙂
The smell of my grandma’s bread. She always had a fresh hot slice of bread whenever I went to visit, with her homemade jam of corse!
I remember one time when my mother was making sour beans for my father. He wanted them for Christmas and asked her at the last minute to make them. She had made everything and went to put vinegar into the pan but instead of putting vinegar in she put grape juice. She took the beans and buried them in the flower bed outside our side door. Came in and making sure she had all the right ingredients made them again.
Years later we can laugh at it but then we were all worried that Dad would find out mom had messed up the sour beans
We make ableskivers for breakfast on General Conference Sunday. We use a recipe that has been passed down in our family and is well over 100 years old. The book looks lovely.
thus may sound strange, but one of my favorite foods is simply whenever the recipe calls for fresh vegetables: especially onions. My paternal grandparents had an enormous and beautiful garden, and the smell of fresh onions reminds me of my grandma’s kitchen. They both passes away this last year, and so now, whenever I cut up an onion, I shed tears for more than one reason.
So many memories involve food! Since we just enjoyed General Conference, I will share one that relates to that. For the few years of my life when I was actually in Utah near the rest of my extended family, we always went up to Grandma’s house on Sunday of General Conference. We had a wonderful brunch in between sessions of Conference. She made this amazing breakfast casserole with potatoes and eggs and ham and sausage and cheese, lots of cheese! There were always sliced oranges sprinkled with powdered sugar, but most of all, there was so much love!!! I now live on the East Coast, but yesterday we were sharing the Conference weekend with my cousin who is also out here, and as we gathered our families together, we both looked at each other and said, “Wouldn’t it have been fun to make Grandma’s breakfast casserole?!?” We did have the orange slices, though!
My favorite memory of food is eating Colombian food all day on Christmas Even made by my mom and grandma.