The Ferguson Recipes
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The Ferguson Recipes
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When I started The Ferguson Recipes in 2006, my main goal was to create a place where I could collect and present our favorite family recipes in an orderly fashion, without all of the distractions of other recipe sites. At The Ferguson Recipes you will find recipes, plain and simple, just like the recipe cards you have crammed into that well worn binder of your family's most beloved recipes.

Many of the recipes included here are Ferguson family favorites passed down through the years. Many more are recipes we have gotten from friends or shamelessly "adopted" from other recipe sites. And a lot of the recipes are from three recipe collections which family members have participated in creating: "Cooking with Carl, Hugh and your Friends", "Cooking With Cow", "The Sears Sun Cookbook", and more!

Why aren't there a lot of flashy pictures? Well, first of all, we do have some, but overall, I find them annoying when I am trying to read a recipe. And if you need a picture to show you how to stir your cake batter, you shouldn't be cooking! Occasionally, I do include an image of the finished product somewhere in the recipe if I remembered to take a picture of it.

Help, Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service are located at the bottom of every page.

Thanks,

Dave - 8/13/18 (A Palindrome Date)

Updated: 3/29/25

🏛️ Founded April 13, 2006
©️ 2006 - 2025 fergusonrecipes.com
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⬇️ Oh! Look! The Recipe of the Day! ⬇️
Turtle Brownies
F ✖️ 🌞 🧵 🫴
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Serving Size: 24 brownies
Ingredients
4 squares Baker's unsweetened baking chocolate
3/4 (1 1/2 sticks) butter or margarine
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup flour
1 pkg (14 oz) caramels, unwrapped
1/3 cup heavy cream
2 cups pecans or walnut halves, divided
1 pkg (12 oz) real semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions
HEAT oven to 350° F. Grease foil-lined 13 x 9 inch baking pan.
MICROWAVE chocolate squares and butter in microwavable bowl on HIGH 2 minutes or until butter is melted.
Stir until chocolate is completely melted.
STIR sugar into chocolate until well blended.
Mix in eggs.
Stir in flour.
Spread 1/2 of batter in prepared pan.
BAKE 12 minutes or until batter is firm to the touch.
MEANWHILE microwave caramels and cream in microwavable bowl on HIGH for 3 minutes or until caramels begin to melt.
Whisk until smooth.
Stir in 1 cup of nuts.
Gently spread caramel mixture over brownie batter in pan.
Sprinkle with chocolate chips, if desired.
Pour remaining unbaked brownie batter evenly over caramel mixture.
Sprinkle with remaining nuts. (Some caramel mixture may leak through.)
BAKE additional 20 minutes.
Cool in pan.
Run knife around edge of pan to loosen brownies from sides.
Lift from pan using foil as handles.
Cut into 24 fudgy brownies.
🧑‍🍳 The Cook:  Carol Jancsi 🔑 Keywords: brownies, desserts, sweets, chocolate, caramel, unsweetened baking chocolate
🗂️ Categories: 🍪 Cookies & Bars
📚 Cookbooks: From The Ferguson Family, Uncle Dave's Cookbook, The TFR Cookbook
Recipe #354 was added on March 28, 2007 and last updated on March 17, 2025.
Uncle Dave's Husky Treats
Uncle Dave's Husky Treats were first made for my nephew's high school soccer team: Hughson High School Husky Soccer Team, 1995 - 1996. They have been a favorite of our family and friends for almost 30 years.
Not much has changed since I first started making them, except you now have to buy Skor Toffee Bits online. I have not found any suitable substitute. Husky Treats
About "Cooking with Carl, Hugh and your Friends"
In 1974, J. Carl Ferguson, Jr. of Kaiser Aluminum, and Hugh Griffiths of Sangamo Electric, put together a cookbook for the annual meeting of the E.E.I. Purchasing and Stores Committee (an electrical products industry group). This cookbook included many recipes of the committee members and their wives - mostly the wives - and was called "Cooking with Carl, Hugh and Your Friends". I have tried, as much as possible, to leave the text exactly as written, except where it didn't make sense (and a couple of them still don't make sense, but they're in the cookbook anyway). The women who contributed most of the recipes were middle-class housewives, many of whom were born during the depression and grew up during WWII. Most of them didn't work outside the home; they stayed home to take care of the kids and the house. This was just before the birth of "women's liberation", and many of them were identified by their husband's name: Mrs. John Smith, for example. The nice thing about "Carl and Hugh" is that it does give you a glimpse into what families were eating in the 60s and 70s.

By the way, we haven't tested many of these recipes, so if you find an error, let us know. Some of these recipes are fairly old and ingredients commonly available when they were written may not be so common now. Many of the recipes suggest using "oleo", which is what margarine used to be called, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Also, I recently noticed that there are a lot of recipes that include MSG as an ingredient. Most of them are probably fine without it.

Dave Ferguson - 10/09/14
Nuts & Bolts
This is one of our absolute family favorites! And it also happens to be the first** recipe ever entered into The Ferguson Recipes, almost 19 years ago! You can read more about our version in the recipe's comments, but the most important things to remember is that it takes a lot of time, a lot of good, fresh ingredients, and a lot of love to make this the best Nuts & Bolts ever!
**The sharp-eyed among you will notice that it is recipe #6. Because the database assigns a new number to every entry, it is likely that #1 thru #5 were failures that occurred during the code development.
Nuts & Bolts
Spoon Bread Old Virginia
Our oldest family recipe from Missouri Ann Ferguson, grandmother of J. Carl Ferguson, Jr. (and my great-grandmother), in her own handwriting. UPDATE (3/09/25): Missouri Anne was 3 years old in 1864, so I am going out on a limb here and guess she was neither married nor writing down recipes then!
Written by Missouri Ann Ferguson in 1864
About "The Politics of Cuisine"
"The Politics of Cuisine" is an upcoming publicatioon by University of California, Merced Political Science professors Nathan Monroe and Courtenay Conrad, dedicated to investigating how politics--government actions, and citizens reactions to those actions--shape and change cuisine. Here we bring these stories to life by sharing the recipes behind the stories!

Dave Ferguson - 10/04/22
About "The Sears Sun"
Way back in my sordid past, sometime in the middle 1990s, I helped put together a collection of recipes by folks at my work called "The Sears Sun". You guessed it: I worked at Sears in Modesto, California, for waaaay too long. The cookbook never got printed, but it has remained alive on my computer and it is part of The Ferguson Recipes. Some of the recipes are just plain weird. I think there is one for Italian Chicken that involves dumping a bottle of Wishbone Italian on chicken for a few hours and then cooking it. Simple, but weird.

Dave Ferguson - 6/27/18
About "Cooking With Cow"
"Cooking With Cow" has nothing to do with beef. Well, there might be some beef recipes in there, but Cow is actually a nickname for my sister, Carol Ferguson Jancsi. She put together her cookbook over many years, giving out new pages as she added them. Unlike the Carl and Hugh recipes, most of Cow's recipes have been tested by someone still living to tell about it.

Dave Ferguson - 6/27/18
About "The Gussie Files"
Our Aunt Gussie Rush left a big card file full of recipes, most of them neatly type on 3" x 5" index cards. As of the date below, I have begun transcribing those recipes. Gussie was born in 1911 and died in 1997; most of her recipes are from the 1940s thru the 1980s. There is a lot of margarine and a lot of shortening, and a lot of terms that we don't even use today.
One thing I do love about Gussie's files is that the recipe cards are impeccably typed, as she had been an executive secretary for most of her career. It is these cards that influenced the way I want measurements and abbreviations to be formatted here.
Dave Ferguson - 1/30/22
💛 Visit Our Favorite Recipes Page! 💛 📖 About The Cookbooks 📖
🔥 What's New?
03/28/25: Acorn Squash
03/28/25: Sticky Toffee Pudding (Cake)
03/23/25: Scones from Krusteaz Blueberry Mu...
03/23/25: Breakfast Rolls with Sausage, Egg...
03/23/25: Pommes Mont D’Or (With Leftover...
03/23/25: Swedish Apple Cake
03/21/25: Combined Tips and HInts
03/19/25: SKOR Toffee Bits vs. Heath Bits o...
03/18/25: Three Bean Salad
03/11/25: 7 Can Chicken Taco Soup
03/06/25: I Don't Wash My Non-Stick Pans Wi...
03/05/25: French Onion Dip Mix
03/02/25: Cranberry-Glazed Roasted Butternu...
03/02/25: Mexican Refried Beans
02/28/25: Compound Butters
02/23/25: Green Beans with Shallots
01/22/25: A Lemon Cake To Die For
01/22/25: Gooey Cinnamon Cream Cheese Muffi...

🛠️ What's Changed?
03/28/25: Uncle Dave's Husky Treats
03/28/25: Nuts & Bolts
03/29/25: Ortega Chili and Pepper Jack Stuf...
03/23/25: How to Open and Clean a Pismo Cla...
03/24/25: Country Oatmeal Bread
03/23/25: Homemade Taco Seasoning
03/22/25: Jacques Pépin's Crêpes Confitur...
03/19/25: 7 Can Chicken Taco Soup
03/18/25: Barbecued Spareribs
03/30/25: Italian Pismo Clam Chowder
03/07/25: A Lemon Cake To Die For
03/29/25: Carne Asada De Camancho
03/02/25: Heavenly Lemon Cheesecake On A Gi...
03/02/25: Instant Pot Chicken Thighs
03/29/25: Moist Oatmeal Pancakes
03/13/25: Corn Sticks
03/30/25: Pot Roast for Crock Pot or Sous V...
01/22/25: Vanilla Wafers with Mascarpone an...

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🙄 Help: Seriously? You don't need any help.
🌄 Why No Pictures: Well, there ARE some pictures, here and there. But to be honest, if you need pictures showing you how to stir something, you shouldn't be cooking! And really, I find them annoying when all I want to do is look at the recipe! Also, we haven't made most of these recipes. We occasionally take pictures of the finished product when we remember!
💯 Why There Are Recipe Numbers Missing: Well, it's like this. The recipe numbers are automatically generated by the database, always using a new number for a new recipe. Over the last 20 years many recipes, mostly test recipes, have been added and then deleted, leaving only their memory and their number behind. And there was also a lot of weird stuff going on in the beginning, which messed up the order. In terms of date added, the first one is #6, then #4, #9, #10, #4, #718!!!, #2, and finally #1. Just the way databases and poor programmers work!
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ℹ️ About TFR: Click me to learn more about The Ferguson Recipes!
🏛️ Founded April 13, 2006
©️ 2006 - 2025 fergusonrecipes.com
📧 Contact!