Cherished memories: Cedar City B&Bs publish cookbook of favorite

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Aug 18, 2004 | by Susan Whitney Deseret Morning News

CEDAR CITY -- For Donna and Ralph Fisher it has become a tradition.

Drive from Park City to Cedar City and meet up with friends from California. Stay at the Big Yellow Inn. See four or five plays. Relish eating breakfast on the wide front porch. Relish the food and the company and the way this inn feels more like home every year.

At home, the Fishers have a simple breakfast. Maybe some oatmeal. But at the Big Yellow Inn they have frittata or a sinfully rich French toast made with cream cheese.

"The Big Yellow Inn is just a very pleasant place to have your breakfast and, when we are there, we spend a lot of time with breakfast," said Donna.

Listening to Fisher describe her favorite Cedar City bed-and- breakfast made me think of my own family's Shakespeare Festival traditions.

We must have stayed at Karlene Paxman's Summer Home B&B, on 400 West, for a dozen summers. Sometimes it was just my husband and me, a few times my cousin from California and her husband stayed there, too. Once my brother and sister-in-law joined us. A couple of times we brought teenagers along.

I remember the summer that my son had grown too tall for the child's bed, which was tucked under the eaves in the south bedroom. We made him sleep there anyway. Mrs. Paxman didn't have any other rooms that weekend. She never had any empty rooms.

We grew to love Mrs. Paxman, a dear widow lady who had been a schoolteacher and never lost her interest in history and current events. I remember her green dishes, made of old-fashioned milky green glass.

Eventually Mrs. Paxman grew too frail to run the B&B, and for several summers we drove by, noting that her sign was gone and wondering who lived there. We heard Mrs. Paxman had passed away, and we were sad. For one weekend every summer, we had felt like her nieces and nephews.

Then, earlier this summer, our friends made reservations for an impromptu trip to Cedar City. When we arrived at the Cherished Memories B&B, we were thrilled to see it was Mrs. Paxman's old place.

Our trip got even better when we met the new owner, Rae Overson, who told us she had known Mrs. Paxman, had taught school with her, when she, Overson, was a young teacher and Mrs. Paxman was a veteran at the junior high.

Overson made us feel welcome in much the same way Mrs. Paxman had always made us feel welcome. She showed us the changes she and her husband, Larry, had made -- the new deck out back, the way they had enlarged the little space under the eaves so it could hold a bigger bed.

This year my husband and I had the main-floor bedroom, the one that Mrs. Paxman used to use as her own. On the wall was an antique photo of a woman who looked a little like Overson, and when we asked if it was her grandmother, she said it was. Then she told us about watching her grandmother do the hairstyle she wore in the photo. We'd always wondered how ladies of a bygone era were able to achieve those tight little waves.

The next morning, when Overson served us coffee cake, I recognized my own grandmother's recipe. The cinnamon flavor was the same, but somehow Overson's cake seemed sweeter and more moist. She invited me to peruse her recipe and pointed me toward a table holding spiral- bound cookbooks. The books were called "Good Morning Breakfast," published by the Cedar City Bed and Breakfast Association.

The cookbooks cost $7.50, and I bought one. Inside were dozens of recipes for breakfast food and appetizers. (I learned the "Classic Coffee Cake" recipe differed from my grandmother's because it used sour cream instead of buttermilk and called for more sugar.)

Overson said Tony Baker, who owns the Baker House Bed and Breakfast, was the one who had the idea for the cookbook. He also did sketches of each B&B to include in the book.

Overson says each of the 10 bed-and-breakfast owners ordered 100 copies of the cookbook. She will probably have sold half of hers by the end of the Shakespeare Festival season. (To order a book call your favorite Cedar City B&B or call the association at 435-867- 5695.)

The cookbook is just one of their joint projects, Overson said. "A lot of people ask, 'Aren't you competitors?' But we really are good friends," she said. "We help each other with referrals when we are full.

"We formed this association a little over a year ago and started meeting once a month because we felt we could help each other bring people in during the off-season." Some of their ideas include hosting a scrapbooking weekend and a quilting weekend. They are also hoping to get some of their summer customers to come back over the winter holidays to see the annual Christmas parade and to build a few memories -- and have a good hot breakfast.

BLUEBERRY BREAKFAST BAKE

8 slices white bread, cut into 1-inch pieces (about 6 cups)

1 (8-oz.) package cream cheese, chilled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes

1 cup fresh blueberries

8 eggs

1 1/2 cups milk

1 cup blueberry syrup

Grease 11x7-inch baking dish. Spread half of the bread pieces evenly in baking dish. Top with cream cheese. Sprinkle with blueberries. Spread remaining bread over blueberries. Beat eggs and milk in a medium bowl until blended; pour over bread. Cover unbaked mixture tightly with aluminum foil and refrigerate at least 8 hours but not longer than 24 hours.