Microwave fun for a crisp fall day

I usually go for older cookbooks, but the cover for Kenmore Microwave Cooking (1985) was so perfectly '80s, and I adore microwave cookbooks anyway, so here we are.

So what might a 1980s microwave owner eat on a crisp fall day? We'll start off with breakfast. How about some eggs benedict?

Sure, you could poach the egg in conventionally-boiling water, but then you wouldn't have the fun of trying to pierce the yolk to avoid an explosion in the microwave. And you could enjoy crisp freshly toasted English muffins as the base, BUT YOU HAVE A MICROWAVE! So you will make those toasted English muffins soggy and rubbery by microwaving them under a slice of ham before assembling your breakfast. 

For lunch, we need something cozy. How about French onion soup? Sure, it usually takes quite a while to get the onions properly browned and and the broth full of flavor, but you've got a microwave! You can get that shit done in just barely over half an hour.

As long as you don't mind that the onions don't really brown, so they won't get much flavor. Or that the cheese on top will only melt-- not get browned and delicious. Or that you will be eating microwaved toast. Again.

Then for dinner, let's have this.

No, we're not going for dessert first with a microwaved fruitcake. This is family meat loaf ring!

It's admittedly a pretty boring meat loaf. I just initially mistook the picture for a fruitcake and wanted you to have that fun too. 

We can have some apple-stuffed acorn squash as a side.

At least this is recipe that actually makes sense for the microwave. The squashes will cook faster (and be easier to halve partially-cooked than they are when they're raw). 

And if a side dish full of apples, cinnamon, and honey isn't enough of  a dessert for you, end your meal with a peanut colada sundae!

Hopefully the cream of coconut will help you forget about eating all that microwaved toast! And then you can go to bed and dream about going to see Freddy's Revenge when it comes out next month. I mean, I love microwave cookbooks, but they weren't the best part of 1985.

Substitute? I do not think it means what you think it means

A lot of my old health food cookbooks are for vegetarians, and even the ones that aren't are usually veg-heavy and light on the meat. I picked up Let's Cook It Right (Adelle Davis, originally 1947, but mine is a 1962 edition) in part because I saw it had a fairly substantial chapter about meat substitutes, so I wanted to see what it recommended. Would it be bricks of veggies bound with whole wheat bread crumbs? "Fillets" made with things like olives or cereal? Big platters of overly plain cooked vegetables? 

Nope!

Believe it or not, Spanish Rice with Meat is actually a meat substitute, at least according to the chapter title. Not sure how, as the meat it calls for is, in fact, meat. This chapter reveals that unlike other "health food" writers, Davis is extremely wary of the idea of meatless cooking, noting in the introduction for the meat substitute chapter that plant proteins "lack several essential amino acids and hence do not have the health-building value of meats, fish, eggs, or milk. Generous amounts of meat, cheese, or other adequate proteins should be added to these so-called 'meat substitutes' whenever possible." The inclusion of a meat substitutes chapter seems pretty puzzling once you realize the author is convinced the only adequate substitute for meat is meat. 

You might think that meat is only added to the rice since rice is not all that high in protein, but that recipes based on beans might not get the same level of meaty fortification. You would, of course, be wrong. 

The seasoned lentils or split peas are an adequate meat substitute if they contain meat.

I spotted a Chow Mein recipe and wondered if it might at least introduce readers to tofu since Davis reluctantly named soybeans as being the only "true meat substitute" from the legume family. 

Nope! Forget tofu. The "meat substitute" here is leftover pork roast.

And the one recipe I expected to include meat once I was used to the chapter's emphasis on meat was perhaps the biggest surprise.

Fried rice-- usually enriched with eggs and a meat of some type-- is an entirely different dish in this book. Here, it's just a rice pilaf with a bunch of cheese stirred in at the end! Sounds good, but I'd be pretty surprised if someone promised fried rice and showed up with a dish of this.

I was at a loss as to how the recipes in the meat substitutes chapter were different from the recipes in any other chapter. Then I noticed the full title of the chapter (rather than the shortened version written in the header of each page in the section): Meat Substitutes and Extenders for Limited Budgets. This chapter is more about stretching the meat than using something else in its place. I always thought that was the role of things like casseroles, though, and they show up in a lot of chapters. I never did quite figure out how these recipes got singled out for this particular chapter when they might have fit just as easily in the chapters on meats or using up leftovers, but at least I had an interesting afternoon trying to figure it out. 

Enjoy some peanut butter and meat!

 As someone who used to make the boring vanilla ice cream mom bought when I was a kid more interesting by stirring peanut butter (and chocolate Nestle's Quik if we had some) into it, and as someone who now tops pancakes with a thin layer of peanut butter instead of syrup, I can't resist the temptation of a peanut butter cookbook! That's how I ended up with Peter Pan Peanut Butter Cook Book (1963). 

This book is not quite as wild as Jif's 1979 book, but it does have its moments. Honestly, my favorite things in this book are not the actual recipes, but the recommendations for how to gussy up other foods with a little Peter Pan.

Need some appetizers? Get the peanut butter!

Appetizers apparently really needed both peanut butter and some kind of pork, as the peanut butter is paired with bacon for the Bacon Pinwheels and Stuffed Celery Sticks (or Hog on a Log?), blended with deviled ham for the Deviled Ham Puffs, or used in an attempt to make Vienna sausages less sucky in the Meat Morsels. The book also offers Cheese Dillies with peanut butter, cheddar, and dill pickle juice if someone refuses to eat pork. 

I also love how appetizing the picture makes the Stuffed Celery Sticks seem-- like a cross section of the bottom half of a clay drain pipe clogged with sludge. Yum!

For those who love doctoring up canned goods, there's a soup suggestion.

Just mix Peter Pan into cream soup! Creamy peanut tomato! Cream of celery and peanut butter! The possibilities are... well, not endless. Just weird. And extra rich because we all know cream soup is not rich enough unless you fortify it.

If your mom won't let you have peanut butter as your sole protein because she thinks you will immediately DIE of a protein deficiency if you don't have meat at every meal, she might try some meat tricks. (Not that I know of any mothers like that...)

Peanut butter in the meat loaf! Peanut butter broiled onto the tops of hamburgers! Peanut butter grilled right onto the chicken! (Hell, throw some peanut butter on the grilled corn too if you're feeling wild and/or out of dairy butter.)

The end of the book has another of my very favorite things: pictures of vintage packaging!

Oh, yeah, baby! Show me some old peanut butter jars!

I know I'm not alone in my love for peanut butter, so I hope you enjoyed this too. And thank goodness I'm not as into peanut butter as some people are! I'm sure Peter Pan is glad that this peanut butter lover is a Skippy man. (You're welcome.)

Cool Fall Soup-Jells

Sometimes on cool fall mornings, you think you might want a big, hot bowl of soup later-- such a cozy idea! Maybe you even stocked up on a bit of canned soup for just such an occasion. And then as the day goes on, the temperature rises from maybe the upper 40s to mid 70s and those cans of soup lose their luster.

Well, Marye Dahnke's Salad Book (1954) has the perfect solution: gelatin with soup in it! Yeah, I know I've featured recipes like these (but from other cookbooks) before, but I will never cease to be amazed by how many people used to seem to think that combining Jell-O and Campbell's was a great plan. I hope you are similarly amazed and amused, but if not, well... Where is your sense of wonder? (As in, "I wonder what was wrong with the people who wrote these recipes.")

At least the old recipes calling for a can of tomato soup make some degree of sense. Tomato was a pretty common aspic flavor, so soup wasn't that different from the tomato puree that usually went into an aspic, for example.

And it's not like too many people would object to combining it with a brick of cream cheese (except maybe on health grounds). A brick of cream cheese can make just about anything better.

A bit more out-there but still pretty common are the ones that call for a can of cream-of-something soup.

This time, our cream of chicken soup is combined with a smaller brick of cream cheese. I'm starting to think the real attraction of these soup-and-gelatin molds might be the excuse to eat cream cheese.

Tomato and cream-of-something soups tend to be the only ones I see turned into gelatin molds, but this book goes all-in and even recommends turning canned gumbo into a shimmery and wobbly salad.

 And of course, this one gets the little brick of cream cheese too, along with plenty of ground ham. (I'm not sure New Orleans would really want to claim this, but at least this seems more plausibly connected to New Orleans than some of the "Mexican" salads seemed connected to Mexico.)

Whether your fall is turning out to be too hot, too cold, or just right, I hope it's at least as spooky as a soup-haunted blob of gelatin.

October: The month of chocolate cakes full of veggies

According to Cooking by the Calendar (edited by Marilyn Hansen, 1978), "October is a colorful, spirited month. Vivid blue skies are overhead and sure rays of clear sunshine warm our shoulders. The changing leaves dance in the trees and then drift slowly down to form a multi-colored carpet for our walking pleasure."

In October, I'm more focused on admiring the Halloween decorations than the leaves, but then again, 12-foot-tall skeletons and giant inflatable ghosts, black cats, and spiders were not easy to come by in 1978. I guess they had to take their thrills where they could, so it was the fall leaves.

October is designated as the month for "ethnic" foods, so this chapter features Italian Meatballs and Sauce Heroes.

I think a lot of today's home cooks would consider themselves relatively accomplished if they made meatball sandwiches at home using frozen meatballs and jarred tomato sauce. Spending hours making the ingredients could be a fun way to spend a chilly weekend, though, especially back before people got sucked into doomscrolling.

A lot of October focuses on something we still associate with October: sweets! Granted, none of these would work for trick-or-treating, but still... Sugar!

The book suggests Chocolate Surprise Squares in the "Cooking for the Fair" section. Our county fair was the end of August when I was a kid-- not anytime in October!-- but I definitely remember seeing this recipe well-represented in our baking competitions.

Its popularity was mostly because our fairgrounds were within smelling distance of a sauerkraut factory, and they would sponsor special prizes for dishes with sauerkraut in them. I'm not sure what everybody else's excuse for making chocolate sauerkraut cake was. 

The vegetable of the month-- potatoes-- gets featured in recipes both savory and sweet. The sweet potato isn't the only tuber that gets in on the dessert action. 

Yep! The Chocolate Potato Torte is made with plain old white potatoes sent through a ricer.

The section of the October chapter that puzzled me the most, though, was the section labeled "Halloween Treats." You might expect treats with spooky shapes, like jack-o-lanterns made with oranges or orange peppers. You might expect homemade candies or popcorn balls, given that this was the very end of the era when homemade treats might be considered acceptable for trick-or-treaters. What you would not expect, though, is something like this:

I have zero clue what makes Surfer Shake Halloween-appropriate. It's just a weird hybrid of an indulgent thick ice-creamy milkshake and a weird "nutrition" shake the health-food set would try to choke down. (Okay, now that I think about it, maybe a mixture of raw eggs, wheat germ, vegetable oil, and vanilla ice cream is pretty scary...) And this recipe isn't an anomaly in a mostly-spooky collection. The entire section just seems like it's random recipes Hansen wanted to throw in somewhere and couldn't find the right spot, so she just said, "Let's claim it's a Halloween treat!" and called it a day. 

Here's hoping your October is as cozy as an Italian Meatball and Sauce Hero and far spookier than a Surfer Shake! (And that your chocolate won't be full of surprise vegetables.)

All you need is some Miracle

The Wayback Machine is a little wonky right now-- couldn't make it all the way back to the '70s-- so today's cookbook is from 1989. Let's see what Good Food Ideas with Miracle Whip (Kraft) thinks we should do with that nasty white slime.

Other than to stuff it in pasta shells after mixing it with Fancy Feast, that is. 

The best way to get an overview of this collection might just be a menu of mayhem! So we will start out with an appetizer.

I picked Vegetable Pizza just because I know this recipe got a LOT of use in the late '80s/ early '90s. I swear, it was at every single potluck I ever got dragged to as a kid, although in my area, the cooks were more inclined to top their "pizzas" with raw broccoli and shredded carrots than red pepper and radishes. I just remember staring dejectedly at it and wondering why anybody bothered to make this when actual pizza exists and is MUCH better.

Of course, we need a salad. In a menu chosen for maximum contrast (meaning that everything will clash terribly), let's get a little tropical with Piña Colada Freeze.

Yeah-- with all that fruit and whipped topping, it might sound more like a frozen dessert, but this is in the salad section, so it's a certified salad! (Plus, I'm hoping I can make somebody out there gag at the thought of a piña colada full of Miracle Whip.)

I also liked that the photo of this concoction looks kinda like a brain.

Well, a brain surrounded by kiwi and strawberry slices and topped with pencil shavings.

I picked our main dish mostly because I love the title.

Midwestern Stir-Fry is a tacit admission that the closest most Midwesterners at the time would get to cooking Asian food was slathering some sliced smoked sausage and a few veggies in mustard-y Miracle Whip and serving the whole mess over rice.

For dessert, I could have chosen chewy double chocolate brownies or easy carrot cake, but I know that Miracle Whip in baked goods makes too much sense. It's mostly just oil, corn syrup, vinegar, and eggs--most of which are common ingredients in baked goods anyway-- with the possible exception of vinegar, but that still adds acid to help with leavening. The flavor will melt away, and you'll just have fairly typical brownies or cake. So instead, we're getting another frozen treat! This one is intended as a dessert rather than a salad.

I really don't know why you'd need Miracle Whip in with the blueberries, sugar, and gelatin flavored with just a bit of lemon peel. It seems like this icy dessert could very well be better off without it, but Kraft, of course, thinks the MW is essential!

I think the real miracle is that anyone wanted this collection. But then again, I wanted this collection. Maybe it's just a reminder that people always want to look at a train wreck, or a dumpster fire, or... Well... (Shrugging and glancing in all directions as 2025 spreads out around me.) You know.

Funny Name: Not the Bragging Point You Think It Is Edition

When people make rich desserts, they often brag about how the recipe is made with real butter. I'd think that would be the case for the Kentucky cooks who put together Morehead Woman's Club's Our Ways with Food (undated, but from the early 1960s), but I was very wrong.

Yes, these cookies brag about being made with margarine right in the title! How was this a point of distinction?