Bring on the dancing meats!

Memorial Day! That means while I'm griping about the way families with 27 screaming, unruly kids seem to miraculously appear anywhere I try to go in public this weekend (Seriously, do bratty children spontaneously generate for summer holidays and then disappear for the rest of the year?), you may well be having a hamburger and hot dog weekend. (If so, invite the families with the crazy kids so there will be fewer of them to get in my way!)

To help you get in the mood for cheap but tasty meats, how about some recipes from Good Housekeeping's Cook Books (1958) "Hamburger and Hot Dog Book"?

The picture doesn't really go with anything. I just cannot resist dancing meatballs, hot dog segments, and Swiss cheese, especially if they have top hats and enormous smiles.

What can you make with the hot dogs? If you want actual barbecue recipes, you might want to see what I posted last year. This time I was intrigued enough by the title to choose this to represent hot doggery:

Career Girl's Spaghetti! She should have some time off this weekend, but if she doesn't want to spend it cooking, she can make spaghetti with chopped-up hot dogs, onion, mushroom, and green pepper in a watered-down tomato-juice-based sauce. This sounds pretty bland, and it's still more work than throwing a few hot dogs into a jar of store-bought marinara and calling it a day. Career girls just couldn't catch a break in the '50s.

Dogs are fine for the kiddies, but a lot of grown-ups prefer real meat-- something that clearly had a spinal cord at some point. This next recipe doesn't really still have the spine attached, but it kind of looks like it does:

The "bones" are canned peaches filled with jelly. I'm not sure what makes this peach loaf spicy. The fact that a full third of the meat is sausage (and not necessarily even spicy sausage)? The knowledge that an actual herb has been added, even if it is just thyme?

I also wonder what the 3D viewer has to do with anything.... Is it something to divert the gazes of guests who would prefer not to start a meal by staring at canned peach "vertebrae"?

Okay, but maybe meatloaf isn't the way to go for a holiday weekend. If you want an actual burger-- preferably one that can use up snacks left over from a party that wasn't attended as well as you hoped (The child mob failed to show up? I'd count that as luck!)-- maybe this will help:

Make some chip burgers! The five-year-old in me would be enchanted by the idea of having potato chips and a burger all in one! No need to break out the banjo-and-clarinet band to sell this idea.

And if the weekend partying wreaks havoc with your "digestive health" (as commercials now call it), Good Housekeeping of course has a remedy for that:

 GH knows the real secret to having fun is maintaining regularity.

Have a great weekend!