A Bisquick Barbecue

For the first day of August, the last full month of summer proper, I thought we should have a barbecue. I wanted a little bit of a challenge, though, so I didn't pull out one of my grilling books. Instead, I looked at my special ingredient cookbooks, wondered which one would be most likely to have an outdoor cooking section despite the fact that it wasn't really for a product identified with grilling, and picked out 1967's So Quick with New Bisquick.

Bisquick is not a crazy choice. Most of us have probably accidentally lit a skillet full of campers' pancakes as we've tried to cook them over an open fire because we overgreased the pan and forgot how heavy a skillet full of pancakes is and how hot fire can get at close range....

Besides the pancakes, though, there are plenty of other ways to enjoy Bisquick in the great out-of-doors. This first one sounds yummy and I only included it because I love the illustration:

The cheesy pup, draped in a bacon a towel, looks as if she has been surprised in the shower. (How do I know this is a "she" hot dog? The bacon "towel" seems to be obscuring her chest, and the scandalously uncovered area above her legs is smooth-- no dangly bits. Despite their phallic shape, hot dogs can be girls.) 

Maybe this is the hot dog equivalent of a scene from Psycho. The final scene of people eating hot dogs wrapped in cheesy biscuit and smoky bacon is pretty polarizing. The movie is rated G for people and NC-17 for hot dogs.

Other recipes just seem a bit odd:

The owl looks pretty excited about "Dough Balls," but a recipe that has little kids dripping water into a bag full of Bisquick and then rooting around in it with a stick and their grubby little unwashed camping hands strikes me as a wee bit unsanitary. I'll let the owl have my share.

At least the dough balls promise to be pretty innocuous. I am not so sure about this one:

Grilled pizza isn't exactly a new idea, and it of course sounds pretty good if you don't look at the recipe. Anyone who doesn't love pizza is probably a psychopath. That's a scientific fact.

The thing that concerns me about Bisquick's Camper's Pizza is the sauce: pure "catsup." That by itself is enough to turn me off, even though I know some people (who are probably also psychopaths) consider ketchup to be a suitable pizza sauce substitution. Even they, though, should be a bit concerned. Why? This recipe specifies the size of the ketchup bottle. Why give the size? The most logical reason is that the recipe writers intend for cooks to use all of it (as the "spread 1 bottle" directions seem to confirm). A 14 oz. bottle of ketchup divided between four personal-size pizzas= 3.5 oz. (nearly half a cup!) of ketchup per serving. In contrast, there's only two ounces of cheese per pizza. Even if you can accept the sacrilege of ketchup as pizza sauce, you better be repelled by pizzas with more ketchup than cheese. If not, you should probably be locked up because there is definitely something wrong.

Happy Saturday! Get out there and grill some dough!