Stretching with an Automatic Fry Pan

No vintage Halloween-themed cookbooks for my feature today, so here's a woman proudly displaying an electric skillet full of mini Frankenstein's monster heads with their brains exposed for easy scooping:

Fine, she's really showing off stuffed peppers on the cover of "Hamilton Beach Automatic Fry Pan Recipe Book" (undated, but probably from the 1950s). That's not nearly as fun as my description, though.

In case you didn't know you could cook stuffed peppers-- a staple mid-century dinner-- in the electric skillet-- a staple mid-century gadget-- now your life is complete.

The exciting thing about this recipe is that it's all in one pan-- fry the onion and beef with the rice, add soup and corn, stuff the mixture into the peppers, and stick 'em right back in the pan with some carrots! Carrots-n-pepper-brains have never been so easy!

If you'd prefer your ground meat and green food in another form, there's always this:

Normally the kids would rather have meatballs with delicious pasta, but maybe Halloween is a good excuse to serve meatballs with Lima bean zombie toes covered in sour cream pus?

Okay, my attempts to make this booklet Halloweeny are a stretch, but to be fair, a lot of their recipes are a bit of a stretch too:

Why "bake" a frozen pizza in an electric skillet? It's not as if frozen pizzas are known for being top quality anyway, and when we take into account that there will be no divinely browned crispy-chewy cheese on top, well... the sad gets even sadder.

Need a dessert to distract from a disappointing dinner? Bust out the cake mix:

Then bake that prepared cake mix in your Hamilton Beach Fry Pan, though even the booklet feels duty-bound to note that while the top will eventually dry, "It will not be brown."

Note that while the family above seems excited about the cake, the round layer cake mom is serving does not appear to have been plopped out of an electric frying pan. She knows when to use an oven.

Happy Wednesday! Stretch to make something spooky today, even if it's not really. I'm going to pretend my oatmeal is haunted.