Diet like an Iowa police officer!

Thanksgiving is coming! Maybe you need to save a little space for the big day with a pre-Thanksgiving diet? A delightful feature of Police Potpourri (Iowa State Policeman's Association Auxiliary, 1977) is that it has a very short diet chapter. I always loooooove diet advice, so let's see what police claim to eat after they've had a few dozen too many donuts.

For the main dish, there's Easy Barbecue Chicken (Diet).

I wasn't sure what made this diet, considering that it's got plenty of sugar, butter, and catsup. I thought for a moment that it might be that the recipe never actually calls for a chicken. (The second half hour of baking is pretty rough after you flip the uncovered cake pan, but it does have the advantage of draining off nearly all the calories!) If I'm fair and assume that we're actually supposed to add a chicken and flip it halfway through, then the recipe claims the lack of a "heavy calorie laden sauce" is what makes this diet food, so sure! It's diet food.

You'll need a salad to go with the chicken, and here's the perfect dressing:

It's mostly tomato juice and fairly unremarkable for a diet dressing, but I love the final line claiming that it "'Crisps' up lettuce." Doesn't dressing usually make lettuce soggy? Even the writer seems to think so, using quotation marks around "crisps" as if she wants to have some plausible deniability should the lettuce not actually crisp....

And finally, no diet section is complete without diet cookies. This chapter offers two options. If you're basic, the Basic Diet Drop Cookies might do.

With a full cup of shortening and more than two cups of flour, these cookies can't be all that diet to begin with, liquid sweetener notwithstanding. Then if you throw in suggested additions like raisins, coconut, and/ or peanut butter, well.... Just keep telling yourself the artificial sweetener makes these low calorie.

If you're more dedicated to dieting, the Low Calorie Applesauce Cookies are probably at least marginally better in the calorie count.

Part of the fat is replaced by applesauce, some of the flour is replaced by All Bran, and the batch is divided into four dozen tiny cookies, so it should be easy to resist wolfing down too many. (Especially after the donut run, amirite? Thanks! I'll be here through Thanksgiving.)