Nothing but Bundts

I knew Bundt pans became popular in the 1960s, but I didn't realize that they remained popular long enough for Pillsbury to publish 100 New Bundt Ideas in 1977.

Unrelated, but this is also one of the few items in my collection with a barcode!

In any case, Bundt pans were primarily popular for making cakes, so let's get away from the decadence associated with the pan and make a healthy menu that would require either owning a bundle of Bundt pans or making a lot of stuff ahead of time and washing the pan over and over again. 

First, you need a healthy main dish. How about some omgega-3 fatty acids in a Dill-Sauced Salmon Ring?

I'm sure no one will be alarmed to see the Bundt pan out of the cupboard-- a pan best known for the "Tunnel of Fudge" cake-- and smell fish. Well, fish and overcooked peas. But won't that big wet pink lump look lovely under its dilly icing? Sorry, sauce!

Especially if it's put on a glass plate surrounded by very thin lemon slices and backlit so it looks like the whole thing is glowing? (You really gotta sell this one to get the family interested.)

And of course, you need some veggies to go with the salmon loaf. It's easy to demonstrate you've used a Bundt pan to prep the veggies if you use enough gelatin.

This big wet pinkish lump is Gazpacho Salad.

To avoid big wet pink blob overload, let's turn our attention to a necessary component of any real 1970s meal: the bread! In keeping with my theme, we're going with Sunflower Health Bread.

Honestly, I think I'd just skip the raisins if I made this recipe and eat a slice or two of bread slathered in butter for my dinner. Forget the salmon loaf and gazpacho! (I'm permanently scarred by gazpacho anyway. When I was in grad school and we were all trying to pretend to be sophisticated adults and invite each other over for dinner, pretty much everybody made gazpacho because it wasn't expensive and it seemed fancy. Plus you could turn cheap wine into sangria and have an easy theme that would also get everyone tipsy while still pretending we were cultured individuals! I can't stand vinegar or raw onions or tomatoes and was trying SOOO hard to be a reasonable grownup that I choked down at least a few bites of gazpacho at so many parties... Can barely even look at recipes for it now.)

Anyway, on to dessert. Yes, I guess we can actually use the Bundt pan for its boring, usual purpose: to make a cake. We just have to add bits o' zucchini so it will fit our "healthy" theme. 

Good luck figuring out what to replace the Pillsbury Coconut Pecan or Coconut Almond Frosting Mix with, though. (Actually-- I could find recipes to replace the pecan version, like this one on Food.com. I imagine you could just swap out almonds for the pecans if you really wanted the almond version.) Of course, this cake is really zucchini bread, but it's ring-shaped, so no one will be confused by a non-Bundt-shaped foodstuff in your Bundt-based banquet. We couldn't have that!

I may be amused by the kitchenware trends of yesteryear, but at least home cooks in 1977 didn't have to add another app to their phones to get the new appliance to work, and then try to figure out why it wasn't connecting-- and then get it to shut up and leave them alone once everything was set up. Nobody needs the oven to beg for a new accessory at 3 a.m. (Not that I have personal experience with this-- I started to feel exhausted just from Googling "trendy kitchen appliances 2025" when I was trying to decide what fad to put in the previous sentence. It seems like they all require at least as much work to set them up as it will take to use them. Progress!)