Ready, aim, eat!

I've posted plenty of appliance cookbooks: microwave, refrigerator, blender, pressure cooker, slow cooker... But The Ready Aim Cookbook (Jo-ann Schoenfeld, 1976) is a new one for me.

This unusually specific book is a collection of "recipes for the electric foodgun." If you're not sure what an electric foodgun is, it's also called a cookie press. My internet buddy at A Book of Cookrye has a non-electric version that she's used to make plenty of cookies. Well, this book thinks that limiting the appliance to cookies is a mistake, so it has recipes to use the foodgun for every part of the meal. 

We'll start out with an appetizer.

With Roquefort Gardens, the headnote observes, "You can smell the flowers!" Whether you want to smell them is a different question, but at least the foodgun makes the cheesy flowers on a pumpernickel backdrop cute.

Next, we will need a salad. How about this beautiful goblet full of salad?

It looks so pretty and inviting with the orange slices and the whipped cream... So pretty that it is easy to miss the fact that this also contains big slices of onion.

I can easily imagine the shock of thinking you're digging into a light and dessert-y fruit salad and ending up with a big bite of red onion drenched in vegetable oil... Probably best to move on and get to the main course.

A LOT of the recipes in this book mainly qualify as foodgun-prepared because they're finished off with a sprayed-on dairy topping of some sort, but the appliance actually plays a more central role in the recipe for Spinach and Ricotta Gnocchi.

It's used to shape the gnocchi! Part of me thinks this seems like a stroke of genius-- making a potentially tedious task faster and easier-- and part of me knows I've never actually made gnocchi from scratch and suspects that people who have would seriously question my assumption. At least the foodgun seems less superfluous here than it does in a lot of the other recipes. And here is the Basic Tomato Sauce the gnocchi are supposed to go with.

I assume the oregano is supposed to be dried given the tiny amount and the unlikeliness that '70s cooks would have fresh on hand, so I'm not sure why it's added for the last five minutes. Dried herbs are usually better added near the beginning of cooking. At least this has more seasoning than just salt and pepper!

And now that we've prepared an entire meal using the foodgun, it's time for dessert! Not cookies, since that would be too obvious. Instead, let's go for a fresh Mint Chip Mousse to help counteract the smell of all those onions.

Okay, I picked this mostly because I have sooo many recipes for gelatin with weird things in it, but I think this is my first one for gelatin with cut-up mint patties in it. The foodgun really doesn't have much of a role here, just shooting on some whipped cream as a garnish at the end of the process. (Much easier to just buy a can of Reddi-wip!)

So if you have an electric foodgun hiding out somewhere and it's feeling lonely, now you know how to give it a real workout. (It's probably still easier than trying to sell it on eBay, even if that would be the more practical solution.)