Good old Butter 'n Love

Everybody knows home cooking is supposed to be made with love. The Voices of Exodus from Second Baptist in Olathe, Kansas, were a little too practical to claim that love is all that's needed for good home cooking, though.

That's why they wrote Butter 'n Love Recipes (1977). Love by itself? Meh. Butter and love? Then you've got something.

Is the cover representative of typical Kansas kids in the '70s? Her hat would look more appropriate on a Strawberry Shortcake doll and the overalls make it look as if she's got a weird potbelly and maybe misshapen legs.

What were those weird Kansas kids raised on? One answer appears to be weird noodles.

It's a pretty unexceptional Marzetti recipe, but what the heck are "non-skid" noodles? Not to be too indelicate, but are they supposed to slow the passage of marzetti through one's digestive tract? I tried looking it up, and the story is not nearly as interesting as I hoped. American Beauty Macaroni Company in Kansas City trademarked "Non-Skid" for the name of their egg noodles (although I still can't figure out why they thought advertising noodles as "non-skid" was a great idea). The good news is that the trademark expired in 1992, so if YOU want to relaunch non-skid egg noodles, the name is yours for the taking.

Here's another weird Kansas-y noodle recipe:

Good old Scroodles Casserole! I wasn't sure what scroodles were either, but I guessed it was probably rotini, and my internet searching mostly supports that hunch. I'd never heard the name before, but I love it and I'm going to start calling rotini scroodles from now on!

I also learned that dieting in Olathe meant one thing:

This is the entirety of the "Low Calorie Dishes" chapter, so apparently dieting meant eating nothing but Jell-O. If you were feeling particularly ascetic, it was just Jell-O with some evaporated milk. If the diet wasn't that urgent, you could throw in fruit, cottage cheese, Cool Whip, and maybe, if you were really good, some peanuts.

For those not on a diet, there was always cake:

Pistachio Cake! I love nuts, so the idea of a nutty cake drives me, well, bananas. (Ha! I didn't say nutty. Well, now I did, so I guess that kind of ruins it. Sigh.)

With a full box of pistachio pudding mix in the cake and another in the frosting, I guess it deserves the name Pistachio Cake... The pistachio level of pudding mix tends to be pretty minimal, though, so it makes sense that the recipe calls for added nuts in the cake part. The thing that doesn't make sense is that it calls for PECANS. Not that I'd complain about finding pecans in there, but maybe call this "Nutty Cake" instead?

Starting to overthink this, and it is officially now driving me nutty. I don't want to end up with a scroodle loose, so I'll sign off now!