What is the recipe for happy eating? Well, it's pretty bland for the most part.
You might expect a recipe called Chicken Delicious to have something in it to make it... well... delicious.
Will 8-10 chicken pieces pressure cooked in two cups of barely-seasoned water (1/8th of a teaspoon each of pepper, meat tenderizer, paprika, MSG, and garlic powder) have a delectable flavor? What if you release the pressure and add some bell pepper along with onion that will be barely cooked before it's taken off the heat? Well, I guess that raw-ish onion will have some flavor, but its deliciousness will depend on one's tolerance for onion.
Usually recipes with "zippy" in the name have at least a minuscule measure of Tabasco sauce, or maybe some vinegar if the writer equates tang with zip. Zippy Vegetable Soup with Meatballs, though...
...has no discernible zip. The meatballs are the most basic meatballs you can imagine: ground meat pressed into a ball. No seasoning. No binding. Hell, not even any browning! They're just squashed meat simmered in slightly salted water. Throw in some common veggies and "salt to taste," then wonder if the word "zippy" wandered into the title from a nearby recipe, didn't feel like going home, and just decided to live as a squatter at the beginning of the title. The word Vegetable is pretty easygoing and just went with it. Vegetable kind of appreciates not having to take all the pressure of being the first word in the title anymore. Meatballs is pissed because it's tired of hearing Zippy's stories about life in Louisiana (probably made up anyway, that liar!), but Meatballs is too far away to do much and just sits at the end of the title, stewing in its own juices.
If you think you might need an appetizer to stimulate your appetite for this bland glop, you're in luck. The book offers some suggestions for consommé-based starters:
If you think I included this just so you could see that bouillon-cube-based broth mixed with "tomato catsup" or cut with canned asparagus juice was suggested as a good starter, you'd be right. Any meal might taste better compared with this!
My favorite part of the cookbook might not be the recipes, though. I kind of love Mrs. Nancy Minadeo's illustrations at the beginnings of the chapters. They show various hospital employees doing something food-related. Some are just straight-up playful, like this title card for the "Meat, Poultry, and Fish" chapter:
I think it's a little late to help that patient-- unless they're just helping themselves to some slices of white meat. (Is it normal to have a table in the surgery to be used for chicken carving? It looks way too small to be used for human surgery.)
Some of the pictures are just kind of inexplicable, like this one from the "Bread" chapter.
Does anybody have a clue what's going on here? There's a speech therapist, apparently trying to get the patient to say bread. The other people have PT and OT on their sleeves, so I'm guessing they're the physical and occupational therapists. It looks like they're all tending to a patient completely covered with a sheet, which would suggest to me that the coroner and mortuary attendant might be more appropriate than any of these therapists.
If the patient is supposed to be yeast bread rising under a towel, I'm not sure what physical and/or occupational therapy might entail. (Maybe the PT and OT are getting ready to shove the dough into the oven so it can become bread, thus fulfilling its occupational destiny?) The speech therapist is just deluded if she thinks she's going to get the loaf to say its name, though.
If you've got better theories as to what's going on in this one, feel free to share!
I have no clue what is going on in that picture, but your post made my Friday morning even better! Thank you!
ReplyDeleteReal life tends to be inexplicable enough. It's nice to kick back and enjoy mortuary attendants trying to teach dough to speak.
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