Fun? With Food

Are you ready for some fun with a teal chicken who can apparently lay dozens and dozens of eggs, possibly because she is being threatened with hot sauce?

If so, then you are ready for Fun with Food: Breakfast, Brunch and Lunch Edition (1965).

This book has some truly amazing recipes, so many that I didn't know where to start. I almost gave you the whole page devoted to nothing but salads that made me do double takes (ketchup and cherry gelatin, anyone?), but I think I'll save that for a salad post and give you a good overview of the book as a whole with one of Poppy's Patented Menus of Mayhem.

We'll start with the appetizer.

Chicken-Pineapple Treats are to cupcakes what sandwich loaves are to cakes. Here, we have pineapple-slice-sized bread rounds filled with pineapple slices, canned chicken, olives, pickle relish, and mayo, then frosted with cream cheese to make the scariest mini-cakes ever!

I'm saving the cherry-ketchup salad for later, but that doesn't mean you'll be deprived of weird-ass cherry-based salads with this menu.

This actually sounds pretty delightful if you like cherries-- lemon juice, orange gelatin, cherries, pecans... right up until you hit the stuffed green olives. Then you have to wonder whether Mrs. W. L. Hodgson was passive-aggressively punishing friends and family for not letting her have a real name, or whether she was a confused social climber who thought that randomly adding olives to everything was a way to class things up.

Since our meal is so much work-- appetizer (especially building, stacking, and icing all those little sandwiches!), salad, main dish, and dessert-- I thought I'd make the main dish easier by incorporating some canned food.

Just mix canned mushrooms and  macaroni and cheese (Mmmm.... Mushy!) with canned chicken à la king (which I didn't even know was a thing, but apparently, it still is!), then bake under enough bread crumbs with butter and cheese that it may start to taste decent if you mostly stick to the top layer....

You may have noticed that aside from a ton of olives, the menu doesn't have a whole lot of veggies. Maybe I should throw some in for dessert.

Squash-based desserts aren't that uncommon. (Grandma's "pumpkin" pie was almost always really made out of squash.) They're usually made to taste like pumpkin spice, though. This one is just flavored with butter, sugar, and vanilla, and maybe topped with meringue-- not a treatment I see too often. It's probably one of the blander squashy desserts, but-- I would guess-- the tastiest thing on this menu. (If you want to remedy that, just throw on a few stray leftover olives.)

Books like this are probably what made going out for brunch on the weekends so popular. You certainly wouldn't want to stay home and eat this instead!