The kitchen might not be quite so full of joy as the title or the woman dancing with a bouquet on the cover might suggest, though. The book starts out with a lament suggesting that putting together community cookbooks is not necessarily as easy as it might seem to readers.
There's no winning for those who share their recipes: they're too silly or serious, too lazy to create their own recipes or too fond of showing off the recipes they've created, too stingy or generous in their choices of which recipes to publish. The ending suggests that they Assembly of God members might not naturally be this cynical in their outlooks, though, as the whole poem is swiped from another source.
One thing I really enjoyed about this book is that it had so many Mexican-American food terms before the spelling was standardized and/or easy to look up. (It took me a while to figure out that camino was probably their way of spelling cumin, for example. Let me know if I'm wrong on that, and the recipes are really calling for a teaspoon of rust off a Chevy tailpipe!) My favorite alternate spelling was probably this one for chimichanga.
"Bean Chime Chunga" just sounds like a name for an ill-conceived wind chime made by hanging a few cans of refried beans that really make a racket when they hit the house in a high wind.
I was not always sure of the merits of the Mexican-American recipes, though. I'm not exactly sold on the idea of canned tamales to begin with....
And I'm not sure that plunking them on top of a layer of cooked lasagna noodles (or covering in "Mozarilla" cheese and "tomatoe" sauce) would really do a lot to improve them.
When I saw that the book had some vegetarian loaf recipes, I was hoping I might find some spicy, Southwestern spins on the stodgy, dense bricks that other cookbooks of the era offered.
Apparently, though, meatless loaves were not really adapted to the area cuisine. No spicy black bean loaves with enchilada sauce or anything like that. Just mushrooms, cottage cheese, and oats held together with tomato sauce and eggs, seasoned with sage. Sigh.
At least the whole recipe seemed to be there for the Mushroom Loaf. I have a feeling that something got left out of the Weight Watchers Pumpkin Supreme recipe.
Canned pumpkin with milk, sweetener, and spices is just.... sweet pumpkin soup, right? Why bake it? I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be a custard and the eggs are missing. Even if we accept that it's missing the eggs, though, I'm still curious how we get two four-ounce servings from eight ounces of canned pumpkin and six ounces of milk. Math is not my specialty, but I suspect this is one of those diet recipes that fudges the numbers so diners can feel like they're really cutting back without having to fully go through with it. (Of course my dessert is only four ounces. It said so right in the recipe!)
I'm not sure how joyful these recipes would make my kitchen, but the book sure brightened up my day as I pondered its mysteries.
I was a bit puzzled by the mushroom loaf. It calls for a small can of mushrooms, then talks about using 1/2 the can of mushroom SOUP in the loaf, and 1/2 on top. Were you supposed to mix the mushrooms with something, or does the juice on the canned mushrooms make it a "soup"? So many questions. I guess in an era when dinner came in "loaf" form, you had to make you veggie dishes that way as well.
ReplyDeleteI think they actually mean cream of mushroom soup. Use half with the other ingredients in the loaf and half as the sauce on top. It's a pretty common maneuver.
DeleteI figured that, too, but it still sounded strange, especially if you didn't read the instructions before making the shopping list (and don't keep canned soup in the house).
DeleteYes! It really does seem to be calling for canned mushrooms in one place and canned mushroom soup in the other. Maybe they were so used to mushroom soup that they forgot there was any other kind of canned mushrooms!
DeleteSo...if you bake watered down pumpkin puree mixed with spices, you get flavored pumpkin that slightly caramelizes. I think that recipe may be complete as is and the baking lets the pumpkin steam in the custard cups so it, with the small amount of dairy, becomes more pudding like. Pumpkin, being high fiber, without any additional fat would totally be "diet" food.
ReplyDeleteThat could be. A lot of diet foods had eggs in them (protein!) and all the similar modern recipes I found have eggs, so my theory is still that the eggs were forgotten. You could be right, though, and your explanation makes sense! We don't have Sis Field to ask.
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