Garden Explosion Spectacular!

Now that growing season is underway, it's time to look at my cookbook with the massive garden-related title: Too Many Tomatoes, Squash, Beans, and Other Good Things: A Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes (Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers, 1976). 

When I was perusing this cookbook, a certain sense of sameness started to settle in. Each chapter is about a specific vegetable, and a lot of times, the chapters seem to cycle among a few common recommendations: the vegetable marinated in a vinaigrette and presented as a salad, the vegetable sautéed with onions and garlic, the vegetable whipped into a soufflé, the vegetable mixed into a batter and fried into a fritter, the vegetable served in a cream sauce. Maybe there should just have been a chapter listing a few preparations that would work with nearly any vegetable before it moved on to the more vegetable-specific recipes.

At least there are plenty of odd recipes to be found once you get past the stock recommendations. Many of them kind of undermine the specific vegetable focus of the chapter, asking for so many types of veggies that you wouldn't necessarily know which chapter it belonged to. For instance, the Fresh Enchilada Sauce recipe is in the pepper chapter...

...even though it's also loaded with onions, carrots, celery, and tomatoes (well, tomato sauce)--and I don't generally associate carrots or celery with enchiladas! This reminds me of a meal Mr. Crocker and I had at my grandma's house before he was aware of her propensity to be extremely open-minded about what ingredients were interchangeable. Shocked after a bite of home-prepared cheese pizza, he asked, "Why are there carrots in this?" Grandma had used a jar of garden vegetable marinara sauce as pizza sauce. So, this sauce might similarly startle those who are used to enchilada sauce being a smooth sauce with spices and tomato. 

Sometimes I looked at a recipe title through a modern lens without even realizing it. When I saw Broccoli Guacamole, I assumed it replaced some of the avocado in guacamole with puréed broccoli to help keep it green and cut down on calories, similar to the divisive modern pea guacamole. 

Nope! This is just a straight-up broccoli-based dip. Apparently people in the '70s saw the green color, rather than the addition of avocado, as the sign of a guacamole? (Plus, if they insisted on calling this a guacamole, why not Broccomole? That's a missed opportunity.)

Some seemed so vintage that I wasn't sure which '70s-appropriate way they might go. Will Rainbow Vegetable Ring consist of layers of vegetables in different shades of Jell-O, or will it layer different colors of veggie custard on top of each other before baking?

If you guessed the latter, you are correct! There's a green spinach-and-pea layer, an orange carrot-and-brown-sugar layer, and a white cauliflower-and-cheese layer. Whether those flavors go together is debatable, but vintage cooks never let questions like "How will it taste?" get in the way of a multicolored mold.

Of course, this book offered up plenty of veggie-containing desserts, too. Many were expected, like carrot cake and pumpkin pie. A few were unexpected but probably delightful concoctions, like Winter Squash Doughnuts.

Market them as Pumpkin Spice Doughnuts, and you'd probably sell them as fast as you could fry them in the fall. 

A few were, well, as we say in the midwest when we're trying to be nice, interesting. I thought Cabbage Strudel might be a savory recipe, starting as it does with cabbage and onion.

Then I got to the sugar, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg, and graham cracker crumbs. I can easily imagine this as disappointing both those who are ready for a savory appetizer-style bite and those who smell the cinnamon and sugar and are ready for dessert--only to find it's loaded up with shredded cabbage. But hey, at least it's way more memorable than being another iteration of creamed veggie or veggie soufflé!

If your garden is threatening to overwhelm you, you don't necessarily need this book. Just remember that those veggies can be vinaigretted, souffléd, frittered, cream sauced, etc. or, if you're feeling adventurous, mixed together and marketed as a sauce. (You only need one sauce-- just change the name to pizza sauce, enchilada sauce, marinara, chili, etc. based on how you plan to use it!) Alternatively, try grating or mashing a random veggie and throwing it into dessert! Dinner can always be a surprise when there are too many veggies.