End the old year and begin the new one with some Methodist pig farmers

Let's end the year with some New-Year-appropriate dishes from Our Favorite Recipes (First United Methodist Church, Marion, Iowa, 1977).

For the New Year's Eve party, we'll need some appetizers. I'm always grossed out whenever my in-laws make the famous cauldron of cocktail franks with grape jelly and mustard, so let's go with a related variation.

It's meatballs in apple jelly and hot ketchup! I would have expected Iowans to go with, oh, pork meatballs in applesauce mixed with corn relish.

Once you've got the hot meat appetizer, you also need a cold meat one. How about one meat pretending to be another meat?

Braunschweiger Drumsticks allow your dad's favorite liver spread to masquerade as chicken legs, with the added bonus of eating the "bone."

And of course, no festive spread is complete without something pizzalicious. 

The Methodists apparently think cocktail rye spread with some common pizza toppers (olives, onions, tomato sauce) should also include the more divisive American cheese and the totally WTF chopped hard boiled eggs. Maybe that last ingredient is to make it easier to jumpstart the New Year's resolution to stop eating so many snacks.

The book also has the weight loss resolution covered, as you can start the new year with Po' Girls' Metracal.

I'm impressed that Betty Grant had her apostrophe rules down cold! We have an apostrophe for omitted letters AND a proper after-the-s plural possessive! I'm less impressed by the idea of starting a new year by drinking dry milk reconstituted with oily water. Can't po' girls just have a piece of fruit and a poached egg? That seems infinitely better, but I guess it's not a real resolution unless suffering is involved...?

Thanks to my sister for sending this book so we'll all know how to party and atone for said partying like a bunch of Iowan Methodists.