More Surprises from the Lutheran Ladies

We know that Favorite Recipes of Lutheran Ladies: Traditional Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966) includes lots of sweets, especially for a book centered on meat. However, those Lutheran ladies can also take the sweet out of a recipe, too. 

For instance, I wondered what Sunshine Salad was doing in a meat cookbook. The recipe is usually kind of like a carrot cake changed its mind and decided it wanted to be Jell-O instead. There's no  meat involved! Those Lutheran ladies do keep the lemon gelatin, but their version of Sunshine Salad is otherwise very, very different.

Theirs is chicken and macaroni salad, congealed with peas, pickles, onions, and cheese for a truly inexplicable mold. Maybe Mrs. William Block sat in the sunshine too long and got delirious when she came up with this one?

Alternatively, Lutheran ladies just like to make their own way of doing things. When they get tired of plain old meatloaf, they dress it up...

...with a mustard meringue top hat! It's kind of a meatloaf version of baked Alaska. Well, except the middle is hot, not frozen. So not really baked Alaska at all. Okay, forget about the premise of making not-sweet versions of sweet things. Those Lutheran ladies just have their own way of looking at the world.

And when they have to face down a can of tamales, they don't go the obvious facehugger route. 

They go for an international mashup, using those tamales with pizza sauce, cheese, and olives as toppers on a cornmeal-mush-based crust. 

I'm never sure just what the Lutheran ladies are thinking, but they are full of surprises-- surprises that I hope will stay in their church potlucks, far away from me.