The Trotwood Madison Mothers Club just wants your money, okay? Don't make them put in too much effort for it.

I must have picked up Our Favorite Recipes (Trotwood Madison Mothers Club, Trotwood, Ohio, 1975) because it was cheap. Or maybe I felt a little sorry for it. 

Despite the lavish-looking two-tone cover, resplendent with blossoms and vintage cookware, this is a very sad effort at a community cookbook. I mean, sad. It has 25 total pages of recipes from the Mothers Club, padded out with a bunch of the usual filler pages community cookbook companies often provide (calorie charts, charts of how much ice cream you need if you're serving 100 people, etc.), plus several pages of cartoon recipes I recognized as being plagiarized directly from House & Garden's New Cook Book (1977). I really hope these moms did not pass their work ethic on to their children, as the teachers would have constantly been dealing with essays that were plagiarized and/ or about 17 words long.

I shouldn't be too surprised at the laziness of the book, given the recipes. The mothers' idea of cheese fondue was little more than "Heat up a can of cheddar cheese soup."

Okay, they added a little actual cheese and some French onion dip, but still... Definitely not the fancy wine-and-cheese concoctions of '70s dinner parties.

They loved the Sweet & Sour Pork craze, but thought Kraft barbecue sauce with extra vinegar might be easier than trying to make their own sauce.

I also think they must have really liked the sweet aspect, considering they include pineapple preserves rather than the plain old canned pineapple I usually see.

The moms also really loved sandwiches of the "spread some stuff on a bun and bake it" variety, like good old Weiner Mix Buns. 

Grind weiners, green peppers, and Velveeta (plus onion, maybe), smear that mix on a hot dog bun, and bake until it's hot. I'm not sure this method stretches the meat by much, but I guess it's an easy way to make sure the little kids don't choke on the hot dogs. 

And if you want to feel fancy about "spread on a bun" sandwiches, there's Meat Salad Hideaway Sandwiches.

I like that they include "luncheon meat spam." Super-busy moms can make up a big batch of spam-olives-eggs-catsup-cheese-onions-and-mayo buns, freeze them, and then give it their best guess as to how much longer the frozen versions will have to bake than the non-frozen variety. Eunice Murdock might have given an estimate, but putting that much work into it would have ruined the ethic of the book.

So that was my lazy review of the book, and here is my lazy ending: The End.