Plan-Ahead for Disappointment

I love ideas about how to use leftovers. A lot of times they sound pretty good, of course, but the concoctions can just as often lead to recipes that are clearly the product of someone panicking and, say, cramming all the leftovers together into a Jell-O mold. Hoping for the latter, I picked up The Plan-Ahead Cookbook: 300 Delectable Ways to Use Leftovers (Ceil Dyer, 1969).

The Spice Islands jars are so prominent on the cover that I initially thought this might have been commissioned by Spice Islands, but a closer inspection reveals there are actually more McCormick canisters in the picture-- they just aren't facing out. Nobody is actually sponsoring this book.

In any case, spice doesn't always play much of a role anyway, like in this Noodle Pie. I initially imagined it would be a pie with a noodle-and-egg mixture as the crust and a spaghetti-sauce-like filling, but I was very wrong.

This is hot carb-on-carb action, with noodles (seasoned with ham, onions, salt, and pepper, and lubricated with a bit of sour cream) sandwiched between two pastry crusts! 

Even entries that I would expect to be a bit spicier don't really come through, as the Quick Chicken Enchiladas mostly rely on the seasoning of the "medium can chili sauce, without beans" (which I initially assumed to mean canned chili, given that things sold as "chili sauce" tend not to have beans in them anyway, so specifying the kind without the beans wouldn't really even make sense-- but then again, it would be hard to dip tortillas in actual canned chili, so maybe Dyer is trying to clear up 1960s cooks' confusion about canned chili vs. chili sauce in the most confusing way possible?).

In any case, I think I'm actually less appalled by the lack of spice than by the instructions to roll shredded lettuce in the tortillas with the chicken before baking. Fresh, crispy lettuce atop a taco? Yum! Hot, soggy lettuce in an enchilada? No thanks. And thinking that American or Swiss cheese is a suitable cheesy topper does not help matters...

Still, though, does the book have mounds of Jell-O full of random shit? Yes, it does. Well, lovers of pork chops and applesauce may not see the contents of this mold as entirely random, as it does include both pork and applesauce.

However, I don't think the pork-chops-and-applesauce crowd generally imagine the dish as being encased in gelatin with olives and hard-cooked eggs, either.

Ceil Dyer really likes the cold pork and fruit combo. This is the one that really got to me.

The cold ham mousse sounds about as good as one can hope for a recipe like this, consisting mostly of ham salad ingredients in unflavored gelatin aerated by whipped cream. The spicy fruit salad filling, though...?

It's great for anyone who has ever wanted pickled peaches and ripe bananas to mingle with avocado, chives, parsley, and mayonnaise... And for that relatively small (I would assume) subset of humanity, they still have to want to eat this concoction as an adjunct to the ham mousse. This would not be super-popular, I imagine. But hey, the book has "300 delectable ways to use leftovers." If you don't like this, I guess you're just going to have to pick another one and convince yourself that it's delectable. That noodle pie is sounding better all the time...