I did like the chicken tiptoeing past the salt shaker and pepper grinder. She's hoping she can escape before anybody realizes that dinner is sneaking away. I couldn't let her get away, though, so I picked this book up.
A lot of the collection consists of baked goods that sound perfectly fine-- so the pictures of cakes and pie on the cover are pretty representative of the recipes in this collection. You know I'm here for the weirder stuff, though!
The Minnesota Casserole may not strike you as weird because it is a pretty standard midwestern casserole.
Ground beef, onion, celery, various canned soups and veggies, rice, and soy sauce. The thing that shocked me was that Irene Agin labeled this as Minnesota. In any other regional cookbook I have, this would be called "Oriental Casserole" (or something similarly appalling) because of the soy sauce, rice, and Chinese noodles. The fact that this was accurately identified as something belonging more to the midwestern U.S. than to the far east impressed me far more than it probably should have.... The Hilltoppers shocked me without even trying!
If you want to get weirder, though, the Party Sweet Potatoes straddle the line of sweet and savory...
Whether canned onions and apricot halves in a brown sugar sauce sounds better or worse than marshmallows and/or canned pineapple as a sweet potato topper is your call.
Another oddity, the Baked Tomato does not involve an actual baked tomato.
Instead, it's a bread-pudding-ish concoction with tomato juice as the liquid.
And for the dieters, there's a weird little salad.
Ever yearned for kidney beans and shredded cabbage suspended in a jiggly mass of cottage cheese and French dressing? No? Well, that will make portion control a snap.
And now I wonder if the chicken on the cover of the cookbook is actually planning to cross the road because she lives near Mickey Shaw. Maybe she's just trying to escape the smell of Cottage Cheese and Kidney Bean Salad, and somebody up the road is baking a layer cake and just might have leftover crumbs to throw in the yard. A chicken can dream...
That baked tomato is disturbing. I thought that maybe bread with tomato juice was a way to pretend to have tomatoes in winter, kind of like apple pies made with Ritz crackers instead of apples. The cup of brown sugar nearly gagged me (much like the canned peas in the first recipe, or the terrible things done with gelatin in the last recipe). I guess that I'm glad that I am perfectly content eating eggs prepared in a simple way every day. Monotany makes life easier, and why mess with something that you know works?
ReplyDeleteYeah-- I'm much more likely to choose something I know I like than something I haven't tried before.
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