the good old days

Y’know, when I’m out of time, I just tell my kids, “No dessert.” That takes a lot less time than even instant Jell-O pudding! (I should market these genius ideas some time…)

Commercial found via Kitchen Retro, with a nice recipe for Strawberry Sparkle…

This is the food pyramid.

This is not.

Seriously, the food pyramid was developed to emphasize that different types of food were appropriate in different amounts. The “classic” Four Food Groups placed grains, fruits and vegetables, dairy, and meat on essentially equal footing, which was ridiculous. In fact, the last of the four can be dispensed with entirely. (OK, by the 1980s, beans were half-heartedly acknowledged as belonging in the “meat/protein” group, but they didn’t get much mention in my elementary school health classes—and none in my parents’.)

The food pyramid fixed that, with the foods we should be eating more of filling out its broad base. Foods we ought to eat less are situated higher up. However, as I discovered on a recent visit to Ed Venture, the current pyramid has slid back to being nothing more than the slightly more nuanced version of 1956’s Four Groups that I head about as a kid. Sure, the “Meat & Beans” wedge is narrower, but that’s a lot less effective than relegating it to the upper tiers. No doubt the Beef Board is very happy.

What do you do when you have a real craving for sushi, but all that’s in your wallet is a coupon for a two-piece Popeyes Bonafide spicy fried chicken dinner?

Get creative.

This and many other meals (quiche! lo mein! tortellini!) can be seen at Fancy Fast Food, proving that presentation really is everything.

It reminds me a lot of this Penn & Teller clip — with less profanity, and admitting up-front what’s in the food.

Is frankfurter casing really that much of an issue [insert Mohel joke here], or is it more like when kids “need” to have the crusts cut off a peanut butter sandwich?

image from Retrospace

If your family is more tolerant, then you can go for really upscale hot dog choices — Oscar Mayer wieners with a sack-o-sauce! The wiener the world awaited!

image from clotho98’s Flickr

Last month, Recovered Recipes posted a recovered recipe that really caught my interest — Mock Salmon Roast.

Mock Salmon Roast
1 1/2 cups grated carrot
1 cup cooked rice
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 cup warm milk
1 egg
2 T oil
1 medium onion
Sage and salt to taste

Mix peanut butter with warm milk until blended. Add remaining ingredients and mix until combined. Bake at 350F for 45-60 minutes.

I was very curious to see whether peanut butter, rice, sage, and carrots would manage to come even close to tasting like salmon. I’m also curious how somebody came up with this recipe. If I’m thinking of salmon loaf, then thinking of potential replacement ingredients, “peanut butter and carrots” wouldn’t be the first that come to mind. But then I realized there wasn’t anything coming to mind. “Salmon loaf” means “salmon”, and it’s hard to shift the omnivore train of thought once it’s on the tracks.

By far the weirdest step was mixing peanut butter into warm milk. It doesn’t really smoothly blend, it just turns into tiny peanut butter globules floating in milk — mixed enough for the recipe, but odd to look at.

I almost forgot to add the rice, which would have really ruined the texture.

It definitely needs to be baked in a loaf pan (or even a small casserole dish), because prior to baking, it’s very liquid.

I admit, it’s not much to look at. It’s all squishy and flat. (I wasn’t concentrating on presentation; a bed of lettuce would drastically improve the visual aesthetic.)

But the taste is pretty good!

Vegetarian and vegan meals can be absolutely delicious. When you try to make vegetarian versions of specific meat dishes, however, things can get dicey — there are very few dishes which authentically emulate the flavor and texture of what they’re pretending to be. (Most people have tried a veggie burger once in their life, and said, “Well, well, that doesn’t taste like beef at all.”) The trick is to stop pretending that you’re eating a non-vegetarian dish. Our local health food store makes some very good meals, such as Vegan Chicken Kiev — if you take a bite of Vegan Chicken Kiev and expect it to taste exactly like a chicken cutlet filled with butter, you’ll be disappointed. Once you start thinking of it as a totally different dish (faux-chicken wrapped around some sort of rice-and-herb stuffing, then breaded), it’s delicious.

And that was the case with the Mock Salmon Loaf. It’s a healthy meal, with vegetables and protein and carbohydrates all mixed together in one convenient package. It tastes interesting (in a good way) and has a nice texture. It even looks like a pinky-orange meatloaf, just as a “real” salmon loaf does. But it doesn’t taste exactly like salmon, unless you haven’t had salmon in a very long time.

Today, the two-year-old found a Tootsie Roll Pop that his sister had left lying around the house. Familiar with suckers, he made it clear that he wanted it. At first, I was a bit leery, lest he choke or something on the Tootsie Roll center. Then I remembered this.

The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon was contemporaneous with my childhood, but the commercial is much older. It dates from the 1960s, and you can still see it on television today.

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing

Apple pie with a dutch crumb topping (Miranda @ A Duck in Her Pond)

Buttermilk spice cake (Mary @ One Perfect Bite)

Chocolate cherry pie

Dilly Potato Salad (Gloria @ Cookbook Cuisine)

Election Day Cake

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie

I will update links to all the previous delicious entries as I get them.

For the letter “F” recipe, I had a dish in mind that I had bookmarked a while ago. (I could probably manage almost any letter of the alphabet, including Q — my “to cook” bookmark folder has something like a hundred retro recipes, with varying levels of ewww). So on Sunday, I cheerfully pulled up the bookmark for what I had labelled as “Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie”, and realized the recipe name was actually “Christmas Meringue Pie.”Whatever. I’m BRINGING fruit cocktail meringue pie, that’s all I know.

This recipe comes from Flickr, from a vintage advertisement unsettlingly titled, “Look what you can do with fruit cocktail and dairy foods!”

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie: Combine 1 envelope Knox gelatine, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp salt in top of double boiler. Stir in 3/4 cup syrup from fruit cocktail, 2 beaten egg yolks. Cook over boiling water, stirring often, 15 minutes, till slightly thickened. Remove from heat, stir in 1 cup commercial sour cream, 2 tbsps lemon juice. Cool till thickened. Fold in 1-1/2 cup drained canned fruit cocktail. Turn into baked 9-inch pie shell. Top with Marshmallow Meringue. Sprinkle with toasted coconut. Chill 2 hours or longer.

For meringue: melt 16 marshmallows with 1 tbsp lemon juice and 1 tbsp syrup from fruit cocktail, over low heat, stirring often. Cool. Beat 2 egg whites with 1/4 tsp salt till stiff. Gradually beat in 1/4 cup sugar. Fold in marshmallow mixture.

I didn’t expect this to be complicated by just glancing over the recipe, but it turns out to require double-boiling a custard, chilling for a couple hours, melting marshmallows, and beating egg whites. Rather like Election Day Cake, there’s a lot of effort required — the question was whether it would pay off in the end.

A zabaglione is a very fussy egg-yolk custard, requiring stirring in a bowl over steam (or using a double boiler, if your kitchen is so endowed) until your arm falls off or the mixture thickens. I was rather surprised to see it showing up in a fruit cocktail pie recipe, particularly including gelatin and then being added to sour cream; it seems with thickeners like that, you wouldn’t really need to cook your egg yolk until it solidified. I suppose they did that just to put the separated eggs to full use or something.

Note my ultra-fancy, incredibly upscale double boiler. (I don’t recommend trying this if you don’t have a Pyrex bowl, though.)

Putting a tasty zabaglione in with sour cream just feels wrong somehow, but for the moment I’ll trust the recipe…

Melting marshmallows is fun. We also have a recipe for grasshopper pie which requires marshmallow melting, and it’s great to see them slowly shrinking and turning to thick goo.

After assembly, chilling, and a sprinkling of coconut, it looks really impressive.

It’s a little on the sweet side, and definitely very firm (which means it will stand up well to being in summer heat for our picnic). Overall, it’s tasty and fun. Would I want to make it again… maybe for a special occasion. (The ice cream Jell-o pie is a lot less work, albeit also a lot meltier.)

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing

Apple pie with a dutch crumb topping (Miranda @ A Duck in Her Pond)

Buttermilk spice cake (Mary @ One Perfect Bite)

Chocolate cherry pie

Dilly Potato Salad (Gloria @ Cookbook Cuisine)

Election Day Cake

I will update links to all the previous delicious entries as I get them.

For the letter “E” recipe, the only things I could thing of were eggs or eggplant; I looked through my archives and found three “E” dishes which could qualify. Egg nog was eliminated because we never took a picture of it (shame, because Grandpa’s Egg Nog is quite the party drink), and egg drop soup, while delicious, savory, and inexpensive for large groups, just doesn’t feel very picnic-like. Election Day Cake, however, is a recipe that’s designed for large groups.

Election Day was originally a huge party in the US, a day when people didn’t work, but instead hung out in the town square and had picnics and various patriotic activities. Like any good picnic, it meant cooking lots of food for lots of people. So big loaf-like cakes, yeast-based fruitcakes basically, were baked for the occasion and became known as Election Day Cake. (Credit where credit’s due, I originally got the recipe and idea to make it from Historiann.) I learned quite a lot of things, including “baking powder is a wonderful invention” (yeast is a hassle!), and “your puny kitchen mixer is no match for Election Day Cake” (but I did get a new mixer out of the deal).

Whenever I try a 100+ year old recipe, I am amazed by the cooking skills of our forebears, who managed to make a huge batch of cakes with no power tools and wood-fired stoves and all sorts of inconveniences. Of course, the picnic participants will only enjoy the delightful cake and its bits of candied citron, and won’t have to bake the thing themselves. It really is delicious, and if you’re ever going to an actual Election Day party, I highly recommend making it — it’s both tasty and an excellent conversation piece.

Louise of Months of Edible Celebrations has invited us to a picnic, and we are only too happy to attend. It’s not a particularly real picnic; instead, a bunch of bloggers are getting together and playing the Picnic game, and sharing recipes with a particular letter.

If you’re not familiar with the Picnic Game, it’s a great way to kill time on roadtrips. Somebody starts with, “I’m going on a picnic, and I’m going to bring [food starting with A]“. The next player has to bring “[A-food], and [B-food]“, the next person brings “[A-food], [B-food], and [C-food]” — remembering what the first player chose for the menu, and adding their own contribution at the end. You keep going through the alphabet until somebody can’t remember the previous dozen or so dishes… or, preferably, you arrive at your destination. (Months of Edible Celebrations has a more complete description, including detailed rules of how to play it online with a bunch of bloggers.)

I got the letters E and F, and I promised to NOT bring “frankfurters in gelatin with hardboiled eggs and celery” (or soup shakes, which luckily aren’t my letter anyway). Stay tuned for the dishes.

Here’s a cute little cereal advertisement (featuring a puppy!) from the 1950s, which harkens back to even simpler times before.

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Listening to any commercial, I automatically pick apart any unusual claims. Grape nuts apparently had more energy per spoonful than any other breakfast cereal in 1955. No doubt, this was true, since Grape Nuts are really dense. They’re just “homogenized nuggets” of baked grains (and now I know which grains), compact in shape (unlike corn flakes) and lacking the air pockets common to so many cereals. That’s why Grape Nuts are sold in smaller boxes than most other mass-market breakfast foods.

I like Grape Nuts, although I haven’t eaten them for breakfast in years. I wouldn’t want to eat them every day though. They kind of weigh on the stomach. While I can understand how parents with fickle, finicky children might benefit from having only one food available for breakfast (avoiding a lot of whining and indecision), I pretty shocked to see the entire kitchen cupboard completely jammed full of Grape Nuts and nothing else.

Maybe it’s a good idea to keep unnecessary complications—unnecessary decisions—from cluttering up your life, but frankly, I think the gains to be had on the food choice front are pretty minimal. And I enjoy some variety on my breakfast.