the good old days

Credit where credit’s due — the image is originally from jbcurio’s Flickr set. There’s lots of crazy old stuff in there.

Venturing back into the realms of probably-horrible, this week I decided to try Pie Plate Salad. It’s a pretty typical-looking example of vegetables put into gelatin, and also seems to strongly support the theory that gelatin was just a way to flaunt the fact that you could afford a refrigerator. Why else would you want mixed vegetables and lemon Jell-O in the same dish?

When shopping for ingredients, I was taken aback to actually find Veg-All on the shelves. I’d never heard of it before seeing the ad, proving I’m not an expert in canned mixed vegetable brand names. (Nobody’s perfect.)

Making this is only slightly harder than making plain lemon Jell-O… so, really really (not) hard. Mix water with Jell-O and pour in vegetables… and wait.

If you get something that looks like the Jolly Green Giant sneezed on your plate, you’ve done it right.

The most surprising thing about this recipe was not that it was disgusting — I fully expected that. But it wasn’t the Jell-O that was bad. It tasted… well, edible, if you concentrated on the carrots and corn. Unfortunately, the Veg-All brand of mixed vegetables doesn’t stop with just carrots and corn; it also has peas, green beans, lima beans, potatoes, and celery, and possibly a few other vegetables that are too traumatic for me to remember. And lima beans, bad enough on their own, are incredibly revolting when paired with sweet citrus slime. Don’t even get me started on the mushy celery.

And that’s something about vintage recipe advertising that I never really understood. After making Pie Plate Salad, I will never, ever, under any circumstances, buy Veg-All mixed vegetables, even if I’m shopping for a food drive. Claiming that Pie Plate Salad is a great use of your product is a quick way to convince me you’re a liar and possibly also dangerously insane — is that really the image you want your product to have?

In early March, it is SUPPOSED to be something like 60 degrees; instead, we had a snow day yesterday. (It’s worth noting that a “snow day” in South Carolina simply indicates that there was a prediction for a chance of snow greater than 50%, and so the entire region panicked and closed the schools. You should see them when it actually snows. I shouldn’t laugh, but come on, folks — must you act like flurries are not a sign of the End Times?) In that spirit, I decided to go with a warm winter drink this week. Via the charming recipes of RecipeCurio.com, we bring you…

(Depending on what region of the country you’re from, this could be Hot Soda, Hot Pop, or Hot Coke.)

WINTER WARMER
HOT DR PEPPER

Clever people who enjoy something different–-devilishly different and delicious–-will welcome this exciting Winter Warmer . . . Hot Dr Pepper! Easy to prepare-–simply heat Dr Pepper in a saucepan until it steams and pour into a glass or cup over a slice of lemon. Perfect for the family or when friends drop in-–and take along a thermos of Hot Dr Pepper when enjoying outdoor activities. Hot Dr Pepper–-the distinctive Winter Warmer!

Seriously, doesn’t this read like a crazy marketing stunt? Hmmm, our sales drop off in winter months when everyone’s too cold to want a nice iced soft drink… let’s encourage them to HEAT it instead! I’ve had warm soda, and it wasn’t a taste which made me want it to be even warmer.

But I’m willing to give it a fair shot. Let’s see, how did that recipe go again… ah yes:

(1) boil Dr Pepper, and

(2) drink it.

To give other soft drinks equal opportunity to shine, I tried the same recipe with Cheerwine. It’s a local beverage (produced by the Carolina Beverage Corporation, making it just as Southern as Coca Cola) that Buzz calls a Dr Pepper knock-off, but is actually more cherry and less cola. (The company calls the flavor “unbridled deliciousness”, which is not all that descriptive.)

And the verdict? There’s a reason this idea never caught on. The kindest description I can manage is “drinkable”; I finished it, but I won’t ever make it again. Both ended up tasting like bad (albeit sweet) tea. It was quite fruity; the cola flavors of the Dr Pepper were basically gone, although it did still have a more caramel flavor than the ultra-cherry Cheerwine. If you’ve ever had Celestial Seasoning’s Red Zinger (or any raspberry-based herbal tea), then you’ve got the general idea. The lemon wedge was vital for making the drink palatable. I must admit though, it was much better than drinking warm soda — but not nearly as good as an icy cold soda. The fizziness just isn’t there after it’s been boiled!

Stick with a nice cup of cocoa for winter drinking.

Pre-children, we never used a lot of milk in our house; Buzz has always been mildly lactose intolerant, so it was only used for the occasional recipe. Now, though, the two kids get plenty of milk every day (yes, I’ve fallen for the Dairy Council’s message that MILK BUILDS BONES). The local health-and-organic grocery store has milk in actual glass bottles from a organic, no-hormone Virginia dairy. You can return the bottles for a deposit (and should, since it’s a $2 deposit), and it’s just a seriously awesome way to buy milk. The bottles are just cool.

Unfortunately, the milk occasionally has a tendency to go off before the expiration date, far more than any other brand of milk I’ve ever bought. The store is always quite nice about it and exchanges for a fresh bottle with no questions asked, and it’s (kinda) on the way home so it isn’t extremely inconvenient. Tonight, we opened a bottle that allegedly had 3 days to go, and noticed it was sour… and Buzz decided, “Hey, people used to cook with this stuff, that would make it a Retro Recipe ingredient, right?”

Well… he’s right, but I’m not feeding it to the kids until he eats it with no ill effects.

See those chunks on the glass? That’s how you know it’s, uh, “good” for this recipe, originally from The Pioneer Cook Book.

Mrs. Ethington’s Old-Fashioned Muffins
2 cups uncooked oatmeal
1 1/2 cups sour milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup melted shortening
1 well-beaten egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

Pour sour milk over oatmeal; allow to stand a few hours or overnight. Combine sugar, shortening and egg; add to oatmeal mixture. Sift together remaining dry ingredients; blend. Bake in greased or paper-lined muffin tins at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Makes 18 muffins.

After soaking up sour milk overnight, the oats had become a very solid mass. It broke up without too much trouble when stirred into the other ingredients, but it was interesting getting it out of the bowl.

The muffins themselves were good — a little on the bland side, though, so use a whole 1 teaspoon of salt instead of the 1/2 the recipe calls for. They are certainly hearty, and probably good for you with all that oatmeal goodness.

I’ll give it 24 hours before I feel really comfortable stating that the sour milk wasn’t a bad idea, though. Buttermilk would give the same tang (which wasn’t really obvious in the end product), and unspoiled milk should taste just as good — why use the spoiled stuff when there are alternatives? (Unless you happen to write a weird blog chronicling your occasional attempts to poison your family, of course, in which case go nuts.)

I have a fair number of bookmarks of retro recipes I want to try, often from other retro-ish blogs I read. While searching through them for this week’s cooking adventure, I found this:

Sorry, readers. I’ve done one vintage meat-and-gelatin dish, and that was more than enough, even if it is the most popular post I’ve ever written. (The jellied frankfurter nightmare also called for hard-boiled eggs, though. I’d wonder if this was a trend in jellied meat salad, except that would mean I have to think about jellied meat salad, and I don’t really want to.) So enjoy the deceptively attractive picture, because this is all you’ll ever see. (Thanks, Mad Vortex.)

So instead, our first retro recipe of the new year will be Ground Beef Grand Style. (Good eating! Easy fixing!) A typical recipe-disguised-as-advertisement, it insists you use Philadelphia Cream Cheese (which is still available) and Ballard biscuit dough (which is not — well, not exactly; was bought up by Pilsbury in 1951, but the biscuits were still apparently sold under the Ballard label for some time, since this recipe is from 1963).

GROUND BEEF GRAND STYLE
1 can Ballard OvenReady Biscuits
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1 cup chopped onion
1 package (8 oz.) Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese
1 can (10 1/2 oz.) cream of mushroom or chicken soup
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup catsup
1/3 cup sliced stuffed olives, if desired

Brown ground beef and onions, drain.

Combine softened cream cheese, soup, milk. Add salt, catsup, olives, ground beef. Pour into 2-quart casserole. Bake at 375°, 10 minutes.

Place Biscuits around edge of casserole; if desired, top with olive slices. Bake at 375°, 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

While fetching the camera to document this attempt, my daughter stopped to take about twenty pictures of things around the house. This is one of our cats. I think I will start an exhibition, “Random household objects and occupants, out of focus and overexposed.”

SOMEBODY brought home olives that were not stuffed, and instead were “Southwestern Olives with Herbs and Napa Valley Chardonnay”. (La-de-dah! CHARDONNAY!) The Southwestern appelation is from the jalapeños that were pickled along with the olives (and, for some weird reason, carrot slices), which gave the olives a peppery tang — they were spicier than the pickled jalapeño peppers. The Chardonnay did nothing except increase the price, but that didn’t matter because these were 50% off on closeout.

We mixed all the ingredients together with the Super Wonderful Fantabulous Mixer. Daughter poured things in. The cream cheese, milk, and mushroom soup make a very rich, creamy base for the other ingredients.

I’m not really sure why this has to be baked for 10 minutes to begin with, because it added nothing (except perhaps warmth) to the cheese-meat-olive mixute. Oh, and see that little glass bowl full of brown liquid there, next to the casserole dish? That’s the collected fat from 1.5 pounds of ground beef. Now I remember why I frequently use ground turkey (or veggie-based meat substitute)…

Except for a little running over at the edges, the casserole baked up nicely. Since we didn’t have the appropriately pimentoed olives, I am including an artist’s rendition of the dish so you know what it would have looked like. (It’s surprisingly lifelike.)

The main difference between reality (above) and advertisement (below) is that the meat-cheese mixture doesn’t appear to have been baked in the advertisement image. I guess it does look better all creamy and pale than it does baked.

But more important than artistic rendering is the flavor. (This make probably 8-10 servings, rather than the 5-6 listed in the original advertisement.) And what is the overall opinion of Ground Beef Grand Style?

Meh.

It was pretty good for the first few bites. But overall, it’s salty (do NOT add the 1 teaspoon salt), and not very flavorful. It turns out the Southwestern Olives purchase was serendipitous — at least there was SOME taste from those jalapeños. There’s too much cream cheese and not enough vegetable/meat bits. The biscuits, sitting on gooey cream cheese while cooking, were still raw on the bottom.

By the time we made it through one serving, neither Buzz nor I wanted more. Toddler Son refused to eat even a biscuit (unusually sensible of him), and showed his disapproval by throwing food on the floor. Preschooler Daughter, however, insisted it was delicious and cleaned her plate… which rather makes me wonder just what sort of crap they feed her at preschool.

Aside from bland gooey underwhelming flavor, the name is just dumb. Alternative ideas:

• Cheesy Hamburger Biscuit Pie
• Cholesterol Pie
• Ground Beef Scumpy Style
• Ground Beef Drowned In Goo
• Did The Cat Barf On My Plate Or Did You Make Ground Beef Grand Style Again

Oh well. We had fun, lots of laughs, and didn’t throw up afterwards, which is really what we hope for in these recipes. (Finding a good one is just a bonus.)

Recipe is via RecipeCurio.com, which accurately labels itself as a blog of “charming vintage recipes.”

This was the worst thing I’ve made in a while. (Not as bad as Jellied Frankfurters, but then what could possibly be as bad as Jellied Frankfurters?) Today’s fable has many morals, and I’ll walk you through each one of them. Consider it a rough draft for the home economics book I could write someday.

1. When you want to cook, have a recipe.
Unless you’re Masahari Morimoto, it’s risky to just throw things together and expect them to taste good. It can work for stir fried vegetables, but not for baked goods.

2. Having a recipe in the house isn’t enough. Know where your recipe is and look at it before you start
Unsurprisingly, this is where my problems started. I knew I had a lemon meringue pie recipe on an old Jello advertisement I’d previously used for a retro recipe.

I also knew I had some lemon gelatin. So, I started making the lemon gelatin.

3. When you have found your recipe, and when you realize you haven’t been following it at all, and in fact it’s not a recipe but an instruction to look somewhere else that doesn’t exist, don’t start combining other recipes.
When I decided to actually look at the recipe, I panicked. There wasn’t a recipe there at all, just this annoying little note:

Directions on the box?!?

At this point, I realized (a) I should have been using Jello Pudding, not Jello Gelatin and (b) Jello Pudding does not print lemon meringue pie recipes on its Lemon Jello Pudding boxes any longer. Arrrrrgh.

So I had no recipe. Thanks to Google, I managed to find one that called for lemon Jello combined with Cool Whip, and then made another critical mistake…

4. “Whipped topping” and “cream cheese” are not the same thing.
While it’s possible to combine cream cheese and gelatin (I’ve seen it done and it’s quite tasty), it’s almost impossible to do so by hand with cold cream cheese.

Before:

After (in crust):

See the little white bits? That’s teeny chunks of cream cheese which weren’t properly blended. Whisking by hand just won’t work for this.

I tried to repair my mixer (which won’t turn off and smells of burnt wiring, ever since it sucked up Election Cake batter), and Buzz and I each wasted a good half hour trying to remove this one stupid two-inch-long bolt that was holding the damn thing together. All the others came out fine, but THAT one had to strip. And if you can’t get into a mixer, you can’t clean out the gunked-up motor, so you can’t keep it from wildly sparking and potentially electrocuting you while mixing.

5. You won’t get nice stiff peaks in your egg whites if you whisk by hand.
Same problem as with the lemon filling… not enough mixing power without my mixer, although I came close before my arm fell off. The peaks were present, but wimpy rather than stiff. My pie topping desperately needed Viagra. (Meringue lasting more than four hours… ?)

Without those spiky little peaks, you don’t get the same light browning and drying-out that makes for a really tasty meringue.

6. Meringue is not spelled with a “Q”
I don’t know why, but I have a constant compulsion to type MERINQUE. No wonder my blog only rates at a junior high school level.

It isn’t the worst pie I’ve ever had, but it’s down there. The filling was bland, the meringue was insipid, the overall experience was thoroughly pointless. It was a refresher course in culinary stupidity, though, as well as a compelling argument to buy a new mixer

This week is the South Carolina State Fair, and since for once we’re actually living in a state capitol, Buzz and I took the kids. And it was great. We saw some really cool pheasants, lots of dairy cows, horse slalom (I don’t know the correct term for this, but it’s riding a horse as fast as possible weaving through some poles), very neat crafts and artwork, and of course the obligatory midway rides, games, and carnival food.

One of the first booths by the entrance had the infamous Deep Fried Candy. Snickers, Oreos, Reeses Cups, Cookie Dough, even Pepsi (I’m surprised it wasn’t Coke, since this is The South) — all battered and deep fried. So Buzz bought us some deep fried chocolate chip cookie dough.

Now, I’m a fan of cookie dough. The yield of a “makes 60 cookies” recipe will, for me, probably be 20% less. (I blame the economy.) However, I only like cold cookie dough. At room temperature, it starts to taste a little less appealing, and you might as well just bake it. And now I know that if it’s hot… if it’s been, let’s say, deep fried… it’s disgusting. I’ll eat pretty much anything, but I didn’t want another one of those.

What struck me as particularly odd about it was that it had dusting of powdered sugar. When you’ve just invented deep fried cookie dough, it takes a particularly dedicated sweet tooth to say, “This would be totally awesome if it just had more sugar on top!” Maybe there’s a demented dentist out there creating this crap.

And the scariest part of the experience? Six hours later we were leaving the fair. I thought to myself, Gosh, I’d like some more deep fried cookie dough. And then I thought, Um, WHAT? That was horrible, I don’t want more! My stupid side replied, Ahhh, c’mon! It’ll taste good this time. Mmmm, cookie dough!

I didn’t get more.

Photo borrowed from the Food Network, which has a recipe if you’re crazy enough to want this when the fair isn’t in town.

Before we delve into this week’s recipe, I’d like to share something that’s been bugging me for a few days. Now, I’m sure you’re reading this thanks to phonics, that wonderful system by which a word like “antidisestablishmentarianism” can be broken down into reasonable sections, and thereby pronounced. Unfortunately, phonics fails me when I have to use Knox Gelatine in a recipe. It’s that pesky “e” at the end of the word. It makes a long-I, which says EYE, instead of a short-I, which says EEE. So, a word spelled G-E-L-A-T-I-N-E is technically correctly pronounced “jell-a-tyne.” Without an “e”, it would be “jell-a-tin.”

So when I see Gelatine, I hear “gelatin” in my head because that’s a much more familiar pronunciation (even Firefox spellcheck is refusing to acknowledge gelatine as valid). But I see the “e” at the end and an annoying little voice shouts, “Jell-a-TYNE! Um… jell-a-teen?” This results in a temporarily distraction from my normal sensible approach to food, and I end up cooking something like Jellied Bouillon with Frankfurters.

(I actually found this after first landing on the terrifying Corned Tongue in Aspic. I will not buy tongue. It’s not gonna happen. Look elsewhere for sheer masochism. I don’t even know where to buy tongue, and I am not going to find out.)

JELLIED BOUILLON WITH FRANKFURTERS
Use beef stock; place frankfurters upright; hard-cooked eggs, sliced; diced celery. Frankfurters take on new glamour in this gleaming aspic.

From 500 Snacks: Bright Ideas for Entertaining (1941), Culinary Arts Institute

Glamour indeed. I challenge anyone to come up with a sentence using both “frankfurters” and “glamour” — and I won’t accept “Frankfurters are not usually associated with glamour.”

Anyway, Jellied Bouillon with Frankfurters appeared quite simple, like any good ingredient-centric recipe. I decided to jazz it up a little bit by making the frankfurters more visually appealing. (I had to do something — my hot dogs were too tall to fit in my bundt pan.) You can’t do much with diced celery, jellied bullion, or sliced eggs — but hot dogs, those turn into adorable little octopi.

Cut the bottom of the hot dog into 8 eighths, cook, and voila, curly little legs. You can even carve teeny smiles and eyes into them. Guaranteed to make preschoolers happy.

Once the eggs and celery were cut up and my hot dogs were octopussed, they all went into the bundt pan

and got covered with gelatined broth. (Ewwwww.)

Then it sat in the fridge for two hours. Reeeeally easy. Even popping it out of the mold was easy. But that’s when I started to have some misgivings. Some of the bouillon I’d used to make broth hadn’t dissolved, so there was some grit on top of the molded ring. You also couldn’t see anything besides the hard-boiled egg slices. The aspic was not “gleaming” so much as “very muddy”.

The pretty celery leaf garnish didn’t help. It tasted worse than it looked. Much worse.

While hot dogs, celery, and egg are tasty on their own, or even together, they are NOT tasty when coated in salty beef jelly. In fact, they are downright disgusting. Even hours after dinner, my stomach was angrily reminding me that I was a horrible person for expecting it to digest this foul mush. Utterly revolting.

It was just wrong. It should be sent to the Fail Blog. It was so bad I gave my child a piece of cake instead to try to make up for this heap of crap. If I cooked like this regularly, it would be grounds for divorce — if the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, this dish is a shortcut to a restraining order.

But on the plus side, the preschooler was very pleased with the octopi, and the dog thought he had gone to heaven when he got the vast quantities of leftovers. And it was a hell of a good laugh.

At first I was going to blog about this retro recipe simply by pointing out that I would never try canned meat. Then I decided I was being elitist. What’s wrong with canned meat? (Besides the fact that it’s canned meat. I couldn’t come up with anything more rational than that.That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong; the cooking was one of those weird experiences where I was not sure whether I might be killing my family.)

I did, however, insist that we use the best canned meat possible (which is NOT necessarily the “fine pork shoulder meat”). Turns out that was SPAM Turkey, or, as I’d rather call it, SPURKEY.

I am quite pleased with the instructions on the back of the SPURKEY can. They aren’t treating this like some gourmet delicacy which can be used in so many delectable ways. It’s just SPURKEY. You shlorp it out of the can onto a plate, cut it up, and cook it. SPURKEY-licious!

It actually isn’t all that bad. It tastes like very mediocre sausage: extremely salty and a bit dull. My one-year-old son thought it was thoroughly awesome, and sucked down a whole SPURKEYburger before I’d gotten through a third of mine. The preschooler thought it was “pretty good”. I thought it was OK. Buzz thought it was revolting, despite it being served with a fine white wine. (Now, canned beef, you’d want to serve that with a dry red.)

I wouldn’t make this for anybody older than 10. It’s great for toddlers (since it’s flakeboard-made-of-meat, SPURKEY falls apart at the slightest touch, making it extremely chewable), or I guess anybody on a budget who doesn’t really care what they’re eating. I also don’t recommend making them open-face, unless you’re on a very tight budget and can only afford half a bun.

On another note, I was curious about George Rector; while many food companies would create Home Economics experts (e.g. Betty Crocker), they usually didn’t have male spokespeople. It turns out Mr. Rector was indeed a real live human being, although the most thorough piece of information I could find was his obituary.

Died. George Rector, 69, last of the restaurateur Rectors of Manhattan’s lobster-&-champagne era; of a heart ailment; in Manhattan. Apple-cheeked, white-haired George carried on when father Charles died in 1914, but bowed out when Prohibition closed his last café in 1923; thereafter he nourished the Rector legend and himself by diligent publicity work, lecturing and writing, wound up as food consultant for a Chicago meat packer. — Time Magazine, December 8 1947

There’s something sad about a restaurant owner who ends up with a legacy of canned meat recipes.

During my random search for retro recipes to inflict on the kids treat my family to, Lidian of Kitchen Retro posted one that looked like a real fiasco winner:

The name promised a fast, exotically foreign, zippy and fun dish.

Then I read the ingredients.

1/4 cup bacon drippings [This is where I should have just stopped.]
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1/2 medium green pepper, diced
1-1/2 cups Minute Rice (TM)
1-3/4 cups hot water
2 cans Hunts Tomato Sauce (TM)
1 teaspoon salt….Dash of pepper
1 teaspoon prepared mustard (optional)

The teaspoon of mustard is optional, just in case you might find this too spicy! Urgh… But, through a lack of common sense and self-preservation, I felt committed.

I tend to violate these brand-created recipes at will, sticking to the “spirit” while adjusting the ingredients. If there is any way to make this even vaguely edible, I’ll be attempting it. For example, Minute Rice is stupid. If you can’t boil rice in water, you shouldn’t be trying anything harder than peanut butter sandwiches. Similarly, I’m not using 1/4 cup of bacon drippings (shouldn’t I be recycling this for bombs, anyway?) because that’s disgusting. I decided to live dangerously and use a heaping teaspoon of mustard.

It starts off well — onions, green pepper, and rice look pretty tasty. Then I added the tomato sauce, and it ended up looking like an accident scene out of a Sid Davis driver’s ed film. (Commentary on Kitchen Retro about this ad-recipe concentrated on the unappealing visual — the food photographer should have been fired for making a dish look that bad. In actuality, we should be heaping praise on the poor guy for making it look as good as he did.)

Even with 2 teaspoons of mustard, it’s bland — no surprise, since you’ve ended up with a bowlful of tomato sauce with small bits of other stuff in it occasionally. And it makes a huge bowlful, meaning I have plenty of Spanish Rice Pronto for leftovers. One mitigating factor is that I got to picture 1950’s Housewife being told by her husband that he was bringing home an important client for dinner, and he was from Spain so could she please try to come up with something Spanish? And then this bullshit would be served. EPIC FAIL! HA HA!

From January 1952, originally posted for your enjoyment by Millie Motts *, comes an advertisement-turned-recipe for Jell-O…

Prune Cream Pie. A brand-new pie idea for a happier New Year! Prepare Jell-O Vanilla Pudding and Pie Filling as directed. Before serving, top pie with mixture of 1 cup drained cut stewed prunes and 1 tablespoon grated lemon rind. Spread with whipped cream.

So by “happier”, we can assume they mean… well, “more regular”. Stewed prunes?!? But hey, you can’t make an easier pie than “jell-o in graham crust with fruit and whipped cream on top.” Even having to stew your own prunes and puree them is crazy-easy if you own a food processor. So, Prune Cream Pie it is this week.

It’s insanely easy to make. Even stewing prunes — water, pot, prunes, boil, puree, and voilà you have stewed prunes. (I may be over-experienced, though, because this is how you make pretty much any fruit or vegetable into baby food, and I’ve done that a lot.) Here’s the almost-done pie. I can TOTALLY see why this should be covered with whipped cream — it currently looks like the vanilla pudding is covered with dog food.

Unfortunately, even after covering the prunes with whipped cream, you’ll still get a glimpse of pruney goodness when serving slices. (Maybe offer your family blindfolds instead of napkins.)

It’s SUPPOSED to look like THIS — and even an idealized illustration isn’t much better looking, is it?

While the taste was underwhelming, it’s really the visual unappeal of the pie that makes it a disaster. If you really must have prunes, this is a great way to make them less appetizing. But, if you really must have a fast and easy pie, use a different fruit. Like strawberry or cherry pie filling out of a can… this saves the trouble of stewing prunes, and (more importantly) also means you don’t have to look at stewed prunes!

* Lovely blog — it’s all pictures and is a quick, refreshing inclusion in your daily RSS…