Remember last year when I forgot to celebrate my blog-irthday?  Not so for Year 3 my friends. This year, not only are we starting early but I bought you a present.  Well one of you…but more about that later.  I have quite the celebration planned, cakes, a cocktail, these lovely cucumber candlestick canapés and maybe even a Spanish take on the Potato Salad Roll…

But first  up, my mum and and I had a lovely Mother’s Day bonding experience last weekend by hitting up some of the local op shops and I got a huge swag of goodies, some of which will be jumping right to the top of the queue in the retro food stakes.

Here are some of the best of the best:

The Complete Avocado Cookbook by Christine Heaslip

I was utterly obsessed with this book as a child.   But until I saw this book in the oppy on the weekend, I had completely forgotten a very strange thing I used to do.  I must have had an idea that avocados were very sophisticated and I remember borrowing this book from the library about a billion times because I would get it home, then I would dress up all my dolls in their best clothes and put them in a circle and put the book in the middle and I would make up menus and they would have avocado based dinner parties where i would flick to a page in the book and tell them what we were eating, and they would each comment on the food.

Sometimes they didn’t like what they were given in which case they either got put into the corner and missed the next dinner party or I’d twist their heads around 180° and say something like “Maybe you’ll like it better out of the back of head”

(WEIRD. ONLY. CHILD).

I was particularly obsessed by this – The Crusty Stuffed Avocado.  Which is an avocado stuffed with camembert, crumbed, deep fried and served with an almond butter sauce.

Maybe I should have used that as a threat for the dolls that didn’t like their meals.  “One more peep out of you Missy and you get the Crusty Stuffed Avocado.  And then we get to play Barbie gets a triple bypass”.

The Egg Cookbook By Peter Russell Clarke.

Back in the day, he was a celebrity chef in the 80’s whose catchcry (is that a word? it looks weird) was “Where’s the cheese?”  To which the answer presumably was “In the hardened arteries of the people who ate the Crusty Stuffed Avocado”.

Eggs are one of the favourite ingredients here at maison de la retro food so this one was a certainty, despite it contains such dubious delights as a banana and chicken omelette and eggs in oranges.  That one is so dodgy that even Peter Russell Clarke admits his friends don’t like the sound of it.

If you you tube PRC you will see that, instead of his good natured tv personal is he actually a bit of a foul mouthed curmudgeon.  As one myself, it only made me like him more!

The Beautiful Breakfast Book by Judy Willing

Proof that you can judge a book by it’s cover.  And Judy looks more than willing on the cover!  This is going to be GOLD!

 International Mixed Drinks

This isn’t strictly vintage but who could resist a book that offers over 300 cocktails by country? Not me that’s for sure.  Mind you, I think they might be drawing a long bow in some of their allocations.  Yeah, we all totally get that the Long Island Ice Tea and the Louisiana Lullaby are from the U.S.A.  However, I searched for cocktails containing Parfait Amour, because I still have a buttload of it left and I found the Purple People Eater and the Love Bite.  These apparently hail from The Seychelles and Mauritius respectively.  Which smacks of allocating sucky cocktails to countries who are too small to declare war on you.

Still, this got me all sorts of excited.  I was thinking we might do a round the world in a cocktail glass feature over the next year…52 countries in 52 weeks?  Or at least until either incipient bankruptcy or alcoholism make their presence felt…..

And finally, this is it folks, over the top

Australian Cooking For Today by Anne Marshall

If today was 1977.

This is a MONSTER of a book, 900 recipes, 450 colour photos.  If you were hit over the head with this book, you would wind up in hospital faster than someone who had eaten a Crusty Stuffed Avocado.

And this can be yours!

(Basically because when I got it home, I realised I already had a copy.)

And just in case the cover is not enough to convince you, opening Australian Cooking For Today at a random page reveals this – Giant Gingerbreadmen apparently reenacting the Great Train Robbery and a big ball of sausage and cheese:

You know you want it…

How You Can Win Australian Cooking For Today

There are three ways to win:

1. If you already follow the blog, follow me on twitter or facebook  or viceversa, drop me a note and I will pop your name into a hat.
2. If you know of someone who you think would enjoy reading this, send them my way – all new followers will get a chance to win and if they leave me a message giving me your name, you get 5 chances.
3. Finally, if you already follow me on all media as do all of your friends, neighbours, co-workers, etc or you have none of the above, leave a comment below, answering the very simple question “Where’s the cheese?”  and you will get a number of entries commensurate with how funny I think your entry is.

The T’s, The C’s, The Boring Bits

• The actual birthday of the blog is 25 May, however  it’s going to take me a bit longer than that to post all the posts on the celebrations so let’s say you have 4 weeks from now to enter.  Entries will close midnight 14 June 2015.
• You can enter as many times as you like.
• If you are outside of Australia, I will have to send the book by cheapest mail possible as postage from here is terribly expensive. So you might get it by Christmas.

Maybe once you get it we can do a combined cook or something.  Then again, it’s your present, you can do what you want with it!

Good luck!!!