Last week I mentioned that there was surprisingly little to mock in Roberta Ashley’s Singers and Swingers. Never fear though, little doesn’t mean nothing and today, I’m turning my unflinching gaze to a few of the less palatable gems contained therein.
I have a strange relationship with cold soup. Until 5 years ago, I can honestly say, had never eaten it, and had no intention of doing so. I started to come round after a trip to Barcelona in 2008 and a bowl of the most amazing gazpacho I have ever eaten. I have become a fan of this delicious Spanish concoction, to the point of whipping up a batch or two of my own...
Homemade Gazpacho…I can do cold soup
So, whilst reconciled to gazpacho, cold creamy soups and I aren’t even friends on Facebook. You know how sometimes, if you eat something creamy you get a film in your mouth from the fat in the cream? That’s the thought that puts me off. Well, it’s that thought that puts me off a cold soup made from the freshest cream and vegetables. I have seen what cold canned soup looks like and believe me, it’s not going anywhere near my mouth! Gross! So, this recipe from Leonard Nimoy is designed to push all the wrong buttons for me. As far as I’m concerned this one can go back to Vulcan, Spock!
Leonard Nimoy’s Cold Soup..is not for me!
The next recipe designed to have me gritting my teeth and muttering swear words under my breath is called Homemade Canned Beans. As mentioned in the last post, I am not averse to a can of beans. Beans on toast is one of my go to meals when I want something quick and healthy after a trip to the gym or a lazy breakfast. My issue with most of the popular brands of beans on the market is that the sauce can be overly sweet. So I was very excited to read the name of this recipe. Imagine if I could make my own beans that tasted like canned beans but with less sugar? Happy days….
Unfortunately, as I read on, it turned out that the universe had another fate in store for me
Homemade Canned Beans?
Remember in the wacky races when Muttley used to mutter under his breath? I did a lot of that whilst reading this recipe.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/gf_IH3rj0hY]
If you want a better recipe for beans, check out Erica over at Retro Recipe Attempts. If, like me, you have an aversion to an overly sweet sauce for your beans, I think the mustard and tabasco in Erica’s recipe would cut through that sweetness.
Next, on my hit list, we have Southern Fried Chicken À La Mrs Bobby Goldsboro. Personally, I would call this heart attack on a plate but Mr Bobby Goldsboro informs us that:
“I like it because I like Southern Cooking, but another reason is that fried foods are fattening and I am always trying to put on some weight”.
Mr Bobby Goldsboro needs a good hard slap if you ask me. The man must have had the metabolism of a hummingbird!* Just looking at a plate of something that contains bacon fat, oil and cream and is served with mashed potatoes or biscuits, butter and honey would be enough to derail my weight loss efforts for a year!
Southern Fried Chicken A La Mrs Bobby Goldsboro
As a child, one of my favourite tv shows was Get Smart. I would race home from school every day to see which episode was on, I swear I have seen every episode a dozen or more times and, if push came to shove, I could probably recite some of them almost verbatim.
The hero of the show was the bumbling, wise-cracking secret agent called Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams. Given my love for the show, I was delighted to see that Singers and Swingers contained recipes by both Don Adams and Barbara Feldon who played Max’s colleague (and eventually his wife), Agent 99. More about Barbara Feldon next time but I desperately wanted their recipes to be good. Hers is great. However, in the words of Maxwell Smart, I believe this recipe “missed by that much”. If by “that much” you mean the distance from here to the moon. I can’t even think what this mix would begin to taste like…if anyone is brave enough to make it, please let me know!
I’ll leave you to ponder the utter weirdness of the Don Adams recipe. I’m off to search for episodes of Get Smart….
Enjoy your week!
*Hummingbirds have an incredibly fast metabolism. At any given moment they are only hours away from starving to death.
On Christmas Day, we gathered at my mum’s for a family lunch. I made the carrot and orange flower water salad featured in the last post and a lemon and lime tart with limoncello as my contribution to the meal. The tart was meant to look like this…
Sadly, it didn’t. I lack confidence with pastry so thought I would make it with a crumb crust. But I didn’t let the crumb set long enough so when I poured the filling in it all came loose and mixed in with the filling. I ended up covering it with a meringue (thanks again for that idea Monica) but when it was cut it didn’t have a nice sharp line between meringue, filling and base. It tasted wonderful; it looked terrible. I hate that. Why is it always when you have to cook for a large group of people that things go awry?
I was lucky enough to get lots of lovely vintage and vintage inspired presents – a selection of some are below!
Over the break I finally got to visit the Gusto exhibition at the State Library which explores the culinary history of Victoria. Among other treasures, they had an amazing array of vintage cookbooks which I was just itching to get my hands on!
The days between Christmas and New Year are tinged with sadness for me as my Nana passed away during this period a few years ago. In memory of Nana, I cooked some devilled eggs which was a dish she used to make quite often. My deviled eggs weren’t nearly as good as Nana’s stuffed eggs but they weren’t terrible….maybe next year I’ll get Nana’s recipe and do it properly! In the meantime, the recipe I used is here:
Devilled Eggs
Asparagus rolls were another of Nana’s specialties. Nana’s asparagus came straight from the tin, the rolls were made with white bread with the crusts cut off, and the asparagus was melded to the bread with a mixture of butter and finely grated cheese. There may have been some mustard in there too…again, I’ll have to snaffle the exact recipe, if such a thing exists, off mum for next year. Ribbon sandwiches were another of the lovely, dainty things she made…..it’s funny, for someone who had a very sweet tooth, all of the best of Nana’s recipes were savoury high tea type delicacies.
On a more mundane level, I remember school holidays sitting in front of the television watching Days of Our Lives eating hard-boiled egg and tomato sauce sandwiches that Nana had made for me. Just in case you were wondering, these were eggs mashed into tomato ketchup on white bread. I kind of shudder at the thought of them now but back in the day….delicious!
Every year in the school holidays Nana would take me into the city and we would have Frog in a Pond at the Coles Cafeteria. I think Frog in a Pond maybe a uniquely Australian dessert so for those of you who have no idea what I am talking about here it is…
I made us some mushroom vol au vents…can you get more retro than a vol au vent? They were light and lovely after the rich food at Christmas. The recipe I used is here although I cheated and used bought shells. One of my goals for this year is to master pastry!!!
In between some house renovations, we had a boozy lunch and some fabulous cocktails with some girlfriends one day. The cocktails were served in jam jars and look almost as good as they tasted!
Ended the day on the couch watching Bond on the telly. The Spy who Loved Me…which has to be the best Bond song ever if not quite the best movie.
We had a very quiet New Year’s Eve as the dogs get frightened by the fireworks and we didn’t want to leave them alone at home. I lit a tea light – in one of these gorgeous candle holders made from vintage doilies – and reflected on the year gone and the one to come. 2012 was a turbulent year for many reasons and in some ways I was glad to see the back of it. I have a feeling 2013 is going to be a fabulous year! I also wish the same for everyone reading this and hope all your hopes and wishes come true.
Last week I mocked some of the food styling in The Hot Weather Cookbook, so in the interest of fair and unbiased reporting I thought it was only fair to show what I think is easily the best photo in the book. Not only that, I was so inspired by the photo I had plans to cook the exact meal as shown for a barbecue dinner we were having.
Lamb Sosaties, Carrot Salad, Cucumber Salad
Why do I love this so much? First, I think it has a clean modern look to it. This would not look out-of-place in a current issue of Bon Appetit or Delicious magazine. Second, I love gingham. One of the reasons is that it evokes memories of summer, picnics by a river in the shade of a tree, the gingham table-cloth spread on the ground absolutely loaded with super tasty picnic food, the sound of birds and crickets chirping lazily in the background, the sun dappling through the leaves…In my mind picnics look like this. Thanks to the lovely Amber Clery from the Vintage Homeblog for her permission to use these gorgeous photos.
In reality, I remember having a picnic with my parents by a river. I went for a swim and got a leech on my leg. The sounds of that picnic weren’t so much the gentle noises of nature or the hushed sounds of silence but hysterical screaming and uncontrollable sobbing. I vastly prefer Amber’s version.
Apart from the gingham, the other things I liked in the photo from “The Hot Weather Cookbook” were those amazing looking kebabs and the saffron rice with juicy raisins that they are lying on top of. The legend for the picture told me that were Barbecued Lamb Sosaties accompanied by Carrot Salad and Cucumber Salad. No mention of the rice. I had never heard of a Sosatie before so I flipped to the glossary which told me that Sosaties were a:
“Cape Malay (South African) dish of curried meat, cooked in small pieces on a skewer”
So now, not only do these kebabs look delicious, they sound delicious. I was salivating in anticipation of finding out how to cook these delights because I thought they would reconfirm my position as queen of the barbecue. One of the first things I ever cooked for my family was a “Spicy Feta Burger”. I must have been eight. I didn’t even know what feta was but begged my mum to buy some so I could make these burgers. Some decades later we still make them. People invited to family barbecues demand them. In my family and circle of friends, they are legend. However, all empires fall and it had been quite some time since I had come up with some delectable barbecue goodness. I’ve rested on my feta burger laurels for far too long. The time was ripe to launch a new taste sensation.
In my mind, my spicy feta burgers were already singing that Coldplay song about “that was when I ruled the world”. My Barbecued Lamb Sosaties were running up and down flights of stairs and humming “The Eye of The Tiger.”
We’ll pause there and I’ll tell you about the rice with raisins. Remember how I said they weren’t mentioned in the picture tag? I searched for the recipe in index. Under R there are two entries:
Radish Salad, Cool
Rice Salad
I didn’t really know where else I might find the recipe for the rice with raisins (it was not the rice salad recipe listed). So I flicked through the entire book and found the recipe on page 64…well I found something on page 64 called Yellow Rice With Raisins. As it’s not name checked in the photo, I can’t be entirely sure it is the same recipe but given that what is pictured is yellow and it’s rice and it contains raisins I used my best Sherlock Holmesian powers of deduction and decided they were one and the same. I then went back and checked the recipe index. This time, I not only checked under R in case I had missed something in the vast number of recipes beginning with that letter. (I hadn’t.) I then checked Y…just in case. Not there either. I then checked every recipe in the index to see what exactly was listed for page 64. There’s a Barbecue Sauce which is actually on page 64. There is no mention of the Yellow Raisin Rice in the index at all. Grrr….
That annoyed me. It’s slapdash and surely someone in the editing process should have picked it up before the book went to print. Never mind, at least I could make it. After all, I had the recipe, even if it appeared to have been inserted into the book by stealth.
Ok, so the last time we saw the Barbecued Lamb Sosaties, they were fist pumping the air and claiming global victory in the barbecue stakes. I looked up Barbecued Lamb Sosaties in the index.
I started with L…not there.
S…not there either.
I tried B…I may was well not bothered.
I tried a lateral approach and looked under K for kebab and, harking back to the glossary definition, I looked under C (Curry and Cape Malay). I then looked through every other letter. There was no mention to the Barbecued Lamb Sosaties in the index. Double Grrr!
But the rice recipe wasn’t in the index either. No point in getting upset. So, in the spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, I flicked through “The Main Course” section of the book.
Nothing.
I flipped back to the picture. Those kebabs look hearty but I thought that maybe they are meant to be a first course, like satay sticks in an Asian restaurant.
They weren’t in the first course section either.
I then looked through the entire book.
Zippedy doo dah.
I then looked through the entire book again, this time focussing on the page numbers. (This was a second-hand book and, given the awesomeness of the Barbecued Lamb Sosatie, someone may have ripped the page out to keep it for posterity).
Every page was accounted for.
THE RECIPE FOR WHAT LOOKED LIKE THE MOST AWESOME DISH IN THE BOOK….WAS NOT IN THE BOOK.
If that looks like I am yelling, it’s because I am. It’s actually a lot nicer than what came out of my mouth when I initially made this discovery. I probably wouldn’t be allowed to print exactly what I said. It’s more than likely illegal in some countries and frowned upon in most others.
I could give you a recipe for Barbecued Lamb Sosaties. I (eventually) found a number of them on Google. Instead, I was so annoyed with the HotWeather Cookbook, I am going to give you the original recipe for the spicy feta burgers. This recipe is so old now, it comes from a time where they didn’t quite know how to spell spicy. These are awesome and you should all make them immediately. (Sorry it’s a bit crooked, that is literally the way it is stuck to the page in the family recipe compendium).
Just to top off a few days where recipes from the past have really let me down, it is also wrong.
I defy anyone to make 12 burgers out of 50g of minced steak. Unless of course they happen to be pixies. (To anyone not familiar with the metric system, as a point of comparison, I just weighed an egg from my fridge. It came in at 64g. )
I used 500g of mince when I made the burgers this time and made 12 decent sized burgers. I left all other amounts as stated.
This can also be very much treated as a base recipe. For instance, this time round I added some dried chilli flakes and some chopped up coriander. You could use mint or parsley or basil. Pinenuts in the mix are fabulous! You can also use lamb mince instead of steak for another variation in flavour.
Spicy Feta Burgers
Out of sheer spite I also didn’t make the rice or either of the salads from The Hot Weather Cookbook. I made a gorgeous carrot salad inspired by a recipe from Gourmande in the Kitchen. This recipe is amazing…quite possibly the most vibrant delicious taste sensation I have had all year. The orange flower water in the dressing is a stroke of genius! The original recipe required watercress. I tried three local green grocers and was advised that due to the hot weather, we are suffering watercress drought. I used rocket and it was lovely. I will definitely also try it with watercress as soon as I can get my hands on some!
The cumin and the orange flower water actually go very nicely with the lamb and feta to create a lovely Middle Eastern vibe to this meal.
I made a really quick cucumber salad to go with this, just sliced cucumber, a sprinkle of cayenne pepper and chives, and a squeeze of lemon. I had a small bowl of pomegranate molasses as a condiment for the burgers.
Et voila! Here is my Not The Hot Weather Cookbook Middle East Feast!
Feta Burgers, Carrot and Orange Flower Water Salad, Cucumber Salad and Pomegranate Molasses
This will more than likely be my last post before the New Year as I need to focus on cooking and other things related to the season for the next few days.
Best wishes to all for a safe and happy Christmas and a joyous New Year.
After harping on about the awful recipes contained in this book last time, it was only fair to showcase some of the better recipes. Three of them will be included here (I actually made 4 however this week is all about being positive so we won’t mention the Asparagus Italienne. Ever.)
I chose the Stuffed Celery Curls as my first course. This was jam-packed with flavours I love – celery, walnuts, chives, cream cheese and Tabasco so there was everything to like. I chose not to add the red food colouring. I’m hyperactive enough without it and I could see no earthly reason why it should be there. I think the “au naturel” version looks much prettier anyway!
Ingredients
Sadly, my celery did not curl as per the picture in the book. I read the recipe as saying you needed 15 pieces of celery 5 cm long. Which is what I did. In retrospect, I think it may mean an unnamed number of pieces of celery 15 cm long by 5 cm wide. Although that doesn’t seem quite right either – 5cm seems too wide. If you really want your celery to curl, here’s how.
It didn’t really matter though because whilst mine did not look as fun, they tasted amazing! We had these as our starter however they could just as easily be a lunch box snack or as finger food. Blue cheese would be an amazing variation.
Original
Mine – with obligatory knife but no curls
Next up, for our main dish I made a Farmhouse Potato Bake. This dish contains potatoes, Hungarian sausage (I used salami), sour cream and paprika so I guess is Eastern European in tone. It was damn good wherever it came from. If you weren’t fond of salami you could make this with ham, bacon, or left over roast beef or chicken or for a spot of luxury some smoked salmon. As you will see from the picture, I subbed in basil for the oregano. I think it is one of those recipes that you could pretty much use whatever proteins and herbs as you wanted. You could layer in other vegetables as well. Asparagus, green beans, spinach would all be great!
Ingredients
Salami and Onion Sauteing, Potatoes Par-Boiling in the background
Layering
Crumb Mixture
I made a Panama Radish Salad from the book to go with this. Well, I sort of did. There is no intended slur to the recipe for my changes, I think you could follow it absolutely and the result would be delicious. I just happened to have no red onions and a bucketload of chives and rocket that I needed to use. So I swapped these in. I also used my favourite Black Russian tomatoes so my salad is probably “greener” than it should be….it still looks pretty good though.
Ingredients
Panama Radish Salad
These worked really well together, the pepperiness of the rocket and the radish in the salad, the freshness of the mint and the lemon in the dressing cut through some of the creamy, potato, salami induced richness of the Farmhouse bake. Two big ticks here, will definitely be making both of these again.
The Australian Vegetable Cookbook, sponsored by the food companies Edgell and Birdseye, has its fair share of vegetables turned evil – specifically vegetables turned scary, lazy, nasty and just plain bonkers. First, for a vegetable cookbook there is a distinct lack of fresh vegetables. Nearly all of the recipes suggest using either canned or frozen vegetables of the type produced by…oh…I see….let’s move on. I’ve already annoyed the Australian Women’s Weekly. Multinational food companies also have test kitchens. I need a job. We’ll leave it there.
I will not be silenced on some of the truly terrible recipes contained in here though. Maybe if these companies chose their recipe collators more carefully, snafu’s like the ones to be discussed wouldn’t happen. Recipe collator is a job right? If not, it should be. I am available.
Lets start with scary. In one of the many million Saw films, there is a scene where a girl has to throw herself into a deep vat of syringes. I have an almost irrational fear of needles, and up until recently, that image from the film was my own private version of hell. It is still top o’ the list however, the use of the…liquid….accompanying canned vegetables as a food ingredient creates a very similar reaction of visceral disgust in me.
It may be the word liquid that does it. It’s so….unspecific. The stuff that other canned food comes in has a name. Tuna comes in spring water or olive oil. Don’t get me wrong, there is no way I’m using that as an ingredient either, but at least I know what it is. Similarly, tinned fruit comes in syrup or juice. So why does asparagus come in….liquid? Does the conversation in the lab go a little bit like:
“Well…we know it’s wet….as for the rest…we’re really not sure…to be on the safe side, how about we just go with liquid?”
Yeah, I don’t know why asparagus is being canned in a lab either. Anyway, the use of the “liquid” is why I found this recipe for Asparagus and Egg Mornay repulsive. And somehow, the idea of mixing the “liquid” with milk just makes it worse. Asparagus shake anyone? Gross.
The next scary item is the Asparagus Mousse. I made this as I wanted to understand the ’70’s obsession with moulded food. Despite making it I still do not understand the ’70’s obsession with moulded food. It was horrible. The best thing was that it moulded well. I thought this would taste like slightly gelatinous asparagus and cream. It tasted of tin and mint. I have no idea where the mintiness came from.
I accidentally dropped the cracker I spread with some of this mousse on the ground. The dogs loved it. Mind you, they also eat excrement. I didn’t bother making myself another cracker.
Moving on to lazy we find the recipe for Celery Soup and Cheese Croutons. The first ingredient listed is a can of celery soup. Let me make one thing perfectly clear. If you are making celery soup according to the directions on the can you cannot claim that this is a recipe for celery soup. It is, at best, a recipe for Cheese Croutons. Adding parsley or any other herb does not count as cooking. There is absolutely no reason for this recipe to be listed under celery.
Huh? What was that you were muttering cynical subconscious?
Given that celery is usually used fresh, using it its canned soup form may be a way for the book’s sponsor’s to recoup some of their outlay? I thought we weren’t going there. I thought we’d made a decision not to annoy the multinationals. They have test kitchens and possibly require the service of recipe collators. So button it. We’re going with lazy. Not with shameless display of self promotion.
Moving swiftly along in the list of crimes we come to the nasty food. Potato Gems aka Tater Tots in the U.S. are made from a blend of potato and….I don’t know what…I’m pretty sure the crusty outside does not contain diamonds but whatever it is, it probably comes a pretty close second in terms of hardness. Potato Gems / Tater Tots are one of the few foods that actually hate you. Their sole purpose is to tear the top three layers of skin off the roof of the mouth of anyone stupid enough to eat them.
The Potato Gem Pizza is a repulsive concoction created by pressing cooked potato gems into a cake pan and covering them with pizza ingredients. Sadly, if you Google image Tater Tot Pizza, you get a lot of hits. I’m not naming and shaming anyone here, but seriously WTF? Here I am thinking I have found a new culinary low and people are not only making it, they are so proud of their creation (and mostly not in an ironic hipster way) that they are posting pictures of it onto the internet. Admittedly most of these pictures use the Gems /Tots as a pizza topping, not as the pizza base per the suggestion here but really people? Stop it. Stop it now. You’re depressing me.
I would also like to point out that there is absolutely no way the Potato Gem Pizza takes 5 minutes to cook. It says right at the start you have to cook your Potato Gems for 5 minutes. You then have to:
Press your Gems into a flat cake
Season with salt and pepper
Add all your toppings including carefully laid out spoke-like anchovies and between spoke olives
Then grill until the cheese melts
Do these last actions happen in a time warp? Can Potato Gems tear through the fabric of space–time as easily as they tear through your gums?
And finally, the piece de la resistance, the mec plus ultra of food getting weird. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present the Peach Cheese Fiesta. What? You’ve never heard of it? There’s a reason for that. In the words of Gwen Stefani:
“This s**t is bananas. B – A – N -A – N -A -S”
I like to think an editor hid this recipe deep within the section on Swedes and Turnips, thinking quite rightly that it would never be found. And up until now, it has remained in the obscurity it deserves. The Peach Cheese Fiesta even had Google stumped. Until now of course, because by the very act of writing that Google can’t find Peach Cheese Fiesta, I am creating the conditions that will allow Google to find Peach Cheese Fiesta…oh….that’s making my head hurt. So without further ado, here it is:
I know they took a lot of drugs back in the ’70’s but wow, someone must have stoned out of their mind for this to make sense. I like the way they suggest alternative receptacles for the cheesy vegetable mix. I like it even more that instead of these alternatives being fruits and vegetables that are routinely stuffed (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplants) that they continue the looniness by suggesting pears and pineapple. I just wish they’d suggested bananas, it would have made as much sense and made my Gwen Stefani reference all the more meaningful.
The Australian Vegetable Cookbook is not all bad though. I am about to make what will hopefully be a lovely 3 course dinner from recipes contained within the book. I’ll talk about that next time. Until then, blot the thought of Peach Cream Fiesta from your minds and enjoy your week!
