Just so we’re clear?  Free on E is not my memoir of rave and single life in the ’90’s but a new thing  I  thought would be fun – I could cast my eye over some of the cookbooks available for free as ebooks and…you know…do what I do.  Read. Cook.  Mock.  Eat.

And occasionally give a little “Eek” of delight when I find a hidden gem.

And because they’re readily available and free you can read, cook, mock and “Eek” right along with me!

Anyone actually wanting my memoir of rave life in the ’90’s?  Sorry, that’s a completely different e-book that will be available for purchase in the not too distant.  Just kidding.  Unless anyone would actually pay money for it.  In which case….hit the contact me button immediately.  I’ll start writing….

Anyway, my first venture into “free on e” was “Rapid Recipes for Writers And Other Busy People” By Marsha Ward.

Oh boy.

Marsha, Marsha, Marsha….

To put it nicely, the 31 recipes in here are mostly pretty ordinary.  I was seriously struggling to find one that I wanted to cook.  There’s a lot of ground beef, a lot of canned soup and frozen vegetables.  This is a typical example:

Boss Beef Dish

Make patties of:

2 lbs ground beef

4-5 grated potatoes

1 grated onion

1 tbsp garlic salt

2 eggs.

Brown both sides of patties in skillet.

Add mixture of:

2 cans cream of mushroom soup

1 1/2 cans water

1 lb frozen peas.

Simmer until warmed through.

Blecchhhh….

Then there’s

Garlic Baked Potatoes:

Cut a small triangle out of each potato; add 1/2 tsp garlic powder and replace triangle.  Put a pat of butter on or margarine on potato, wrap in foil then bake in over or on coals in barbecue or campfire.  Salt and pepper maybe added to margarine for extra flavour.

Hmmm…Enjoy that mouthful of burnt garlic powder. Why not just add the garlic powder to the margarine?  Whilst we’re on the subject of garlic powder?  It’s the devil’s work.  Second only to margarine.  Don’t even get me started on that particular rant…

I was just about to agree with the reviewer who said this book wasn’t worth free when I came across the recipe for:

Ice Cream Muffins

1 ½ cup self-raising flour

2 cups soft vanilla ice cream

Mix until dry particles are moist.  Grease muffin tins; bake 20-25 minutes at 450 degrees F.

“No way”  I thought.  “There’s no way that’s going to work.  That’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard”.

So, I made them.

Yeah,  I don’t get how my mind works either.

And…believe it or not, they worked!

Don’t get me wrong, these weren’t the best muffins I’ve ever eaten but they were recognizably muffins and they were made out of ice cream and flour!  That’s kind of awesome.  And the possibilities are only as limited as the flavours of ice cream available to you.  I didn’t have  vanilla and I wasn’t about to buy some for a recipe that I was sure wasn’t going to work so mine were actually rum and raisin muffins.

This exercise also reminded me that if you ever need a dose of kooky in your life, spend an hour or so reading Amazon reviews.  They’re hilarious!!!  This gem was in the review section for Rapid Recipes for Writers.

Let’s break this baby down shall we?

I’m not a good judge here.  Didn’t stop you from writing a review though, did it!

This is an actual cookbook!   Yeah.  Uh huh.  What did you think it was?  A rubber chicken?

AND a lot of the recipes had MEAT.  Maybe they don’t tell you in NaNoWriMo circles that it’s bad form to start a sentence with “and”*?  Or that it’s kind of annoying when you capitalise RANDOM words.

I’m a vegetarian who doesn’t cook.  So why buy a cookbook then?  Oh, that’s right.  You didn’t realise it was a cookbook (sigh…facepalm).

When you’re reviewing a book, it might also be useful to tell people more about the book than yourself**.   I believe all we learned about “Rapid Recipes for Writers ” was that it was an actual cookbook!  That contained MEAT.

What do I know though?  Five out of seven people found that review helpful.  Which only serves to confirm my belief that five out of seven people are idiots.  Which I guess dear, smart, funny, cute, discerning reader leaves you and me!

We’ll head back to Vietnam next week….

Bye for now.

*For the pedants, I’m perfectly aware I started at least 3 sentences with “and” in this post. Please refer to sentence 3 in **below.

** For the most part people reading Amazon reviews are not remotely interested in what you eat or anything else about you.  If you are that self-obsessed, maybe you should try blogging. The added benefit of which is, that when it’s your blog, you can start sentences with whatever the hell you want.