When Food Was Sad, Pt. 1

Food.  I think about food a lot.  I think about how I probably eat less well than I should by being too frugal, and yet how I can't manage to be frugal enough to eat the same thing too often, or get things easy enough to make without turning my kitchen into ground zero of a food explosion.  I think about how I am probably not fair in my assessment that the grocery stores here suck, and that my elitist medium-city lifestyle probably made me take things for granted that I shouldn't.  On that note, while I think it might be silly of me to want rarer goods that wouldn't be practical to sell here, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for basic, commonly-used produce that isn't going bad on the shelves, or a selection of frozen vegetables that isn't so picked over that I can't find what I want half the time.  Seriously, it shouldn't be that of all ten yellow onions that happen to be left on the shelf, nearly all of them are soft or actively moldering.

I think about how unreasonably in love I am with certain desserts.  If you have not been to Elephant Bar and had their entirely decadent citrus cheesecake brulee, I urge you to stop reading now, go find your local Elephant Bar, and have one.  It sounds like a hot mess, since it also has a chocolate graham cracker crust, and is served surrounded by this little cloud of custard cream in a little pond of raspberry sauce, and then just for giggles it gets a sprinkling of lavender sugar, but it's like eating a baby angel, it's so sinfully good.  I long for one right now.

In case it's just too much hassle
to get all the organ bits yourself...

I guess my point is that I am kind of in love with food.  And yet I am also strangely, ineffably drawn to really bad examples of food.  I delight at watching Andrew Zimmern on the Discovery channel travel across the world to eat bizarre foods.  I can't help but read avidly about the truly awful things people eat-- my cultural heritage may have haggis and "star-gazy pie," but Italy has casu marzu, which gets my vote for about the worst thing you can eat, period.  For those of you curious, I provide a warning: don't go looking unless you absolutely must know, and have an iron stomach.  I get that not everyone shares this bizarre fascination.

So that's why I keep going back to old recipe books.  Not because I want to make anything from them, oh my no.  It's because I am also fascinated by how for a certain period of time in America, we got so excited about food that we did ghastly things to it in the name of entertaining or thrift, or, I don't know, because postwar everyone was so excited not to ration again that they went a little crazy for like THREE DECADES.  The fantastic Gallery of Regrettable Foods has collected many examples of how bad recipes combine with bad art or photography to make something that even the Tomorrowland-style cheer with which they are presented can't cover for.

I was both delighted and horrified (delightified?) to be given my very own late fifties cookbook by a family friend.  Please let me share it with you.

For starters, just look at the cover.  Go ahead and click it and see it in its full glory.  Print it out as a cautionary tale.  This is not the sort of setup that decent, right-minded people think of when they hear "party."  I'm fairly certain it's impossible to make it out on this picture, but on the far left, nearly lost in the spine of the book, there's a big spoon with a handle that is shaped like the bust of some horribly disfigured smirking... I hesitate to say "person."  It may be a gnome.  There's a couple plates of... what seem to be sad, lonely slices of prosciutto, which may be one of the few edible things on the table.  The parsley is not a selling point.  It just makes the meat look desperate.  There's far too many radishes, and a spirited attempt to make tribbles out of cheese balls and olives.

Oh no, I think it's looking at me.

And then there's the... thing in the lower right-hand corner.  Let me show it to you all on its own.  If I am speaking charitably, I suppose it is meant to be some sort of... fish shape.  But don't you think at some point, someone should have looked at that and gone, "Gee, this looks like a giant mutant one-eyed maggot writhing its way through green sludge?"  I note with horror that the maggot and green are probably both jello, one savory, one sweet.  Imagine that flavor explosion, everyone!

Now, full disclosure on the recipes, they aren't all awful.  In fact, some of them are probably tasty.  I am pretty sure the ice cream recipes are safe, and I admit to being charmed that they actually went to the trouble of detailing how to prepare frog legs.  But some of the things contained herein are frightening beyond belief.  What horrors await when we open Recipes, Party Plans, and Garnishes?  Stay tuned for next entry~

Back Again!

The silence on the blog is due (as most of you know) to the fact that I finished my first semester of graduate school, escaped with my life, and made a beeline for Northern New Mexico, which is Home more than any place I have lived.  Most winters here, I spent longing for snow.  Whenever we visited snow, I ran around like a mad thing, because as you saw from the snow rabbit picture, as much as I hate to be cold, I have an overpowering desire to play with the stuff.  But the holiday season here has a charm that I have come to appreciate.  Winter in New Mexico smells like pinon smoke from the chimneys of practically every house with a wood burning fireplace.  People make tamales and drink Mexican hot chocolate, and along with the Christmas lights, they put out luminarias.  It can be a really pretty place.

During my trip here, I have eaten a great deal of green chile, seen almost everyone I hoped to see, gotten awesome goodies, built a few spaceships, and aided a dragon slaying.

It's been fun, and I'm dragging my feet on going back.  It isn't that I don't like my schooling, but as I've stated before, I've never much liked being on my own.  I'm a little frightened of January and February in Laramie, not gonna lie.  But since I'm a dragonslaying badass now, I guess I should bear it with fortitude.

So it's a new year, and a lot of people would make resolutions and post them or something, but instead, I'd like to share a picture of my sister, who rocks, and who is far better at making and keeping resolutions than I am.  She is pretty much actually this adorable in person too.  Though butterflies don't just appear around her or anything.

So my ulterior motives are showing the utterly cute Japanese photo booth-style pictures I can take with my new iPod.  Yeahhh.

Instead of resolutions, I think I'll just make an ongoing list of adventures to have.  There are animals I have not eaten, wildlife that has not shown up randomly near me, and... well, you get the idea.  Basically I'll just wait for stuff to happen and pretend I planned it all.