When Food Was Sad, Pt. 2

Last entry, we explored the surface of Recipes, Party Plans, and Garnishes, and the somewhat horrifying period of food it comes from.  Here follows party food that I'm pretty sure should not grace any party table whatsoever.

It was pretty much like this all the time.

Now again, in all fairness, when I said last time that postwar, we went crazy for three decades with food, I have to contrast that with the world surrounding it (you may be hearing a lot about that world, since my reading list and hopefully thesis are all postwar-centric) and why the insanity seemed like a good idea at the time.  Shit was nuts then, guys.  We were living in the World of Tomorrow while simultaneously wondering if The Bomb would obliterate us all.  We thought in-the-wall stoves were good ideas, and that having a phone in the kitchen was a sort of ultimate luxury (you learn so many things from MST3K), and that maybe soon we would have robots that actually made our lives better.  We were rocking out to Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald and if I've learned anything from my new postwar-hits Pandora station, that music makes you feel like bouncing around the kitchen in a big dress and getting stuff done.  What I'm saying is that the food wasn't an isolated thing.

That doesn't mean that some of it was not downright inexcusable.

Without further preamble, the contents:  We are mostly safe in the appetizers section, although there are some selections that seem to be there for the hostess who doesn't give a crap and doesn't particularly want her guests to come back.  An example of this is "Cucumber Pickle and Cheese Appetizer," which asks that you scoop out the centers of large, firm pickle halves and fill them with "snappy yellow cheese spread" and cut them into half-inch thick slices.  This and an unhealthy fixation on Roquefort are an excellent reason to skip to the end of the appetizers.

There is an entire section on garnishes, which I find alternately charming and horrifying.  There's directions for making geese out of small yellow summer squash, which is charming, and also directions for using china colonial dolls, sticking them to egg plants with toothpicks through the holes in their waists, and fashioning a lettuce dress for them, which I'm pretty sure has been added to my subconscious's nightmare fuel.

The "Meats and Poultry" section is where things really start to get exciting.  There's almost a whole page at the beginning on preparing brains, curried, cutlets, and with mushroom sauce.  Mmm, gray matter!  There's the timidly flavored chicken curry with generic curry powder, Worcestershire sauce, and apples, which you make "Indian" in this way:

"put in a large bowl, on buffet, next to a large bowl of dry, fluffy rice.  Around this, have small bowls containing following condiments; grated Parmesan cheese, grated ham, grated toasted peanuts, grated cocoanut, raisins, crumbled, crisp, breakfast bacon, Chinese noodles, fried onion rings, English chutney and crumbled sardines (optional).  Guests serve themselves to a large portion of rice, generously covered with curried chicken and a spoonful of each of the condiments.  This is, of course, a complete meal."

I don't know about the rest of you, but I sit there imagining a hopeful and naive hostess, perhaps holding a theme party, serving this to people who have eaten real curry.  "Oh, why didn't you put any fried onion rings or Parmesan on your curry?  It's supposed to have everything, that's what makes it Indian.  Well, except the sardines.  Those are optional."

Then we get into the obsession with gelatin molds.  Imagine taking perfectly good food, and then thinking it would be so much better if it were contained in a massive, quivering shape.  Imagine doing that once, and thinking it was a good enough idea to do it again.  And again.  Get creative with it - almost any food can be subjugated to your jello whims!  Then read the following list, and admit that you never would have gotten this creative:

Chicken curry mold, jellied chicken, chicken-vegetable molded salad, crab meat salad molded, fish molded in cucumber aspic lake "pond lily garnish," frosty salad rings (I interject here to note that these contain lime gelatin, horse-radish, lemon juice, and cottage cheese, and that's it), lamb mold, molded lobster salad, pineapple cheese salad, sweetbreads and asparagus ring, jellied tongue.

You may go wash your brain now.

In Which I Am Not Much of a Filmmaker

I have been seriously remiss in blogging.  I had this nice second entry for the recipe book planned, and still do, but for some reason, my time management this semester is all kinds of wonky.  So instead of part II, I am going to give you an entirely gratuitous film of my cats.  It is not a work of great filmmaking, but I am cleverly covering for my deficits as a cinematographer by shooting in 8mm film style and adding exciting music.  Clearly, that will make anything better.  Also, I love the old timey look of the 8mm film app on my ipod, so prepare to be further inundated with hastily-edited pretentiousness.  I swear that it won't all be about my cats.

I don't know what the story of this video is.  Feel free to add your own interpretations.

I am also open to suggestions of other films.  I could do English Department Noir!  Or... a short documentary about snow!

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.

Not Dead Yet...

I am alive.  Sort of.

Nobody told me I had wandered into the Twilight Zone, but apparently at some point last week, I did.  I had a paper draft due on Tuesday by 4.  Around 3, I printed it, wrote her a note to go with it, turned it in, and left.  Only she tells me today that she left at 4:15 and did not have my paper.  I don't think I suffered a psychotic break.  But I turned in a paper and she didn't get it.  So... Twilight Zone.  Either way, ARGH.  I could just cry.  Or spit.  Or both at the same time, which would be really weird.

In other news, it has come to my attention that someone else created a Little Nerd On The Prairie blog.  This is irritating for a number of reasons.  The first is that I googled to make sure I wasn't stepping on anyone's toes when I named this.  The second is that the other Little Nerd made her blog to create a single post in October about how she had a great idea to fake a Java Chiller.  The third reason this is irritating is that despite her being the latecomer, despite her having a single post, despite the fact that there are no comments or other indications that anyone else found her cold drink recipe inspiring... she comes up first on Google.  That's right, she has more "quality" back-linking than me.

I don't have any malice for the other little nerd.  Okay, maybe a bit.  Seriously, google your blog name.  But not real malice.  I just think that if someone searches this blog title, it should be MY blog at the top of the page.

For a moment of cheer and Zen, though, here is my little Christmas tree.  Some of those ornaments are still on it even, despite the cats knowing of its existence.

Apparently, I'm on a bunny kick. This one is made out of the wax casing from my babybel cheese. She is my new office buddy.

Winter Cometh

Sorry, I'm here, I swear!

Life has gotten a little overbusy due to having approximately three million papers to grade, projects of my own to nail down, and a house that keeps doing bizarre things (the policy is now to keep the plastic cover off the kitchen light so that it doesn't crash to the floor in the middle of the night to scare the holy crap out of me).  I have spent huge amounts of time in the library.  On a side note, I really appreciate the Dewey Decimal system, but sometimes, I think it goes insane.  If I get really inspired, I will document some of the cases where a single book is labeled correctly, and yet has subject matter in totally the wrong direction for its little library neighborhood.  Maybe someone who knows can tell me: does this make sense?  Or do librarians just get a kick out of putting a dated book on dinosaurs right in the middle of the section on new media in the classroom?

So what happened since the last update is that in the last update it was fall, and everything had beautiful fall colors, and there were crisp mornings and pleasant afternoons.  Fall happened so gently I had barely noticed the transition away from summer, and I wasn't really missing it.


Then, earlier this week, after a weekend of the lightest jackets and outdoor romping... I woke up to a world gone suddenly bright and monochrome with this damp white cold stuff clinging to everything.

Campus T-Rex is probably cold and disoriented too.

Okay, okay, despite my desert rat tendencies, I really have seen snow before, and lots of it, and it's not that this is staggeringly alien to me.  But it's still suddenly very cold, and then it gets slippery, and for those of us who are not graceful, there's a new terror to the simple act of walking.  Unlike certain heroines of certain vampire pseudo-romances I could mention, my klutziness does not only happen when it's cute or will drive the plot forward, nor does it net me tall, dark, broody stalker-saviors, and while I'm glad for at least one of those things, I do have to be careful.

I guess this means it's officially winter, since the white stuff does not seem to be going anywhere.  Seriously guys, I watched it, and it got all wet and melty, but I think that just made it mobile so that it could shift around in a sneaky way.  So I tried to make peace with it.

I made a bunny out of snow to sit in my flowerpot.  It was getting exponentially colder for some reason as I did so, and it became a race against time.  I started off with nice wet packing snow, and ended with freezy garbage that fell apart the moment I made it a shape.  Also, those little fuzzy gloves are not adequate protection against getting frozen fingers when handling snow, it turns out.  In fact, the snow loves to stick to those fuzzy gloves so that eventually, your fingers are just caked with it and the gloves are helping the traitorous cold stuff leech your heat away.

I hope Snow Bunny is grateful for the near-frostbite I endured to put his dumpy little self together.  His eyes, by the way, are rosehips, and his nose is a stone.  He has a cottontail in back, but I was really losing the ability to move my finger joints by that time, and it was not wonderful.

The snow and I are not yet friends, but I'm putting forth an effort, and that should count for something.