No Pattern Required

Yawn! I hate time changes. Man.  I hope you were all more sucessful in adjusting to the time change than I was. 

On a brighter note, today we highlight a Mid-Century Lunch. As a good housewife, your job is to make sure everyone has a great lunch for the day!  According to the 1955 Culinary Institute’s The Lunch Box Cookbook, “with imagination in planning and packing, the carried lunch can become the most anticipated meal of the day.” 

Wow, that is a pretty hefty claim.  Let’s see what we can do!

Now, the book states that all lunches must include “a hearty dish (soup, sandwich or main dish), a salad or raw vegetable, a beverage, a dessert and a surprise food.”

Suprise food huh?  I wonder what that could be?  Gelatin? Prunes? An extra heart or tongue sandwich? That would make for a surprising lunch.

A typical mid-century lunch, according to the cookbook.  A liver sausage sandwich, apple, milk and a cupcake.  The surprise?  You have to eat the cutting board too.

Kidding, kidding!

Anyway, the Lunch Box Cookbook also recommends having the following equipment on hand to make your lunch fantastic :

A wide mouth vaccum bottle; small jars with wide mouths and screw tops (like thesefrom moxiethrift),

plastic containers with tight fitting covers; no-spill salt and pepper shakers (like these from bizarrebaubles),

plastic, paper or wooden forks or spoons; plastic or heavy paper cups (like these from my store, Mid-Century Mine),

colorful paper napkins and waxed paper or aluminum foil (like this amazing KVP waxed paper from Lisa’s post on her blog. It is amazing, check out the post for more pictures and fun info on the manufacturing company!)

And top it all off by packing your mid-century lunch in a great lunchbox, like this one from my store.

And maybe your surprise will be that eating a mid-century lunch at your desk can really be fun. As long as you don’t eat that cutting board too….

My parents recently bought a small house on a lake in Woodruff, Wisconsin.  It is really cute, in a retirement community and they love it.  And the best part is, they have a yellow 1970s bathroom. Pictures of that are coming up later this week.

In the meantime, here is pictures of the Wood’s Cafe, which is right down the street from my parent’s new place.

Pretty neat, isn’t it?  This cute little mom and pop cafe has been owned by the same family since 1963, and while the inside isn’t exactly the same as it once was, it is pretty close.

Here is a picture of the cafe from the 1960′s.  Don’t you just love it???

And here is the cafe today.

The floor has changed somewhat, but the counter is pretty much the same, which is the great part. 

The two cute guys are Tom, of course, and my Dad, who was really excited to find a place where he could get good corned beef hash for breakfast before a fishing trip.

Here is the AMAZING Formica on the counter.  Tom was dying over this and I can’t blame him.  I would give my eyeteeth to be able to put this in our kitchen right now!

Another shot of the counter and the great barstools.

Our food, nice and hot!  Looks good, doesn’t it?  And I adore the vintage plates! The pancakes were super good, by the way and had real butter on them.  I love Wisconsin.

So, if you come up to Northern Wisconsin, make sure you stop by the Woods Cafe in Woodruff, especially if you are crazy about vintage!

Hello, everyone!  Welcome to this week’s Mid-Century Menu.  I am happy that all the regular readers have decided to come back for more, and for those of you who are just joining us this week, I can already answer the question that will be floating around in your head.

Yes, I am crazy!

Aaaaanyway, this week’s Menu comes from Money Saving Main Dishes, a pamphlet that was published in 1948 by the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics.  The goal of this pamphlet is very simple. It isn’t for you to make delicious meals or to give your family the culinary experience of their lives.  The goal of this pamphlet is to help you save food, and they aren’t going to let a ridiculous concept like “how things taste” get in the way of the Bureau of Human Nutrition’s goal of saving food. Oh no.  You are going to take what you can get and you are going to choke it down, and you are going to save food and like it.

And if you disagree with them, well, they have plenty of room on their “taste-tester” table for you. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

You think I’m joking, huh?  You think this is just another hilarious intro for a food column?  Well, take a good, close look at this, then we will see how hard you laugh.

Not so hilarious now, is it?  Not laughing now, are you? Let me tell you something, when I read this recipe I broke out in a cold sweat.  That means that not only does it qualify for the Mid-Century Meal, but it actually got bumped to the top of the list.  I just bought this pamphlet this past weekend and already I am making it. 

Now THAT’S a disgusting recipe.

The thankfully small amout of ingredients needed for the recipe. As I was putting it together, the pickles, the peanut butter, the dairy, I kinda thought it looked like something a pregnant woman would crave.  Or someone who was just a little bit off, like someone from the Bureau of Human Nutrition or something.

The ingredients for the filling, ready to be mixed. And yes, those are DILL pickles.

Hold on, is someone screaming out there?  I can hear you!  Sara?  Is that you?

The filling, all mixed up. 

Tom walked by at this point.  He peered down into the bowl, said “Oh god,” and walked away.  I was pretty much thinking the same thing by then.

The bread, all layed out and spread will filling. And yes, it does kind of look like puke.

A close-up of the filling, just in case you missed it before.

The sandwiches lidded, and the filling thankfully all covered up.

Here I am, dipping the first sandwich into the egg mixture.

Here it is!  Frying away!  At this point, I was hoping it wasn’t going to be too bad. Maybe it was because I couldn’t actually see the filling anymore, but I starting to feel pretty good.  The fried bread can’t be too bad, right?

Here is a plate of finished sandwiches, along with the completed Menu with fresh fruit and vegtable soup.

At least there is something good in this meal!

Here it is, the moment of truth.

“How is it?”

Tom was laughing.  “Awful.  It’s awful.”

I took a bite.  It was awful.  It was gooey, and suprisingly mostly tasteless. The most taste was when you got a piece of pickle.  It wasn’t inedible, but it wasn’t the greatest, especially when it got cold.

I finished my soup and my fruit salad.  Three bites of my first sandwich stayed on my plate, cold and congealing.

“Aren’t you going to eat that?”  Tom was reaching for his second sandwich.

“I can’t eat more of this. Seriously.”

“I am going to eat the rest of these.  And I had better get credit on your blog for eating them.”

He did eat them. All. 

And the credit is all his. Seriously.