No Pattern Required

I love the Mid-Century Menu for so many reasons.  Well, not for taste reasons, but there are a lot of other good reasons the Mid-Century Menu is awesome.  One of them is that it gives me an excuse for my ridiculously huge cookbook collection. Another is that it gives me new techniques and recipes to try even if dishes don’t turn out as planned.

The third reason I love it is that Tom and I get to do something really fun together during the week.  We both enjoy planning and making the Menu, which isn’t a traditional hobby, but it is still really fun for us.

So,” Tom said last week as we were paging through cookbooks, “I think we should do gelatin for next week’s Mid-Century Menu.”

“Ohhhkay,” I said, “What do you have in mind?”

“How about this?” He held up the Gel-Cookery Recipe Book, published by Knox in 1955.  I felt a little thrill of disgust go through me.  I don’t like gelatin even when it is fruit flavored, and Jellied Eggs taught me I didn’t like it savory either. 

 ”Do you have a recipe picked out?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice evil, “this one.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhh no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. I really mean it. No.”

“Oh yes,” he nodded his head, “ This is perfect. It has Spam in it. It’s even two layers.” He was really excited.

I sighed.  “Fine. Let’s make the grocery list.”

Poor little ingredients.  They never even had a chance.

Here is the first round of gelatin, all mixed up and ready for the fridge. Now, I don’t use gelatin in cooking at all, so even though I wasn’t looking forward to the end result, it was still an interesting process to go through.  Especially since I couldn’t imagine what the gelatin of this layer was going to taste like.  It had a lot of lemon in it, so was it going to be lemony?  Or taste like Spam? Do I really want to know?

The celery and Spam all diced up and ready to go.  Oh God!

No mayonaise is an island. Except for this one.

I get it now! Mayonaise flavored gelatin! Of course!

Quiet down now, guys.  I can’t think over all your screaming. Especially you, Sara.

No, this isn’t the Twilight Zone.  That is actually mayo flavored gelatin with Spam and celery in it.  And it is ready for the fridge. Shudder.

While the Horror in the Pan solidified in the fridge, I started on the next layer, which was basically tomato gelatin.

With chopped, hard-boiled eggs in it.

Yeah, cause that’s natural. Sure.

The hard-boiled eggs trying not to drown in the chilled tomato gelatin.

And here it is, poured over the Spam layer. And it DOES look a little like barf.

Even though it is vile, I am still proud of this unmolding job.  See!  Only slightly messed up! Still Disgusting Dinner Picture Perfect, though.

In the background is the side dish, Golden Salad, which also unmolded with no problem. Huzzah!

A cross-section, to show off the hard-won layer effect.

“Are you ready for this?”  I was trying to get Tom psyched up. “Are you ready?”

“Okay,” he said, rolling his head on this shoulders.  “I can do this.  I’m ready.”

He took a bite.

And then looked confused.

“Is it horrible?”

“This,” he said slowly, “is the strangest thing I have ever eaten.”

“You say that a lot now,” I said, and I took a bite.  It WAS completely and totally the strangest thing I had ever eaten.  The mayo and Spam layer actually wasn’t that bad.  It just had a really bizarre texture.  The tomato egg layer was even weirder. Everything was really slippery and cold.  It wasn’t a pleasant sensation in your mouth.

About halfway through my slice, I was done.  After awhile, it started to gag me. 

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“This must be diet food.  Because I sure don’t want to eat anymore.”

We came to a standstill about 10 minutes in. I had eaten about two-thirds of my slice, and Tom had eaten two slices and the rest of my slice.

“We did it.”

“Good for us,” Tom was looking around, “Now where is that chocolate pie?”

The Verdict:

Spam and Egg Gelatin:  Weird, but not disgusting. The texture is what really puts you off at the end. The gelatin was too much for me after awhile, and I had to stop. Tom says he will finish the leftovers.

Golden Salad: Surprisingly good. I thought this would be nasty, but it was good and not too sweet. Tom said it tasted like a traditional gelatin salad with fruit.

Brown Derby Black Bottom Pie:  Good.  The texture of the pie is a little strange, but you get over it pretty fast. Tom ate three peices. But don’t try topping it with whipped, sweetened evaporated milk, which is what I tried out of laziness.  It melts really fast.  As you can see, the topping didn’t even make it through dinner.  Use whip cream or Cool Whip.

Happy Mid-Century Menu, everyone!  Oh, wait.  I guess I mean, happy Wednesday.  Wednesday has pretty much become Mid-Century Menu day around our house.

And what is the Mid-Century Menu?  Take one vintage cookbook, add one man who will eat anything and you have the recipe for some good fun.  Every week, I pick an “interesting” recipe from a vintage cook book, put together a menu, prepare it, and serve it for dinner to my husband. Sometimes it is good, and sometimes things go horribly wrong.

This week I decided to delve back into a book that we have visited before, Jiffy Home Cooking by Better Homes and Gardens.  This book was published in 1968, and the premise of this book is basically taking pre-packed and convienence foods and turning them into dinners that everyone can enjoy.  Or, “everyone who loves salt more than anything in the whole world” can enjoy.  But it still is good fun.  In a weird, weird sort of way.

So, here is my choice for this week. Chevron Rice Bake:

Topnotch, huh? Ummmm…no. I don’t think so.  And what is with the peaches studded with cloves?  It reminds me a lot of Peachy-Spam dinner loaf, which I remember was really salty. The curry-rice mixture is going to add a crazy twist. 

Wow. The base is cream of chicken soup?  Really?!?  Oh baby, I am excited to try this one!

A whole pile of ingredients for this meal.  The unusually large amount of spices for this meal is actually deceptive. The recipe calls for 1 tsp of curry powder, which is made up of turmeric, corriander, cumin and sometimes onion. So, all of those spices are going to be mixed into 1 tsp. Because I refuse to buy curry powder when I have the ingredients to make it.

Now, this recipe calls for two WHOLE cans of Spam.  That’s right, two….whole…cans.  And that looks something like….

This!  Du…du…daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

One Spam is cubed, and the other is sliced.  And yes, they are different colors.  One is low fat because I want Hubs to live to a nice old age.  I want the Mid-Century meal to make him miserable, not kill him!

The “sauce” for the bake; cream of chicken soup, eggs, milk and spices.

The rice, Spam and peas, ready to be mixed.

Hmmm…doesn’t actually look too bad…

Onions and parsley….some of the last fresh parsley from our garden. Sniff.

Adding the “dash” of pepper the recipe just kind of threw in there. Good thing I was prepared and had pepper on hand, or it might have been a disaster.

Oh wait…I mean, a bigger disaster…

Carefully arranging Spam slices on the casserole.  This is my favorite part about the Mid-Century Menu, I think.  Arranging everything ridiculously so it looks “attractive”. I think this was my third favorite arrangement, after Spaghetti Timbales and Fish Sticks Polynesian.

Carefully adding canned peach halves and then….

adding cloves to peaches.  What is with them and the cloves?

After 45 minutes in the oven.  Mmmm, mmmm, smell that…curry?

Ok, so it did smell a little weird.  But the smell was kind of overpowered by the smell from the spinach side dish, which REEKED like onion soup mix.

The cheerful little tablescape. Casserole, milk, and what some might consider a vegetable.  Mid-Century cooking at its finest.

But Hubs didn’t want to take the first bite. Maybe it was because he had recently been sick, or maybe it was the smells of curry and onion soup mix mingling in the air.

“Come on, eat it!  I have to take a picture!”

“I’m going. Don’t rush me!”

*laughing* “But you’ve always said you want me to make Indian food.”

“That is not funny.”

Well, after a bit he did get the first bite down.  And so did I.  It wasn’t great, but it was edible.  The curry taste didn’t go to well with the cream of chicken soup, but I think I may have added too much turmeric, so that might be my fault.  The real suprise was how good the reduced fat Spam was.  I think I like it better than real Spam, and it blows generic Spam out of the water!

But I was still too scared to eat a clove-covered peach with it.  Hubs gamely cut one up, and mixed it in with the casserole. His only remark about it was, ”I can pick the cloves out, right?”

The Verdict: Edible

Chevron Rice Bake: Strange, but not the worse thing we have ever eaten.  Be sure to go light on the curry powder.  It would have tasted better without it, in my opinion.

Special Spinach: So very, very salty. Not good. The taste of onion soup mix was overwhelming, but just the spinach and cottage cheese might have been good by themselves.

Pots De Creme Chocolate: Tasted like chocolate chips melted in chocolate pudding, so really good.  I haven’t made a “cook and serve” pudding since I lived with my parents, so it was a fun project. Especially because we got to buy dessert topping in a can.

Hooray for whip cream in a can! Yum!

Oh yeah, it’s that time again!  Welcome to this week’s Mid-Century Menu, where I take a recipe from my collection of vintage cookbooks, cook it, and force my husband to eat it for dinner.  The catch is, we don’t pick a recipe because it looks good.  We pick it because it looks terrible.

This week’s recipe comes from the Better Homes and Gardens Coobook, Jiffy Cooking.  This book is part of a rather large Better Homes and Gardens series, all of which were publish between 1955 and 1980 or so.  This book was published in 1968, and I think this is one of the newest recipes we have ever cooked from.

Now, the great thing about the Jiffy Cooking cookbook is that is uses canned or pre-packaged foods almost exclusively under the guise of “quick” cooking.  Instead, I think all they accomplish is vile cooking. Which makes me really excited about this book.

Why?  Because I am a glutton for punishment. Hot dogs, canned beans, spam, dried packaged beef, canned potatoes, canned sauerkraut, all of these things play heavily in the recipes in this books. There are even some canned things I have never heard of.  Like canned macaroni and cheese.

That’s right. You read that correctly. Canned mac and cheese. We are through the looking glass here, people.

But since I have never SEEN canned mac and cheese before, I was forced to pick something with easy ingredients to find.  Trust me, it is a hard choice when about half the recipes are worthy of the “honor”.

Ginger beans. Simple, easy and weird.  I think anything that has cookies and Spam in it is instantly qualified for the Mid-Century Menu.  The only other recipe with meat and gingersnaps I have seen is an altered version of the German dish Sauerbraten.  Which actually ended up being quite good.

In any case, let’s ruin some food!

There were so few ingredients this time, I had to put out the salt to round out the picture.  Notice the retro ketchup bottle. It was a great birthday present from Hub’s parents.

Look how happy the gingersnaps are. Little to do they know they are about to get snuggly with that generic Spam. Sigh. Sometimes I think I enjoy this too much.

Crushing the gingersnaps into a fine meal.

Can’t forget the secret ingredient of all jiffy cooking: ketchup.

The completed bean mass, ready for the Spam slices.

Carefully laying out the slimy slices. Look at the grace! The finesse!  Okay, okay, so they kept sinking into the beans. How is that my fault?

Here we are, ginger beans fresh from the oven. Honestly, I baked them for about 30 minutes more than the recipe recommended, and I uncovered it for about the last 15 minutes.  After the first 30 minutes it still looked disturbingly…moist.

Plated and ready to be et. Notice the mixed veggies and wholesome glasses of milk.  I’m trying, I really am.

Hubs “enjoying” his first bite.  After which he said, “It just tastes like…baked beans. Really sweet baked beans.”

Actually, we were both a little disappointed that the finished product was edible.  It basically tasted like sweet, sweet baked beans.  The saltyness of the Spam, which usually makes it inedible to me, actually counteracted the sweetness in the beans, so if you took a bit together it almost became good. Almost.

The Verdict: Very Sweet, but Edible

I have to commend this meal for being pretty fun  and fast to make.  Crushing the gingersnaps and placing the Spam actually was good fun. The end product was just so incredibly sweet and salty, that I can’t imagine it being good for anyone at all. Ever.

This post has been linked up with Vintage Thingie Thursdays at ColoradoLady’s blog! Head over there and check out the vintage goodness!

 It’s Wednesday, and you know what that means! It’s time for this week’s Mid-Century Menu, where I crack open one of my many, many mid-century cookbooks and look for the most unappetizing meal I can find. I cook it and serve it for dinner to my husband, who always chokes down the worst food possible with a smile. And why do I torture the poor man?

Because he likes it.

In any case, this weeks fabulous dish comes from this cute book, Good Housekeeping’s Meat Cook Book, published in 1958 by the editors of Good Housekeeping Magazine.  Now those editors must have been mighty busy cooking up their flavor melding magic, because there are some doozy’s in this one, but I thought I would get the most entertaining one first, which I found towards the back of the book.

Ahh…the canned meat section. What would I do without you?  You bring me so much disgusting joy.

I didn’t have to look hard for my recipe.  It practically slapped me in the face.

It is barely even a recipe.  It doesn’t even have an ingredients list.  And yet…it intrigued me the way no other actual meat recipe did. Canned peaches crammed into the crevices of canned meat, studded with cloves, slathered with peach syrup then baked. Oh, you had better believe it is on.

The ingredients gather together for their final picture before their doom. And yes, that is generic Spam.  It was on sale this week, so I thought I would give it a try.

By the way, I am pretty sure my mom once made a spamloaf and put cloves in it like a ham.  For some reason that is a childhood memory that sticks with me.

Brick of spam about to be sliced.  I don’t know why I took this picture.  Probably because the brick looks so very disgusting.  And look at the goo!!

Artfully placed peaches.  It may not look like the most appetizing thing out there, but god help me, I tried. 

As a side note, all three cats were circling by this point, trying to snag a piece of canned meat. Around the outside of the cat circle and the most aggressive by far, was Hubs. “That actually smells pretty good,” he said, which I knew meant he was angling for a handout.

I ignored him.

Studded with cloves and covered with a brown sugar/peach syrup mix. Just in case it wasn’t sugary enough.

So, I popped it into the oven and basted it every 10 minutes to make sure it really got enough of the peach syrup. And when the time was up, we had our dinner.

Mmmmm…sacrelicious.

So, we divided up the slices and sat down for dinner. It didn’t smell horrible, which is always a good sign.  I always  hate having to force myself to take that first bite, though even if it doesn’t smell. I waited for Hubs to take a bite, and when he had the second one in his mouth, I finally raised my fork to my lips and….holy salt! I dropped my fork.

“This is so salty!” I crammed a peach slice into my mouth to try and temper the taste. It didn’t help much, all I could taste was salty sugar.

“It’s pretty good, huh?”  Hubs was smiling and eating his second slice.

The verdict: Salty

Not sure if I just never noticed it before, but baked Spam is SALTY.  I ate my portion, but had about three glasses of water throughout the rest of the night trying to dilute the salt sludge running through my veins. Hubs said it was fine with him, we have eaten worse.

I guess I can’t argue with that one.

Thanks for reading this week’s Mid-Century Menu!  If you have a nasty recipe to share or if you want to be a guest blogger and make a mid-century horror, email me at rkehm at hotmail.com!

Welcome to this week’s edition of Mid-Century Menu, where I willingly make mid-century recipes that I know will be terrible or inedible, and then Hubs and I eat them for dinner. Most of the time we can even eat all of them.

This week we have a special treat. Last week’s frosted sandwich loaf may have been the most labor-intensive Mid-Century menu so far, but this week’s meal may well be the easiest.

Spamcakes.

Yup, that’s right. Spamcakes. For all of you who like illustrated explanations, they are make of Spam and Bisquick. Hence the advanced algebraic equation that serves at the title for this fantastic post:

Spam + Pancakes = Spamcakes.

Believe it or not, there is actually a recipe for this in the Bisquick Party Book, which has brought us such wonderful dishes as the memorable Tuna Royals, and I am sure has plenty more nastiness for Hubs and I to enjoy in the future.

One more thing. Despite what the cover of this book says, I am sure the idea for Spamcakes is neither gay nor new. Even when this book was published in 1957.

But I digress. Bring on the Spam!

Couldn’t be easier, right?  The recipe is only two sentences!

Here is the Bisquick batter, ready to be mixed.

The Spam block.

Now, I know a lot of people out there love Spam.  In fact, it has a huge cult following, complete with kitschy museum and everything.  But for some reason the prospect of meat in a can never appeals to me. Maybe it is the processed taste. Maybe it is the jellied bits. I have never been one to take home a can of it and say – “Yes! The meal I have been longing for, and all contained in a can!”

Hubs on the other hand…

Sliced up and ready to go.

Frying up in the pan.

Covered with pancake batter.  So far so good, right?

Umm…well…that didn’t work so well.  Okay, maybe only one slice of Spam at a time.

Here it is, frying away happily.

Okay, that didn’t really work either.  This is proving more difficult than the two sentences led me to believe.

I decided to cut up the Spam into strips and pour the batter over that.

There, that worked.

So, a plate of spamcakes later, we were ready for dinner. And Hubs was HUNGRY!

Not that I can knock his enthusiasim, but he seems to be enjoying this meal a little more than he should be.

The verdict: Good

These cakes weren’t anything too crazy.  As Hubs said, “They taste like pancakes with Spam in them.”  They were rich, a little greasy and tasted like pancakes. I wouldn’t like to eat them all the time, but it wasn’t such a bad experience.

So, a bunch of edible recipes in a row! This is starting to be a trend.