For Your Approval

BC wild salmon recipes

Here's something from my life as barbecue guy. I was recently honored with an invitation to contribute to the British Columbia Wild Salmon Marketing Council's latest promotional booklet: Download bc_wild_salmon_recipes.pdf. It has a planked salmon recipe from me, as well as some great salmon recipes from actual BC chefs.

A juicy article about steak

As I did last summer, here's a little food-related distraction for you. This is the cover story of the latest edition of City Palate, a Calgary-based food publication I've been contributing to for many years. It's a long post. Hope you enjoy.

I. Love. Steak.

A lip-smacking tribute to the king of grilled meat, the glorious beef steak

As I write this, the giant rib eye that I just finished devouring is pleasantly stretching my overfull belly, which is throbbing happily as it begins processing its glorious, meaty cargo.

The after-effects of that super-delicious steak are still with me. My lips are greasy, the gaps in my teeth hang on to the remaining shards of flesh, and my taste buds resonate with a familiar peppery afterglow.

Licking my lips nostalgically, I have a steak flashback.

Cut to five minutes ago. There it is, glistening on the plate as it throws off the classic aroma of seared fat, mesquite smoke and charred spices. Atop the steaming slab sits a slowly liquefying daub of Gorgonzola butter. The dark mass of the steak is framed nicely by slices of ripe red tomato, a few spears of grilled asparagus and a handful of roasted nugget potatoes, all drizzled with fruity olive oil, spritzed with fresh lemon juice and dusted with a sparkling skiff of Malden salt.

That bite. That first bite! Sawn from a corner of the steak with the serrated edge of my knife, the freshly exposed surface shines with juice as I draw the slice to my mouth. Its warm red core is silky on my tongue, and the crusty, chewy outer layers give my teeth the most meaningful assignment in their lives.

I liberate another shiny slice from the beautiful hunk and ceremoniously drag it through the mixture of juice, savory butter and olive oil that has pooled on the plate. The next forkful includes a tangy chunk of tomato; the next, a creamy bite of potato. Then a lemony, palate-refreshing bite of asparagus.

Oh, yes, almost forgot the wine. A big, jammy Shiraz of course. A slug of that, and then back to the motherlode of a steak, which looms on the plate, its edge now jagged like a mine face, waiting to be carved away.

Many satisfying chews and gulps of wine later, I reach my final destination: the rib bone, with its familiar curve. Setting down my implements, I grab the meat-sicle with my bare hands and gnaw away at it, reveling in the fattiest, richest, chewiest bites, my cheeks shining in the candlelight.

Finally, I can wrest no more flesh from the bone. The job is done, and all that’s left is to release a meal-crowning burp and loosen my belt. Hallelujah.

So, now you know what I do when my wife’s away for the weekend.

A beef steak primer

And now for some advice on how you can replicate great steak experiences at home (with your spouse or not).

Okay. First, and perhaps most important, you have to get a perfect piece of meat, well-aged and nicely marbled. My favorite, as you just found out, is the rib eye steak with the bone attached. I like it because it has lots of fat, and it also has nice chewy connective tissue that makes for an interesting texture (and makes for a steak that kids often don’t like). But there are all kinds of great cuts:

• Flank/skirt/hanger steak, from the diaphragm of the animal, is the most flavourful cut of beef in my opinion. It’s best when treated with an overnight marinade, seared quickly on the grill to a maximum doneness of medium rare, and then sliced thinly across the grain and served fajita-style in warmed tortillas with all the fixings.

• Strip loin or New York strip is the classic restaurant steak. With its perfect shape and thin edge of white fat, it’s hard to ruin one of these. No need for complex treatment; a quick dry or wet rub or a short bath in a soy sauce-based marinade is all you need. Or maybe just course salt and freshly cracked pepper.

• The filet mignon or tenderloing steak is the most expensive cut. This super-lean steak is a favourite among the ladies. Its mild flavour benefits from a wrapper of bacon, a pat of compound butter or a rich sauce but, as with all steaks, it also is nice with just salt and pepper. This one is also best served as rare as possible. Overcook it and it gets mealy.

• Sirloin is a less expensive cut. Like the flank, this sinewy steak has lots of flavour, but it’s relatively lean. This is a great breakfast steak, cut thin, fried fast and served with a couple of sunny-side-up eggs laid on top.

• The Porterhouse/T-bone is gloriously complex, with a tasty, more chewy piec of loin on one side of the bone and a round of filet on the other. This is a rich steak. I like to get one custom cut to about a 3-inch thickness, cook it over medium heat and then carve the meat off the bone and pre-slice it for my guests.

• Round steak is my least favourite cut of beef. Extremely lean, kind of tough, and not a lot of flavour. Acceptable if cooked quite rare, and, like sirloin, not bad for breakfast.

• Chuck. Not good for the grill, but this delicious cut is redolent with intramuscular fat and grisly connective tissue. Simmer or bake it for a long time and it takes on magical properties. But summer’s coming, so just never mind.

Steak your reputation on these tips

Cooking a steak is easy. Almost as easy as ruining one. Heed these words and avoid grill-related emasculation.

1. Turn it down. High heat is important to grilling a great steak because it makes grill marks, which give a nice charred taste to the steak and make it look appetizing. So preheat your grill on high, get some nice grill marks in the first couple of minutes of cooking, and then turn it down to medium-high or even just plain medium. Your steak will cook more evenly and you’ll avoid it being burned on the outside and raw and cold on the inside.

2. Pay attention. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Don’t walk away from the grill. Or, if you do walk away, set a kitchen timer to prompt you come back. Most steaks take about three or four minutes per side, which means if you want to pay full attention it might take eight minutes out of your day. The alternative: go watch TV and come back to the grill when your steak is ruined.

3. Don’t oversauce. I never use barbecue sauce on a steak because I prefer to taste the steak. But if you do use barbecue sauce, use it for the last minute or two as a finishing glaze. Slather it on at the beginning and you’ll have a black steak that tastes of burnt sugar.

4. Let it rest. Here’s a rule of thumb: if it’s done on the grill, it’s overdone on the plate. Take your steak off the grill when it’s almost done, then let it rest, tented in foil, for at least four or five minutes before serving. This allows the residual heat to complete the cooking process and lets the juices in the steak redistribute into the meat so they won’t spurt out when you carve your first bite.

5. Thick is better than thin. Most steaks you buy in the supermarket are cut too thin because they’re designed for people who cook on too high a heat. Get the meat cutter to cut a 1 1/2 to 2-inch steak, cook it a little longer and on a little lower heat, and you’ll get a juicier, more succulent result.

I could go on. But, really, cooking a great steak is pretty simple. Follow these rules and you will experience excellent steak flashbacks that will keep you licking your lips for days.

*****

If you enjoyed this and want more, I'll publish some recipes in my next blog post.

R

Kate wins a big award

My darling wife, Kate Zimmerman, has won Best Food Feature in a Magazine from the U.S.-based Association of Food Journalists in its 2006 competition. The award was open to magazines of every size across North America. Results of the competition were announced on September 16th at the AFJ Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Kate won for a feature she wrote for Wine Access magazine, called Reign of Terroir, about the effects of terroir on artisanal cheese. Kate's in good company. Last year’s winner in the same category was chef, author and TV host Anthony Bourdain, for a piece that appeared in Food Arts.

Kate's been writing great stuff for many publications for many years, but this is her first award, and it's well deserved. Read the article on Kate’s blog.

Extreme Eating

Yet more summer reading, continuing on the food theme, including recipes at the end of the article. Bon appetit.

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Forgive me Jenny Craig, for I have sinned.

I know the principles of healthy living, but I do not abide by them.

I am, and will always be, an extreme eater -- the culinary equivalent of those sinewy, bare-chested youths in beer commercials who zoom down glaciers on snowboards and scoot down waterfalls in kayaks. I live in their extreme world, but my snowboard is a steak knife, my kayak a gravy boat. I have dedicated my life to exploring the frontiers of gastronomic overindulgence. And this is my story.

The boiled and buttered roots of my extremism go back to my rural Ukrainian heritage. Ukrainians are an extreme people by necessity. On the family homestead near Redwater, Alberta, my grandfather used to go out to the barn in 40-below weather with an axe. There, he would chop a hunk from the frozen barrel of sauerkraut stored for the winter so the family would have a vegetable with dinner. Gourmet, or what?

Extreme eating conditions also prevailed at harvest time, when a pack of dusty, exhausted, ravenous men would invade the farmhouse at sundown, wash their hands and sit down to enormous meals of rich, hearty foods like roasted ham sausage, potatoes coated with farm cream and fresh dill, and tender cooked beet greens with butter.

The farm style of eating became extravagant when the arduous lifestyle disappeared but the high-impact cuisine remained. My generation inherited the eating habits without the hard work.

So, when the grandparents sold the farm and retired, the family would still gather on occasion, and the grease flowed like water. Memories of those times abound: stuffing myself with perogies smothered with wild mushrooms that had been fried in farm butter and finished with cream; eagerly sampling my grandfather’s favourite snack, fried blood sausage; enjoying the texture and tang of quivering head cheese sprinkled with vinegar and black pepper; washing it all down with an endless supply of RC Cola; and polishing off each meal with all the raspberry jello and thick farm cream you could eat. No 12-year-old should have been exposed to such pleasures.

Of course, for Ukrainians, one set of feasts isn’t enough. Our religious holidays are celebrated according to the Gregorian Calendar, which is a week out from the contemporary Caesarean. So we get to celebrate Christmas and Easter twice: once at home and once at the grandparents’. Overkill never tasted so good.

If my Ukrainian farm background started me on the path to extreme eating, Graham Kerr kept me going through my early teens. I was addicted to watching The Galloping Gourmet overindulge himself every day on our black and white TV. It was always fun to come home from junior high school to see how much red wine he could consume in one show, or how much clarified butter he would add to the skillet, or how many cloves of garlic he would smash with the side of his knife. I still smash my garlic like he did, even though it sends bits of garlic all over the kitchen. It’s the extreme spirit of the thing that matters.

At seventeen I was ready to embark on my own extreme eating career. It was a high school tradition for Viscount Bennett students to go drink twenty-cent draft at the Westgate Hotel til we got puking drunk. Extreme eating at the ’Gate was sharing an order of Shoestrings and gravy from the food kiosk at the middle of the bar.

A bag of Old Dutch Shoestring potato chips was emptied into a paper shell, the kind used for holding french fries. The Shoestrings, precursors to the modern Hickory Stix, were then smothered with a big ladleful of the fattest, brownest, lumpiest mushroom gravy this side of Minsk. A couple envelopes of salt and pepper were dumped on the concoction and the extreme eating began. With a plastic fork we dug in, drowning each crispy, salty, greasy mouthful with gulps of cold Westgate draft. By the time we were half way through the Shoestrings they were perfectly soft and mushy from soaking in the congealed gravy. God, those were the days.

As a young man I travelled to Europe with three friends for a summer, and got into a few extreme situations over there. I remember mountains of baby whole calimari on the Italian Riviera and homemade strawberry ice cream in Paris. But the birthplace of extreme eating has got to be Greece, home of Bacchus himself.

At a youth hostel on Corfu, Nicos, the handsome and swarthy manager, took me under his wing during a glorious ten-day stay on the island. Every Wednesday Nicos barbecued a whole lamb for a big dinner at the hostel. I got to be his assistant, helping prepare the coals, basting the roast with a mixture of olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt and pepper as it rotated on its spit, and fetching us Ouzo-and-Cokes. I was too young and innocent to realize that, as I was basting the lamb, Nicos was probably imagining basting me.

Watching the roast turning over the fire was a great way to spend the afternoon, but the big payoff came just before the lamb was ready. “Ronnie, go see Maria in the kitchen and get us two pieces of bread,” said Nicos with a knowing glint.

When I got back with the slices of fresh white bread he showed me how to drag it along the glistening back of the lamb, soaking up the tangy, salty drippings. Stomach empty, slightly giddy from sipping Ouzo and Coke all afternoon, the first bite of that bread sent us to Mount Olympus. The lamb was then taken off the spit, hacked apart and served to the hostellers down on the planet’s surface. I have since roasted whole lambs in my back yard on two occasions, and the magic with the bread works, even if it is snowing, even if it is in Calgary, and even though there’s no swarthy Greek with a glint.

It’s easy to get into the habit of extreme eating when you are exposed to an extreme host. My father’s idea of healthy eating is to feature the three pork groups (bacon, sausage and ham) in every meal. Many’s the time I’ve visited his house and enjoyed spending the morning trying to make a dent in roasters full of blintzes with cream and onion sauce, perogies smothered in chopped bacon, chicken legs dripping with tasty fat. After half an hour of gorging, it’s time for dessert: perogies packed with hand-picked wild blueberries and dunked in 14 per cent butterfat sour cream.

Perhaps the ultimate in extreme eating is Christmas Eve at Dad’s house. The traditional meatless meal is supposed to have 13 courses, but Dad has often extended the menu to twenty or more dishes. From the wheatberry porridge soaked in honey with poppy seeds to the buckwheat cabbage rolls to the fried pickerel, we’re talking major pigfest. The risk of severe coronary blockage is high, even with no meat or animal fat. Inventive people, those Ukrainians.

The only thing wrong with extreme eating is there is eventually a physical cost. At 18, I weighed 175 lbs. By the time I was 34 I was a very soft and cumbersome 268 and still growing. I finally had to turn to Jenny Craig and jogging to save myself from an early grease-soaked death.

Over about six months I lost over seventy pounds. Two years later I have gained about 25 back, but I’ve got it under control. Sort of.

I prefer to control my weight through exercise rather than diet, and I confess that many extreme habits persist. The days of shoestrings and gravy are long gone, but I find solace in smoked organ meat, homemade chorizo, Norwegian herring and oaky Chardonnays. Just the other week I coated some fresh oysters in chopped pistachios and fried them in butter, so I haven’t lost it completely.

But now, when I do go overboard, I pay dearly. I break out. I get bad hangovers. I gain three pounds in one weekend. And then it’s off to Fitness World where I sweat butter fat for two weeks. I keep thinking some old Greek will see me and try to drag a piece of bread across my back.

I guess the mood of the times doesn’t have room for extreme eaters. Crazy baldhead Susan Powter is the extremist of the day, encouraging us to go ahead and have all the potatoes and lowfat yoghurt we can eat. Ex-cherub Oprah Winfrey recently ran a marathon. Critic/fatman Roger Ebert trimmed down and now looks like a wrinkly, half-deflated balloon. Even my childhood hero Graham Kerr is now sober, spending his days straining yoghurt and cheerfully marvelling at calorie counts at a drafting table. Yech.

I don’t like this trend at all. In fact, I feel a bit of rebellion coming on. I wonder where I can get a chunk of ripe Gorgonzola . . .

SIDEBAR: EXTREME EATING YOU CAN DO AT HOME

Extreme Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Salmon and Caviar

Roughly chop half a pound of cold-smoked salmon or lox and set aside. In a stainless steel bowl beat eight eggs with half a cup of heavy cream. Put a heaping tablespoon of butter in a double boiler. When the butter is melted, pour in the egg mixture and stir often until eggs are almost set. Add the chopped salmon and stir gently until eggs are just right (creamy and glistening). Place a large dollop on a heated plate, sprinkle with caviar and inhale. Serves two.

Extreme Snack: Vodka and Herring

Keep a bottle of good Russian Vodka in the freezer and a jar of Nyborg marinated herring fillets (red wine flavour is my favorite) in the fridge. When a friend comes over, take out one large fillet and cut it into six slices. Pour two shooter glasses full of the chilled vodka and place them on the kitchen counter next to the herring. Have a shot, then a bite of herring. Repeat, standing at the counter, until herring slices are gone. Put on some loud music and crack out the beer.

Extreme Dinner: Pasta with Gorgonzola Sauce

Heat half a pound of crumbled Gorgonzola, one cup of heavy cream and a quarter pound of butter in a saucepan or heavy skillet over low heat, stirring until smooth. Toss with two pounds of cooked hot pasta (fettucini or tortellini) and add half a cup of freshly grated parmesan cheese. Serves two pigs or four adults.

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This article first appeared many years ago in Calgary food magazine City Palate.

Melon Baller and the Infinite Sadness

More summer reading.....

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Being a man, I like gear. Hiking equipment. Fishing tackle. Hand tools. The shinier, and costlier, the better. I can’t stop collecting. In fact, there’s a simple rule men follow: the more gear you have, the bigger a man you are.

This universal urge has something to do with our ancient and nearly forgotten role as defenders and providers. One can imagine a caveman proudly bragging to his wife: “See, honey? If I didn’t have that number two hardwood club, we wouldn’t be eating mastodon tonight!” The prehistoric spouse would follow her own instincts and roll her eyes, blithely responding, “Yeah, but what about all the spears sitting in the entrance to our cave? You haven’t used them since you got them, and that was at least ten moons ago. And when are you going to finish that flint hatchet? You and your hairy backed friends like to talk more about your tools than use them!”

Yes, dear. We men do love our tools. But there’s a genre of equipage that appeals to both sexes that can’t be matched for sheer diversity and stupidity – not to mention cost: the kitchen gadget. Admit it. Lurking in your kitchen drawers and cupboards are a host of ridiculous culinary instruments that seldom, if ever, get used. The melon baller you got in your Christmas stocking in 1983. The heart-shaped coeur a la creme mold you bought for that dinner party back when you had a disposable income. Or the stainless steel pasta cutter you swore you couldn’t do without, which now sits gathering dust on a shelf in the basement next to the wooden pasta drying rack.

Food and exotic cooking gear go together like a marble rolling pin and a good homemade pie crust. How do you expect to make that angel food cake without the right high-rise, two-piece pan? And after you’ve gone through so much trouble to whisk those ten egg yolks into an angelic fluff, do you really think you should cut the finished product with anything but a multi-pronged angel food cake cutter? Besides, you make angel food all the time, right? But alas, with each gadget we buy, our hopeful rationalizations soon turn into more raw material for the ever-growing pile of clutter.

At least when you buy a  kitchen gadget for yourself you are probably going to use it once. But the gift gadget, whether it is bestowed at a birthday, Christmas or a wedding, is harder to cope with on two counts: the giver tends to make wild leaps of logic about the recipient’s personal taste (“Ron loves animal fat for breakfast, so let’s get him a wrought iron bacon press!”), and the guilt factor reduces the chance the useless utensil will ever be thrown out (“I’d pitch that asparagus scrubber, but Barb and Victor gave it to me.”) Gift clutter is often stocking-stuffer sized, making it blend easily into the background hiss of mushroom-shaped garlic crushers, orange peelers, egg slicers, strawberry hullers and countless other unnameable pieces of wood, plastic and stainless steel that lurk in everyone’s deepest kitchen drawer.

But throwing out is hard to do. The most difficult gifts to garbage are the techno-gadgets that you know cost the giver much more than they should: the battery-driven pepper mill, complete with goofy light; the deluxe coffee grinder; the electric corkscrew; the teflon-coated electric crepe pan. If you can’t actually use these modern conveniences, at least you can haul them out at appropriate moments to amuse your dinner guests.

True foodies tend to gather more kitchen junk that the average home cook. You never know when you’re going to need that corncob-shaped cast iron muffin mold or your trusty mortar and pestle. So what if you have three souffle dishes. They make great serving bowls! And someone else might call that lemon zester useless, but it gets used before almost every dinner party. Many gadgets meant for one purpose can double for another. I know one cook who swears her melon baller makes a great cherry pitter. Or, in a pinch, the steel skewers in my cutlery drawer can be used for unlocking the bathroom door, or pulling lint clogs out of my vacuum cleaner. Let’s not even discuss turkey basters in this context.

A quick browse of a big glitzy kitchen store reveals that the public thirst for useless kitchen gadgets must be insatiable. What I found goes beyond even my jaded culinary imagination. Why would anyone need a bean stringer? What perverted brain came up with a terra cotta garlic roaster? Who needs a special skillet for making fajitas? Who indeed.

But I suppose, in the end, someone out there is using a noodle grater every day because they just can’t get enough spaetzel. And there must be at least a few cooks who can’t stand it if their bacon crinkles in the pan and actually like to have their bacon press within easy reach. Ask a devoted cook to part with their lemon juicer, garlic press or cheese plane and you might get hit in the head with a flying tea ball. Indeed, one person’s kitchen junk can be a foodie’s essential tool.

Existential philosopher Martin Heidegger had a phrase to describe the anxiety of modern life: he called it “the thingness of being.” Heidegger didn’t know at the time, but he was perfectly portraying the feeling we get trying to find the nutmeg grater on the one day a year we need it. As a society, we collectively long to peel our oranges with our fingernails, cut our cheese with an old paring knife and serve our spaghetti with a couple of forks.  This back-to-nature movement, of course, is being suppressed by a conspiracy of the bagel cutter and yogurt strainer manufacturers, who are in cahoots with Santa to keep our junk drawers full forever.

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The preceding article first appeared in City Palate, a Calgary food publication.

A Crescenzo Knock-Off

I was looking at my blog this morning and thinking, man, this time of year no one wants to be reading about whether or not you should include lists of retiring employees in your company publication.

So I figured, if I'm going to keep this blog alive between now and September, I may as well provide  you with some light summer reading. Something lively and fun, like my friend Steve C. does so well in his blog, Corporate Hallucinations.

Think of this blog post as a Crescenzo knock-off -- the blogospheric equivalent of a Ronex watch, purchased in some Hong Kong market and worn shamelessly in an attempt to emulate those with real power and style.

By the way, I didn't shave my head just to look like Steve. I have to wear this goofy Rockin' Ronnie hat all the time when I do my barbecue-related work, and I got sick of having a permanent case of hat head. But let's just say Steve was an influence.

The following article first appeared in City Palate, a Calgary-based food publication. I hope you enjoy it.

A Recipe for Conspiracy

Forget about the government’s cover-up of proof that aliens have visited earth. Never mind whether Elvis staged his death to escape the glare of public life. I have evidence of a far more disturbing and pervasive conspiracy. For years, even generations, the big food companies have been secretly planting recipes and cookbooks among us that are designed to make us buy their products!

I began to piece together this conspiracy theory while going through the belongings of my late father, a great cook who bequeathed me a larger than normal appetite and a house full of clutter. And among the ruins of Dad’s obsessive lifelong junk collecting habit was a shoe-box full of old recipe clippings, hand-written instructions on how to make pyrogie dough and what I can only describe as covert food propaganda.

We’ve all seen it. The little brochures that fall out of Homemaker’s magazine into our fat little laps. “Famous Recipes of Famous Brands” screams the headline, with the suggestive subtitle, “Quality Recipes to Collect and Enjoy.”

Collect and enjoy, indeed. Every time we look over these recipes we are being sent little signals. For example, the recipe for “Easy Peanut Butter Cookies” says you should add one can of Eagle Brand™ Sweetened Condensed Milk. And the “Kraft Festive Recipes” brochure strangely contains recipes that use nothing but Kraft products! A quick skim of the seductive array of recipes for Cheese Pennies, Festive Ruby Ring With Turkey Salad and No-Bake Mincemeat Mallow Cheesecake reveals subliminal messages like “add 1/4 cup PARKAY margarine” and “four cups KRAFT miniature marshmallows.” Ha! Caught in the act!

How do these companies get away with this? Here I am, innocently thumbing through the Eggs Made Easy booklet, and here comes Big Brother whispering to me right in the foreword, “You can feel good about eating eggs because they’re natural and naturally good for you. Give these recipes a try and experiment with your own. Enjoy eggs!”

Eggs. Eggs. I can’t tell you how hard it is to keep my hands at the keyboard with that kind of message gnawing away at my subconscious mind. God I could use an omelette right now.

But I digress. Looking over the pile of booklets (the conspiracy seems largely based on 12- to 16-page, full-colour booklets with titles like “Be Your Own Bakery -- with Roger’s” and “Prime Time for Roast Beef”), I begin to see subtle patterns emerging. Recipes in these supposed help manuals for busy chefs are prejudiced, even bigoted. The one from Fletchers might as well be called Pig Supremacist literature: “Besides being nutritious, pork is exceptionally versatile. For family fare it’s sure to be a favorite!” The next thing you know I’ll be standing around in a circle with a bunch of fellow ham zealots burning a cross rib roast.

One of the main tenets of this conspiracy is to divide and conquer. There are so many different companies and food organizations that are trying to influence our thinking that there will never be a single-food movement. Rather, we will see the emergence of cults and even revolutionary cells. Some will be swayed by “Brunswick’s Delicious and Nutritious Snacks From the Sea.” Others will be slowly sucked in by “Mushrooms Add Magic to Your Meals!” And a few fringe elements of society might get swallowed up by the California Walnuts’ “Go Nuts for Walnuts” recruitment campaign.

There’s plenty of proof this has been going on for a long time. An early booklet from Silverwood’s Dairies features shameless flogging of milk products. It curdles the soul: “Cottage Cheese. So Adaptable. It can fit into any course of the meal. Appetizer. Main Dish. Salad. Dessert.” It seems so obvious to me they are just trying to sell more cottage cheese! And yet why do I suddenly feel like whipping together a Silverwood’s No-Bake Lemon Cottage Cheese Pie? God help me.

Everyone is in on this sickening racket. What looks like a nice little booklet, “The Art of Seasoning,” turns out to contain recipes that all call for McIlhenney Tabasco sauce. A book that came with Dad’s freezer seems to think everyone should eat nothing but frozen food. And every recipe, from the Fun-do Fondue to the Tunnel of Fudge Cake in “A Treasury of Bake-off Favorites” contains Pillsbury products. Coincidence? I think not.

Stop. Please stop. No, it’s too late. I’ve already been trained to salivate at the thought of Rice and Beef Porcupine Meatballs and twitch with hunger when I hear the words Crispy Top Coffee Cake. I came to the realization that it all started innocently 23 years ago with that home economics class I took in grade seven. As the cold reality began to dawn on me, I frantically searched through my cookbook collection to find the final horrifying truth. My sacred copy of “Recipes for Young Adults,” which I had always cherished as a bastion of idiot-proof, high-fat recipes and solid, practical advice on stain removal and personal hygiene, was sponsored by none other than the Alberta Sugar Beet Grower’s Association.

Now it all made sense, I thought to myself, weeping silently. My big belly. My cavities. The recipes for Pineapple Chiffon Cake and Corn Flake Macaroons. Everything came together in one cataclysmic wave of sorrow and defeat as I read the back page of my worn old copy. “Sugar produced in Alberta is now more than 99.97 percent pure sucrose. Better sugar is not to be found.” I realized that since I read that passage in 1974 I haven’t bought anything but Alberta sugar. I dragged myself to the stove, opened “Recipes for Young Adults” one more time and made myself some Tuna Noodle Bake. Sobbing uncontrollably, I followed the casserole with some Orange Ambrosia Salad and finally began to smile.

I truly loved Big Brother.

Eggs, anyone?

___________________________________

RECIPES

PROOF POSITIVE THAT ELVIS IS ALIVE

No Bake Mincemeat Mallow Cheesecake
(from “Kraft Festive Recipes” published by Kraft Limited)

1 cup vanilla wafer crumbs
1/4 cup PARKAY Margarine, melted
1 3/4 cups Mincemeat
4 cups KRAFT Miniature Marshmallows
1/3 cup orange juice
2 8-oz pkgs. PHILADELPHIA BRAND Cream Cheese, softened
2 teaspoons grated orange rind
1/2 pint heavy cream, whipped

Combine crumbs and margarine. Press onto bottom of 9-inch spring form pan. Chill. Spread mincemeat over crust. Melt marshmallows with orange juice in double boiler; stir until smooth. Chill until thickened. Combine softened cream cheese and orange rind, beating until well blended and fluffy. Whip in marshmallow mixture; fold in whipped cream. Pour over mincemeat. Chill until firm. Garnish with additional mincemeat and chopped candied fruit to form a wreath, if desired.

CLEAR EVIDENCE THAT ALIENS HAVE VISITED LOUISIANA

Barbecued Bologna
(from “The Art of Seasoning” published by McIlhenny Co.)

1 whole beef bologna (about 7 pounds)
1/2 cup vinegar
1/3 cup prepared mustard
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon TABASCO
1/4 teaspoon basil
2/3 cup salad oil

Remove casing from bologna; make slashes with knife about 1 inch into the meat. Combine remaining ingredients in small saucepan; bring to a boil. Place bologna in aluminum foil-lined shallow baking pan; brush with sauce. Roast in 425°F. oven 15 minutes or on outdoor grill about 10 minutes, brushing freqently with sauce. Slice; serve on hamburger buns. Remaining sauce may be served with meat, if desired. YEILD: 10-12 servings.