concerning kitchen snobbery

Sorry for the brief hiatus there, plague has entered the house. (Did you see what I did there? I referenced Bambi in an inappropriate way. I accept your praise, thank you.) Now that the sickness is somewhat under control I'm going to get back into the kitchen and do something I've been thinking of doing for a long time now.

I'm going to prove I'm not a snob.

Because I'm not, really. Or at least I never precieved myself to be one until I started reading some of the cookbooks I have hanging around and found myself recoiling in horror at the ingredients. Velveeta cheese mixed with spaghetti noodles, a can of soup and chicken? Oh...my...goodness. You have go to be kidding me. People EAT this stuff? It sounds like spackle. But, I am not a snob and by george I am going to pick seven of these recipes, one for each day of the week, and I'm going to make them. And I'm going to write to you all and tell you the answer to the burning question: Okay, are they really that bad?

First, some rules.

1)I won't make something I know I wouldn't eat because I can't condone wasting food. So this puts the kibosh on recipes of dubious quality such as the tuna and lime jello salad I found.

2)A lot of these recipes seem to lean heavily on pre-packaged or name brand ingredients. Like tater tots, for example. To try and give everything a fair shot I am going to make sure that the recipes I pick don't all use the same stuff. I don't want three recipes with cream of chedder soup. For obvious reasons.

3)The only reason I can see for people making these recipes is that they save money or time, so to see what that translates into I'm going to keep track of the total cost of the meal and time myself while cooking it. Because of the time/cost assumption I will also purposely avoid recipes that involve expensive ingredients or a lot of time.

4)I am going to curb my tendency to 'improve' recipes by substituting ingredients. If it says Velveeta I will use Velveeta even if I have perfectly good real cheese in the fridge. This experiment is going to show me whether the actual printed recipe is any good.

Here are the first three contestants:

Cranberry Banana Salad from Company's Coming Favorites Vol. 1- This one sounds horrible and involves whole cranberry sauce, lemon jello, bananas, mayonnaise and nuts. I have no idea if I can eat this or not. Actually, the whole idea of making a salad that makes the claim "also may be chilled in a pan for serving in squares on a bed of lettuce" frightens me.

Pepsi Pot Roast from Fix It And Forget It Lightly - Pot roast, with onion soup mix and pepsi and cream of mushroom soup. I have high hopes for this one. I hope it's fizzy.

Frankfurter Kebabs from The Step By Step Cookbook - this is one recipe where I will actually make a small substitution. I can't find button onions, so I'll use regular onions chopped into button onion sized pieces.


Now don't judge, I'm trying not to.