Return to the Dead Celebrity Cookbook

Things have been getting a little dark during the first few days of 30 Days of Blogging, so I figure we need to move on to a lighter topic today:

The dead.

Dead celebrities, that is.

As you may recall, I treated myself to The Dead Celebrity Cookbook just after Christmas. I posted a question without context on my Facebook asking friends to pick one of these three dead celebrities, without telling them why: Bette Davis, Karen Carpenter, and Greer Garson. Bette squeaked by with the win, which surprised me since most people that I know seem to only know her because she's got eyes or, possibly, from her spellbinding portrayal of late 1990's-early 2000's Michael Jackson. In honor of her win, I cooked Bette's Red Flannel Hash, and enjoyed it.

Karen Carpenter came in a close second. I feel bad making fun of someone with an eating disorder, but her recipe for a "chewy pie" made of egg whites and saltine crackers could best be described as a warning sign for intervention. I went ahead and cooked it anyway, and I swear that eating it physically hurt me inside. Over the course of a week I managed to eat only half, and I had to soak the pie plate (which had been heavily sprayed with cooking spray prior to baking) for four days to loosen that crap. At one point I even thought about throwing the pie plate away, but it's Pyrex.

This leaves us with poor Greer, the distant third. Although she's largely forgotten by American audiences today, Greer was a major movie star in the 1940's, nominated for Academy Awards five consecutive years in a row (a record that she and Bette Davis jointly hold). I know of her from film class and books about old Hollywood (I've only seen one of her films), and also because she is a valuable piece of Oscar trivia, both for the consecutive nominations and also because she is the reason that acceptance speeches have time limits. Her speech for Mrs. Miniver was over five minutes long, and holds the record for the longest acceptance speech in Academy Award history.

Keep that fact in your back pocket for the next trivia night.

You're welcome.

Greer's recipe in the cookbook is for something called capirotada, which I assumed was British since she is, but which turns out to be traditionally Mexican. Given that Greer ended up married to a Texas millionaire, her choice of recipe is maybe not all that surprising, but I'd never heard of it until I saw it in the cookbook. It's described as "like French toast" and "like bread pudding", but it was the "what the hell?" mixture of Monterey Jack cheese, raisins, and sugar syrup that made me think, "Oh, I have to try this."

Our recipe starts with six pieces of toast:



which means that we've already exceeded the number of calories in Karen's chewy pie.

The instructions said to use a casserole dish, which meant that I had to spend ten minutes deciding which piece of Pyrex would be the appropriate size. I settled on a 1.5 quart Golden Honeysuckle, but now that I've cooked this I think I could have gotten by with a standard sized bread loaf pan. Following the recipe, I began to stack the toast in the dish:



and then to cover it with shredded cheese and raisins:



until I ran out of ingredients and ended up with what looked like the driest, least delicious sandwich ever:



Seriously, those raisins filled me with doubt.

Once the layers were arranged, I set to work making syrup out of sugar, water, and nutmeg. The recipe called for cinnamon, but I didn't have any, so the nutmeg was a substitution. According to the recipe, I needed to boil until it turned amber, which I decided was here:



Hey, Greer? It's kind of hard to see when the syrup is turning brown if you have me putting a brown spice in it.

I let the syrup cool for about five minutes (the recipe didn't say to do this, but I was not pouring boiling hot sugar syrup into room-temperature Pyrex; that's how dishes explode) and then poured it over the stacks:



and then I rearranged some of the cheese that had washed into the bottom of the bowl back on top, brushed it with melted butter, and baked it until golden brown and soaked with syrup (twenty minutes):



It smelled really good, like French toast. The book didn't say if I should eat it right out of the oven or let it cool a little first, so I scooped a piece right out:



and dug in.

It's a hard food to describe. It's sweet, crunchy on top, soft on the bottom, and the raisins get kind of soft and squishy while cooking. The cheese somehow stops tasting like cheese (no surprise since it's so mild to begin with), and the whole thing tastes better if you let it cool down to room temperature.

And, best of all, it comes right out of the dish without four days of soaking.

Potatoes, Candy, and Something That Claims To Be Pie

A week or two ago several of my friends on Facebook were sharing and reposting a recipe for something called "Potato Puffs", which were made out of cheese, sour cream, and mashed potatoes and looked fairly simple. My mom thought they resembled the filling of a twice baked potato, but without the potato, and I found myself intrigued enough to go get some mashed potatoes (I had everything else on hand already) and give it a try.

While buying the potatoes, I also bought these:



but we'll talk about them a little later, while the potato puffs are baking.

Also, because I love myself, I spent the extra dollar to get the pre-mashed potatoes that come in a tub rather than mashing my own or getting instant ones. It's all glamour and glitz all the time around here, I tell you.

Anyway, here's the recipe for the potato puffs, which will make you a cute side dish when you want to do something different:

3 cups mashed potatoes
2 eggs
1/3 cup sour cream
1 heaping cup shredded cheddar
2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese (I used shredded, because I had that)
2 tablespoons dried chives or parsley
Salt and pepper

It's pretty simple as recipes go. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and grease/butter/spray with Pam the inside of the cups of a muffin pan. Then crack your eggs into a bowl:



I used my Pyrex Autumn Americana 404 mixing bowl, because I wanted to give my yellow Primary Color bowls a little break. That poor Americana bowl is my little Pyrex orphan. I don't have the other three bowls that go with it, and would prefer the Blue Americana set, but I was buying some other Pyrex at a going out of business sale at a junk shop and the lady running it offered to throw that bowl in with the rest for four more dollars. You can't buy a new four-quart mixing bowl for four dollars, and I don't actively dislike the set. I'd buy the other three if I saw them, but I never see them, so that bowl sits in the closet alone.

Back to the baking, after you beat the eggs, mix in the sour cream:



This smells about as good as you imagine raw eggs and sour cream mixed together smell. After that, you mix in the cheese, throw in the chives, and salt and pepper to taste. I would like to take a moment here to point out that the handheld, squeeze pepper grinder my mom gave me for Christmas several years ago:



is one of the best kitchen gadgets that I own. It lets me grind pepper with one hand, directly over the bowl.

Thanks, mom!

After you thank your mom (which you should probably do regularly even if she didn't give you a pepper grinder), add the potatoes and mix it really well:



and then spoon the mix into the muffin cups, filling them right to the top:



Bake them for 35 minutes, then let them cool in the pan for 5 more minutes. When they're done, they'll look like this:



The odd brown liquid is non-stick cooking spray; I'm pretty sloppy with my spraying. To get the puffs out, I just stuck a fork in the middle and hooked one out of the pan, and they came out like little muffins:



but inside they're creamy like mashed potatoes.

The only suggestion I would make is that they could maybe use some bacon, but that's totally optional.

While the potatoes were cooking, I tore into those red velvet M&M's:



They're a little bigger than regular M&M's, like peanut butter ones.

Spoiler: They're not red inside:



If you eat more than one at a time, you can catch a subtle flavor of cream cheese frosting, but for the most part they just taste like M&M's.

Since the potato puffs turned out so well, I thought I would try another recipe that's been haunting me. I mentioned when Bette Davis and I cooked some hash that the recipe I almost made was attributed to Karen Carpenter, but that she lost by a handful of votes. Well, now that I made Bette's hash, the door was wide open for Karen Carpenter's Chewy Pie.

It's certainly a recipe. Of some kind. For a food. Or "food".

It starts with sixteen saltine crackers:



They need to be crushed, so I put them in a ziploc bag, left some air in it, and crushed them to dust with a rolling pin:



Since I already had a handy bag, I added the sugar and baking powder to it and shook it to mix. After that I chopped some walnuts:



and then spent twenty minutes googling to find out what to set the oven to. The missing oven temperature could be a simple oversight in transcribing the recipe for the book, but I choose to interpret it as evidence that no one ever actually cooked this thing. If you happen to buy the cookbook, pencil in 350 degrees F.

Then beat three egg whites until stiff peaks form:



You have no idea what a sense of achievement doing that gave me. I've seen people beat egg whites on television, and it always seems fraught with disaster, so when I casually beat my egg whites and they actually turned into a bowl of stiff peaks, I let out such a yell of triumph in the kitchen that the neighbors probably looked at the wall for a minute as if expecting me to burst through it like the Kool Aid Man.

After gloating over my stiff peaks, I folded in the saltine mixture and the walnuts, which promptly destroyed my stiff peaks:



and spread it evenly in a pie pan:



While the "pie" was baking, I whipped cream until I created a bowl of whipped cream:



which is supposed to be the topping for this thing that looks like a giant cookie:



That's a pie?

It breaks when you cut it:



It turned out that only the top broke, and the inside is still soft, but the damn thing also stuck to the pan even though I sprayed the hell out of that pan, so the first slice out looked like I chopped it out with a hatchet:





If I wanted this kind of abuse I'd make fudge.

I managed to carefully remove a second piece and then use the whipped cream to cover the flaws:



so I finally got a decent photo. In case you're curious, a "pie" made of crackers, egg whites, and walnuts tastes like walnuts.

At this point, you're probably wondering two things, and I can answer both of those questions:

No, I don't know for sure if Karen Carpenter ever actually ate this.

And yes, it actually is chewy. Really chewy. Excessively so.

I bet Greer Garson's creation won't be nearly this strange.

The Dead Celebrity Cookbook: Bette Davis

Bette Davis wants you to moisten this, I thought to myself, holding a small container of cream above the bowl. Moisten. Moisten. Moist is the most disgusting word in the English language. Moyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy-st. This looks disgusting, too.

And it did:



But, to be honest, it had looked a little disgusting way before I moistened it.

Every year my grandparents give me a Barnes and Noble giftcard for my birthday, and then another for Christmas. That means that every year, right after Christmas, I treat myself to some post-holiday presents, and this year I treated myself to something very special: Frank DeCaro's Dead Celebrity Cookbook, featuring 145 recipes from old celebrity cookbooks, magazines, and other sources. Not only is it useful, but DeCaro is also hilarious, and provides a brief writeup of each celebrity along with their recipe(s). (Some celebrities get more than one.)

As soon as I started reading it I knew that I was cooking something from it this weekend, so I narrowed down the three recipes that intrigued me the most, and then asked my friends on Facebook to please pick one of the following dead celebrities, without telling them why: Bette Davis, Greer Garson, and Karen Carpenter. Yes, Karen Carpenter published a recipe once. For food. Which she claimed to eat. Poor Greer, largely forgotten by the American public, quickly fell away, and it became a neck and neck race between Bette and Karen.

Bette Davis came out the winner by seven votes.

I probably should have put her up against Joan Crawford, but Joan's recipe is for fish and I don't know if I'm there yet, or ever will be. I don't eat fish, for the most part.

Anyway, Bette Davis' recipe is for "Red Flannel Hash", a mix of potatoes, beets, corned beef, and cream. I've made hashbrowns before, but never hash with meat in it, so I was intrigued, and the ingredients were pretty easy to locate at Kroger. Most of these recipes are like that, as they are from a time before America's gourmet revolution, so there's not a lot of exotic spices or rare vegetables to track down.

The recipe starts with cooked, diced potatoes. Back in Bette's day, Bette (or the maid) had to cook up the potatoes herself, but now that we've entered modern times, I'm fully comfortable with cheating and shortcuts:



No shame whatsoever.

If you're wondering where the "red" in the name comes from, you might notice some canned beet slices draining in the sink in the right hand corner of that picture. In case you're still not getting it, or you've never cooked with beets before for some reason (like that there's something wrong with you, because how can you not like beets? Do you hate things that are delicious?), observe the aftermath of the beet dicing:



Straight up murder scene.

(Observe also my green Primary Colors 403 Pyrex mixing bowl, just because.)

After the beets and potatoes were handled, I decided to tackle the corned beef. Again, this was probably a dish meant to use up leftover beef and potatoes from dinner the night before, but since I didn't make corned beef and potatoes last night I had to settle for canned corned beef:



What is that key for, exactly? The beets just had a pop top, like most of my canned foods do. I've never eaten meat from a can that you needed a key to open, so I was a little dubious.

Then I started using the key, and became even more dubious:



It unzips the can? And that's meat under there? As a person who eats Spam, I have to say that this canned corned beef looks disgusting:



It still looks disgusting after it's diced:



and, as you saw at the beginning of the entry, after it's been moistened with cream.

It also smelled like cat food, but I trust Bette Davis, so I melted a half stick of butter in a skillet pan:



and got to work browning my hash. I wasn't sure how brown it should be when it was done, or if it would turn brown at all with the beets in there, but I figured that I would cook it until all of the liquid was cooked off and it looked at least brown-ish.



As it cooked, it stopped smelling like cat food, and started to smell like carmelized meat, kind of smoky and a little spicy. I added pepper, but figured the corned beef had enough salt to flavor the dish, and it turned out that I was right. I'm not sure if this is how it looked when Bette made it, but it tastes good.

Now I just have to decide whose recipe is next.