Exciting news! An article I wrote about how riding a scooter can simplify your life was posted on the blog Unclutterer last Friday. Go read it! (Ignore the crabby comments from the anti-scooter faction. Who knew scooter haters even existed?)

And expect more posts about my scooter and how much I love it in the future!

In April 1956, the women of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Cleveland Heights, OH published Out of Our Kitchen Into Yours, a 320-page tome featuring "an authentic Swedish smorgasbord" along with hundreds of other recipes -- and all of them hand-written. Women didn't have as much to do in 1956. They also had nicer handwriting.

The smorgasbord recipes come first and are the most intriguing in the book, if not the most authentic. Jellied Eels and Smorgasbord Tongue Arrangement sound like actual Swedish offerings, but Grapefruit Salad Mold and Egg Toadstools (hard boiled eggs served standing on end, with half a tomato on top, apparently resembling toadstools) sound like they were invented in the Kraft Foods Laboratory circa 1952. But what do I know? The closest I've come to eating Swedish food is passing through that scented cloud of Swedish meatball steam near the exit of IKEA. Perhaps Cottage Cheese Salad is a great delicacy there.

Outside of the molded salads, the Smorgasbord section is full of dishes made with ingredients typically avoided by your average American, such as pungent fish (anchovies, pickled herring), weird animal parts (liver, tongue) and unpopular vegetables (mainly beets), so I think it's mostly the real deal. Vaguely unpalatable + oddly translated name = authentic. I'd love to try the Boiled Smoked Tongue or Swedish Liver Pastaj, whatever that is, but I don't want to actually have to boil and/or smoke a tongue myself. I'll probably try making the simple Carrot Souffle, though.

The Smorgasbord occupies only the first 52 pages. There are 268 pages after that! I have to admit my eyes started to glaze over around page 200. Even then there were a few recipes that stood out, such as the faux-ethnic Indian Meat Loaf and African Chow Mein. The Indian Meat Loaf makes some sense -- it's meat loaf with corn in it, get it? In the 1950s, Native Americans were Indians and Africans ate a lot of Chinese food. Except I don't know what makes the African Chow Mein either African or Chinese. It has two cans of cream of chicken soup in it. I think what that makes it is inedible.

There were also two salad dressings of note, the first only because its name is completely unappetizing: Thick Clear Salad Dressing. Um, you might as well tell me you've topped my salad with mucus, Ms. Linea Carlson. Please don't include the texture and appearance of the dressing in the name, especially when said texture and appearance resemble bodily secretions. Thank you.

Onto more delectable things! Bacon Salad Dressing, with the bacon grease serving as the oil in the dressing. Genius, pure bacon genius. This would be good on a spinach salad, as a vegetable dip, or served straight up a small shot glass. Just kidding. Maybe.

And what fundraising cookbook would be complete without a baffling soup? This time it's the Jenny Lind Soup, with its bizarre combination of tapioca and beef broth. However, a little searching has revealed that Jenny Lind soup was not invented by the ladies of Bethlehem Lutheran (although this version likely was); it's an actual soup, named after a famous Swedish singer who took the world by storm in the mid-1800s. She had a clandestine relationship with Chopin! Hans Christian Anderson was in love with her! She inspired the story "The Ugly Duckling"! I don't know what any of this has to do with soup, but Jenny Lind soup is typically made from mashed rutabaga, Gruyere cheese, sage, egg yolks, heavy cream and chicken stock thickened with roux, then topped with beaten eggs whites. Not surprisingly, it has the consistency of wallpaper paste. The soup was immortalized in James Joyce's Ulysses, in a passage where Leopold Bloom dreams of eating it: "Jenny Lind soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half-pint of cream. For creamy dreamy."

Weirdest. Soup. Ever.

For this week's recipe, I decided to go with something beet-based because beets are one of my favorite vegetables, but I usually just eat them roasted with a little salt and olive oil. From the Smorgasbord section, I chose the Beet Luncheon Salad, contributed by Mrs. Theresa Swanson, because I couldn't resist the idea of beets mixed in Jell-O. It's so offensive somehow.

I bought beets from the Hollywood Farmers Market, boiled and peeled them, diced them up and mixed them into salted, half-congealed Lemon Jell-O. Not being one for molded gelatin salads, I don't have any fancy molds, but I did turn out the resulting fuchsia dome onto a pretty cake plate. Unfortunately, this did little to make it more appealing. The texture is nice, with the firm bite of the beets contrasting the slippery gelatin, but the Jell-O is way too sweet and fake-tasting. Lemon Jell-O in 1956 was probably much less sugary than Lemon Jell-O circa 2008, so I can't entirely fault the recipe. (I initially blamed high fructose corn syrup, but 2008 Jell-O is actually made with real sugar.) Perhaps plain gelatin mixed with lemon juice and seasonings would result in something more palatable, but I can't say I'm motivated to find out. I already have one too many jiggly fuchsia domes in my life.

Beet Luncheon Salad

1/2 an onion
1 bunch (5 small or 3 large) beets
1 6 oz. package Lemon Jell-O
2 cups boiling water
2 cups cold water
3 teaspoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon salt

Grate the onion and collect 1/2 teaspoon of the resulting juice. Set aside.

In a bowl or gelatin mold, pour the boiling water over the Jell-O and stir for two minutes, until completely dissolved. Add the vinegar, salt and onion juice and stir until the salt has dissolved. Add the cold water and stir, then put in the refrigerator. Refrigerate for 1 1/2 hours or until thickened.

Meanwhile, prepare the beets. Wash them and cut off tops, leaving about an inch of the stem attached. Put in a large pot, cover with water and bring to a boil. Let simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the skin slips off easily. Drain and let cool, then slip off the skins and dice. Once the Jell-O has thickened, stir in the beets and return to the refrigerator for another 2 1/2 hours, until set completely.

When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of living in a house with a balcony -- I don't really know why. I think I thought if I had a balcony, boys were sure to serenade me on warm summer nights, like how having a swimming pool leads to popularity and pool parties. Well, I have a balcony now, a tiny one, but instead of dreaming about stepping outside to find a crooning boy on the sidewalk below, I dream about tomatoes.

That's how I found myself at Tomatomania at the LA Arboretum a couple weekends ago with my friend Jenn and her husband Mike, my head stuffed with visions of vines and puckered heirloom fruit. Tomatomania turned out to be part of the LA Garden Show, so there was a lot more to look at besides tomatoes, but we made a beeline for the seedlings anyway. Reading all the yummy descriptions, I wished for a real garden, or at least a bigger balcony, but I eventually settled on a cherry tomato called Sunsugar and a black variety called Black Krim.

Because my balcony is so very small, I decided to pot them upside down in baskets hanging from the awning, a method which also improves air circulation and keeps pests away. There are lots of online tutorials for this, but I followed these instructions, mainly because it didn't require a drill. On top I planted marigolds, since tomatoes and marigolds are companion plants. The balcony looks so much more welcoming now and with luck my dreams of sweet summer Sunsugar serenades will come true very soon.

I'm very much a novice tomato grower, so I welcome any tips in the comments!

This week's book -- 450 Original Receipts for Good Things to Eat from the housewives of Lake Geneva, WI -- is a beautifully bound hardcover, so professional-looking that I initially thought it was a cheesy reprint of an older book. But it's the real thing: a fundraising cookbook from 1911, which the library acquired in 1991. Food stains on the pages and handwritten recipes in the back make it clear this book was put to good use during the 80 years in between. I even found a newspaper clipping so old it had stained the pages next to it. (One side of the clipping has recipes for Swiss Steak, Frozen Tomato Salad and Parsnip Balls. The other side has part of an article with the headline "ACIDS IN STOMACH CAUSE INDIGESTION.")

It's not hard to get my head around Post-WWII recipes. Even if they're bizarre, they use methods and ingredients I understand and I don't have to translate them into modern-day terms. But this book was something else entirely. For one thing, there was the sudden realization that all of these dishes were cooked with wood- or coal-burning stoves and ovens. It was the advertisements that gave it away, first one asking readers "WHY NOT COOK BY ELECTRICITY? THE ONLY WAY!" (olde tyme ads were always yelling at people, it seems), then another from a lumber company reminding us, in the desperate tones of the doomed, that if we want that "Van Dyke brown" on our baked goods, we should use maple cuttings. That's when, duh, I realized none of the recipes had any temperatures and the baking times were rather loose. There are references to baking in a "quick oven" or a "hot oven," but that's as specific as it gets.

Then there are the measurements, which seem standardized for the most part, but also include items like "butter the size of a hickory nut" or "two coffee cups of bread crumbs." How big is a hickory nut? And isn't it kind of refreshing that no one drank Venti coffees in Lake Geneva circa 1911?

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about this cookbook is how not weird the food is. It's kind of scary that the dishes people were making in the 1950s through '70s are less recognizable than the food people were eating nearly 100 years ago. Sure, there is a lot of canned seafood (including canned lobster!), a recipe for Sour Mutton ("A fine way to use left over pieces of mutton") and a cookie called Rocks, but for the most part the recipes are for simple, classic dishes made with just a few ingredients. It's kind of inspiring really, to find out during this time of rising food prices and economic uncertainty that you can make about twenty different meals with a can of salmon, some bread crumbs and an egg.

The advertisements are actually more amusing than the recipes, like the germaphobe Gold Medal flour ad asserting its product "is not touched by the hands of man" before it reaches you, the housewife. Does that just mean everyone wears gloves? Because if people are cooking over coal stoves, I don't think robots are involved in the manufacturing process at all.

Or this cheeky ad for...socks? Sex sells, even in 1911. Even in a cookbook. Put out by a church.

The final pages of the cookbook are devoted to household hints, which yield more insights into what life was like when this book came out. A chart of vegetable cooking times is a depressing reminder of why so many American kids hate vegetables -- because not that long ago, boiling green beans for one hour and spinach for two was totally normal. You know what else was normal back then? Washing your husband's snot-soaked handkerchiefs. Ugh.

It was difficult to choose a recipe this week because many of them just seemed very normal and classic, like something pulled from The Joy of Cooking, but I finally settled on Cherry Pudding, because it's cherry season in Southern California and the guy who sells fruit on my street has had big bags of them for the past week. The recipe sounds like a bread pudding, but while I was assembling it, I felt like there wasn't enough bread to soak up the egg and milk. (I chose a dark, sweet anise-flavored bread from Trader Joe's.) I wanted to stay true to the recipe though, so I made it as directed, except I made the mistake of halving and pitting the cherries, since I don't own a cherry pitter. This led to a lot of excess juice once I cut into it. And the unbalance bread-to-custard ratio meant there were lots of eggy bits floating around in the pool of cherry juice. Or failure juice, as I like to think of it. So while this dessert looks nice and smells lovely, it needs a bit of tweaking. I did have some warmed up and topped with plain yogurt for breakfast this morning and it was yummy, so there's hope for it yet.

Here's the recipe as it appears in the book, with my notes.

Cherry Pudding

1 pint bread [I'd use twice that, or 4 cups cubed bread]
1 quart boiling milk
Butter, size of an egg [I used 1/4 cup]
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar [I used 1 1/4 cups, since my bread was sweet]
3 eggs, beaten light
A little cinnamon [1/8 teaspoon]
1 quart stoned cherries

Soak bread in hot milk; while hot, add the butter, salt, sugar. When cool, stir in eggs, cinnamon, cherries. Pour into a buttered pudding dish [I used a 2.5-quart casserole dish] and bake in a quick oven [350 degrees F] about three-quarters of an hour.

Because of earlier failures, I thought for a long time I didn't have what it took to keep a happy, healthy succulent plant indoors. But that was dumb. On a sunny windowsill, nothing could be easier to maintain. Watering every week or two? Bright, filtered light? Done and done.

Small succulent plants are cheap, but plant containers are not, so when I thought about expanding my windowsill garden to the kitchen, I started looking around for inexpensive containers I could modify into planters. The answer: bread pans! Nearly every thrift store has a few of them, priced at less than a dollar. They have a clean, simple shape and just need a few drainage holes added. Here's what I did to turn my 59-cent bread pan into a succulent planter.

Materials needed:

Bread pan (look for a thin pan made from a material that will not rust, as rust will affect the soil's pH)
Succulents
Potting soil formulated for cactus or succulents
Hammer
Awl or nail plus something to widen the holes (like an old screwdriver)
Kitten (to inspect your work -- optional)

Use the hammer and awl/nail to poke evenly-space drainage holes in the bottom of the bread pan. If using a nail, widen the holes by pushing in an old screwdriver. If your pan is made out of the same material as mine, it should be very easy to do this.

Allow kitten to inspect the drainage holes. If everything is up to code, proceed to potting the succulents.

Gently remove the plants from their pots and place in the bread pan. Fill the pan with the soil, water lightly and you're done! Succulents like bright, filtered sunlight, good air circulation and a watering once every week or two. (Better to water too little than too much.)

The succulents in my pot are Baby Toes, Blue Elf aloe and something else that didn't have a cute and catchy name. They seem happy so far! (Now that the plants are out of reach, however, the kitten is less than thrilled.)

First, an FYI: Cookery Book Friday is moving to Mondays. I'm finding I need the weekend to scour the book, shop for the recipe and then make it. So look for the next cookbook review in a couple days.

Second, my favorite new bread: Stolichniy Bread, made by a local bakery called, awesomely, Fairy Tale Bakery. I found it on the shelves at Jons, a local supermarket that carries a lot of international groceries. Some people are skeeved out by the weird pig parts and unfamiliar brands at Jons, but I like it. And I like Stolichniy bread even more -- dark, chewy and sour, it's good toasted and buttered or made into a sandwich with cheese, avocado and tomato.

I can't find anything about Stolichniy bread on the internet -- actually, the first Google result is the above picture, which I posted on Flickr yesterday -- so I think it's an invention of the Fairy Tale Bakery. There is some sort of salad called Stolichniy...but what does "Stolichniy" mean? I'm hoping my sister's Russian boyfriend can help solve this mystery. His name is Sergey. If someone named Sergey can't help, I'm afraid no one can.