The Belly Dancers Guide to Better Belly's has no publication date, introduction, or known connection to belly dancers -- or their "belly's." The recipes may well have inspired Sandra Lee, with their multiple cans of stuff mixed with a tub of other stuff, then topped with bread crumbs and baked. But for all of that, I really love this cookbook.

It could be the book's low production values. The only illustration appears to be a wooden spoon with a Farrah Fawcett '70s hairdo wearing a belly dancer's outfit next to an apple oddly superimposed over a bunch of grapes. This graces the title page of each section, with the title written in a creepy off-kilter handwriting which portends nothing good.

It could also be the unabashed trashiness of the recipes, like the Mini Pizza made by slathering catsup on an English muffin and sprinkling it with oregano and American cheese. Or the Easy Casserole, made with two cans of cream of mushroom soup, one can of chicken rice soup and one can of vegetable soup. Not surprisingly, the recipe cautions "DO NOT SEASON WITH SALT," probably because doing so will immediately cause the dish to seize up and turn into a bowl of pure sodium.

Of note are two recipes -- submitted by one Jean Stuckman of Marion, OH -- dubbed the No Name Recipes, most likely because one dare not utter the name of a concoction so foul. Upon closer inspection, both recipes turn out to be identical: No Name Eggs is a mixture of cottage cheese, bread crumbs, eggs, grated onion and cooking oil, just like No Name Salad. Both are mixed in a loaf pan and baked for 30 minutes. Neither is even vaguely edible.

Even the cocktails are scary. Cherry Coctail Slush sounds like the sort of thing you might put together using other people's leftover drinks: whiskey or bourbon or "etc." mixed with Real Lemon juice (note: a capitalized Real is never real), some "bar sugar" (I'm assuming that's the sugar the bartender has spilled on the bar throughout the night) and eight maraschino cherries. I was under the impression that consuming more than five maraschino cherries in one sitting led to immediate death, but apparently whiskey or bourbon or "etc." cancels out this effect.

Also, the Frozen Dacquari is made with frozen lemonade concentrate and something called Red Pop. The excess capital letters disturb me greatly.

Also, there are spelling errors in the names of all the cocktails. Drunk typing!

Mostly I just really like imagining the group of suburban women from Ohio who assembled this cookbook. Clearly they were friends and all had good senses of humor. Did they do any belly dancing in actuality? Were they all completely annoyed by Beverlyn Cain -- who had obviously taken a trip to Africa at some point -- and and her long, didactic recipes from various African countries? I like to think about them all coming up with their belly dancing names together, the way my friends and I came up with our 1950s girl gang names when I was in high school. I wouldn't be surprised to learn these belly dancers from suburban Ohio are still friends, that they still get together and mix up a big batch of two boxes of stuff mixed with a can of other stuff -- topped with bread crumbs and baked for 30 minutes.

This week's recipe kind of chose itself -- it was the only one that didn't make me gag while reading it. The Harvey Wallbanger cocktail, invented in the 1950s, is a mixture of orange juice, vodka and Galliano, an herbal liqueur. It reached its peak of popularity in the 1970s and even spawned a Harvey Wallbanger Cake, which is what I decided to make this week. The cake, being a product of the '70s, is always made with boxed cake mix and boxed pudding mix, the ingredients I originally intended to use in the name of authenticity. But standing in the fluorescent glow of the supermarket aisle, looking at the boxes of mix selling for 3 for $5, I got too depressed by the prospect of eating a cake made with artificial flavors and weird preservatives and decided to make the whole thing from scratch. Call me old-fashioned. Or new-fashioned, I don't know.

I decided to skip the whole pudding concept and just base the recipe on my favorite citrus cake, Dorie Greenspan's Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and Yogurt Loaf Cake. Usually I make it with Meyer lemon, but this time I used an orange, and covered the whole thing in an orange-Galliano-vodka glaze. YUM. The olive oil might sound weird, but it works well with the citrus and herbal Harvey Wallbanger-ness of the glaze. If I were going to make it again, I'd add some Galliano to the batter (maybe 1/4-1/2 cup) to make it even more Wallbangin'.

New-Fashioned Harvey Wallbanger Cake

Makes 8 servings

For the cake:
1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 cup sugar
Finely grated zest of 1 orange
1/2 cup plain whole milk yogurt
3 large eggs
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

For the glaze:
3/4 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons Galliano
1 tablespoon orange juice
1 teaspoon vodka

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan and set aside. Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Put the sugar in a medium bowl and rub the zest into the sugar with your fingers until the sugar is light orange and fragrant. Whisk in the yogurt, eggs and vanilla and mix until well-blended. Add the dry ingredients and whisk until just blended. Using a wooden spoon or spatula, fold in the oil until the batter is thick and shiny, with no visible pools of oil. Pour into the pan.

Bake the cake for 45-50 minutes, or until golden and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes.

While cake is cooling, prepare the glaze. In a small bowl, whisk together the glaze ingredients until smooth. Run a knife around the sides of the cake pan and turn cake right-side up onto cooling rack. Spoon the glaze over the cake, including the sides, and cool.

Last Sunday was the annual Crab Fest at The Hungry Cat, which I was lucky enough to be invited to by the lovely Meg (in the photo above, depicting the general feeling at the end: sleepy, swollen-footed satiation). There is something magical about eating two courses of crab followed by all-you-can-eat boiled blue crab dumped directly onto newspaper-covered tables, which you smash apart with a mallet while trying not to get crab gunk all over your cucumber martini. Magical, I say. And very messy. You can see all my pictures from the day here.

And this Sunday was my birthday. My sister Sonya is in town, so I got to wake up to the sound of two of my favorite people making me breakfast in the kitchen. And wondering how to make coffee. (Rob: "But this is in OUNCES!" Rest assured, the coffee tasted fine.) Earlier in the weekend, Sonya had the honor of being my first scooter passenger ever and we had a couple thankfully-uneventful rides around town, stopping by Intelligentsia for coffee, Taqueria El Charrito for tacos and Scoops for ice cream. There was also a crawfish boil party in there somewhere. I know how to feed my guests at least.

Rob and I rounded out my birthday with an afternoon screening of WALL-E (we both teared up) and a Sunday dinner at Lucques, where the pork stew over polenta was good enough to make up for any unfulfilled birthday wishes of years past.

(There's a Cookery Book Monday coming later today!)

Did you know Wyoming was the first state in the U.S. to grant suffrage to women? According to the introduction to Cooking in Wyoming, "it all started with a tea party in 1869 in South Pass City," which is why one hundred years later the Wyoming Recreation Commission released the Women's Suffrage Centennial Edition cookbook, to celebrate a century of Wyoming women who can both vote and roast an elk.

The cookbook opens with Wyoming's most exciting culinary offering: Pioneer Recipes! Thanks to a childhood spent obsessively reading and rereading the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, I have a deep fascination with all foods eaten by pioneers, homesteaders and people traveling in wagon trains. I probably spent way too many girlhood hours craving salt pork and johnny cakes, even though I've never eaten either. I'm fairly certain, in fact, that I'd find Mrs. Archie D. Cook's Pork Cake (made with one pound of ground salt pork) absolutely vile. But I'd still like a johnny cake in my pocket, for long trips on the wagon with Ma, Pa, and Mary, okay?

Pioneers -- and modern-day hunting Wyomingites (actual term) -- eat a lot of venison, ducks, wood chucks, bunnies and donuts. There are approximately fifteen donut recipes in this book, including one for Spudnuts, which until I read this cookbook I thought was just a funny name for a depressing donut franchise found near my university in South LA. But no, they are actually donuts made with potatoes and they sound surprisingly good. Not as good as Mother Miller's Fried Pies, though. Mmm...fried pies...

The book is notable for its large number of contributions from men, including a one-page treatise on preparing duck, which ends with "Note to You Duck Hunters: No wife likes to dress and fix ducks so why don't you try fixing the ducks? Then all wife has to do is shove them in the oven, plus prepare the balance of the meal." Wow, how nice of him to give his wife a night out of the kitchen make the duck. What, did you forget this is the Women's Suffrage Centennial Edition?

My second favorite bird-based recipe is not a recipe at all, but a grumpy rant about eating elderly geese, submitted by the obviously-crochety Mrs. Robert McNiel. The problem with cooking wild geese, she says, is that you can never tell how old they are, so you might get a tough 25-year-old or a tender 2-year-old. The same goes for mallard ducks. The end. Uh, Mrs. McNiel? Maybe you didn't hear me? I asked if you wanted to contribute something to our COOKbook. You know, like a recipe? ...What's that? I heard you. And as I said before, some Canadian geese live to be 70. Goodbye. Um. Thank you, Mrs. McNiel.

After the pioneer recipes, the book flirts with some late-'60s American food horrors, but for the most part stays true to its prairie grass roots with simple recipes and preparations. I do have to mention one terrifying dish though: Corn and Spaghetti Custard. I'll say that again. Corn (okay) and Spaghetti (kind of weird, that combination) Custard (oh good god). You mix cooked spaghetti with corn niblets (or creamed corn!), pour in an egg-milk mixture, and let the whole monstrosity steam in the oven until set. Then you put buttered carrots in the middle and drizzle it with tomato sauce. I hear all of Italy sobbing softly right now.

While looking for this week's recipe, I found myself drawn to the various instructions for sourdough starters. I have a fascination with friendly bacteria (hence my love of homemade yogurt) and wanted to try my hand at growing my own batch of happy bread bacteria. Making the starter was easy enough and it was fascinating to peek under the damp dishtowel in the morning and see the bubbling starter soup, twice the size of the night before. Mixed with some baking soda, sugar and an egg, it made picture-perfect sourdough pancakes, the ideal breakfast for a camping trip. Or a lazy Saturday brunch in your kitchen. Whichever you prefer.

Sourdough Hotcakes
Makes about 12 hotcakes

2 cups sourdough starter (recipe below)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
1 can evaporated milk

Mix the first four ingredients in a large bowl and add 1/2 cup evaporated milk, or enough to make a medium-thin batter. Cook on a nonstick skillet, flipping each hotcake when the edges look dry and the center is bubbly. Keep warm in a 250-degree oven or serve immediately with butter and maple syrup.

Sourdough Starter

2 cups flour
1/2 package yeast
1 teaspoon salt
Lukewarm water

Mix the flour, yeast and salt, then add enough water to make a medium-thick batter. Cover with plastic wrap or a clean, damp kitchen towel and let stand overnight. To keep it going from day to day, add more flour and salt each night. When using the starter, be sure to set some aside and continue feeding it to keep your bacteria family going!

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a woman who was doing research on the rising number of Americans who ride scooters, for a news piece to air on Japanese TV. We exchanged a few emails and then she popped the question: did I want to be interviewed and filmed riding my scooter for the story? ...Um, YES.

Then I got really nervous. I hate being in front of a camera. Oops.

But I ended up having a great time. Maybe it's some kind of LA thing that seeps into your blood, this secret desire to have someone follow you around and film the most mundane aspects of your daily life. Hopefully I'll soon be contacted by a crew filming a documentary about people who talk extensively to their cats.

Besides airing in Japan, the segment will also be online, so I'll be posting it once it's up!

This week one of my succulents started sprouting what must surely be a flower, a bumpy rosette at the end of a long stalk. But I haven't been able to admire it really because every time I look at it, I think about that moment in Alien when that gross alien baby bursts from John Hurt's chest. A gross alien baby that looks somehow like my succulent flower.

...No? Maybe it's just me.

Cookin' on the Horseshoe, a fundraising cookbook released in 1970 by the Ladies Altar Society in Lakeland, Louisiana, opens with a shocking revelation: "Contrary to popular belief, the great majority of the people of False River and its environs is not of Acadian descent." I know, all my illusions about the people of False River and its environs have been shattered too. It turns out the area was settled by the French long before the Acadians showed up and Creole cookery is the specialty of the area, not...Nova Scotian. Il n'y a que la vérité qui blesse.

Another shocking revelation: False River is actually a lake. But I guess that one makes sense.

Sadly, the introduction to the cookbook includes this statement:

Today Creole cooking is still influenced by this background, but an affluent society such as ours -- with our great scientific achievements -- with all the innovations in the processing and packaging of foods -- we find that resourcefulness, ingenuity, and even imagination in the preparation of food at home is no longer necessary.

But happily, the people of False River and its environs (who are definitely NOT Acadian, FYI) had not devolved into cooking entirely from processed mushroom soup and packaged Jell-O, at least not by 1970. This cookbook is full of interesting local ingredients, like turtles, frogs and other creatures that might flourish in swampy not-rivers. Unfamiliar vegetables also show up, like the exotic-sounding mirliton, or vegetable pear, which it turns out is actually chayote, a popular South American vegetable I saw for sale this morning at the Hollywood Farmers Market.

Even more intriguing is a recipe for Cushaw in Shell, a vegetable (?) or shellfish (??) made up of a globe, a string and a neck. The string holds the globe together and the neck can be cooked and mashed separately with cinnamon (but definitely "no raisins or marshmallows"). WTF? Actually, a cushaw is just a crooked neck squash. Way to make a squash sound like the offspring of some weird alien, Grover Alford. And why can't I use marshmallows?

And since I'm mentioning Grover, I have to point out that the names of the contributors in this cookbook are nearly as interesting as the recipes. Lottie Belle Chauvin, Ada Hubble, Pigeon Thibaut...the list goes on. I kind of want to write a story set in Lakeland, LA, just so I can give the characters names like Clementine Bergeron and Malvina Pickett.

Like many community cookbooks from the 1970s, Cookin' on the Horseshoe tries to provide a few "ethnic" recipes, with depressing results. Mexican Casserole 1 begins with "Line casserole with round Fritos" and proceeds from there with chili, chopped onions and cheddar cheese. This at least is better than Mexican Casserole 2, which starts with "Line a casserole with potato chips" and involves tuna and mushroom soup from a can. It also has hot sauce. That's what makes it Mexican, see?

But neither of these is as shocking as a salad called, charmingly, WOP Salad. It has Italian olives and capers in it. I'll say no more.

And then there's the booze. Cherry Bounce, a combination of wild cherries, sugar and whiskey, has a disturbingly prophetic name. What is it exactly that ends up bouncing? You, off the walls? Or your lunch, on the pavement?

But my favorite homemade booze recipe in the book is Orange Wine, which I love for its sassy, unapologetic instructions. We have Clementine Bergeron to thank for this gem. First, she says, "Don't cover too tight or it might go BOOM." Terrifying. Then put it somewhere cool for several months. She confesses, "I put mine under the house and I don't breathe a word to a soul." I imagine Clementine hosting bridge parties, smiling to herself the whole time because she knows there is a big vat of orange wine bubbling under everyone's feet. Except that after 1970, everyone knew what she was up to -- I'm wondering if that's what's behind the quote at the bottom of the page. Is the cookbook committee telling her she needs to tear down her wine-protecting walls and start building some bridges? Made of potent orange wine?

After two weeks of only marginally edible dishes, I decided this week's recipe should be something I actually wanted to eat, with instructions that didn't give me pause. So I picked Shrimp & Corn Soup, submitted by Mrs. J.F. Chustz. I like shrimp. I like corn. The recipe is simple and doesn't contain Jell-O; it seemed foolproof. The finished soup was good, but would have been better if I had splurged and bought the bigger, more expensive shrimp, and used bacon grease instead of oil as my fat. But bacon grease makes anything better, so that's a no-brainer.

Shrimp & Corn Soup
Makes about 3 quarts

1 tablespoon lard or other fat
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 onion, chopped
1 16-oz can tomatoes
5 ears of corn
2 qts water

Slice the corn from the cobs and set aside.

In a large pot, heat your fat of choice over a medium flame. Add flour and onion and cook, stirring, until mixture has browned. Add shrimp, corn and tomatoes. Season aggressively, then add water. Cook about 1 1/2 hours, tasting and adding more salt as needed. Serve sprinkled with chopped parsley.

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.

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.)

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.

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!

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.

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!

This is the newest member of our household, Milhouse. His turn-ons include climbing shower curtains, napping in closets and battling invisible enemies. We got him over the weekend at the LA North Central animal shelter and he's been increasing the cuteness in our lives by about a million percent ever since.

See?

In other household news, Rob flew to New York today to shoot a romantic comedy starring Catherine Zeta Jones. It's kind of a huge deal!

I've been looking for a new weekly feature for the blog, something that will inspire and delight me as much as Japanese candy once did -- and this is it. I'm pleased to announce Cookery Book Friday, in which I review one fundraising cookbook from long ago and attempt at least one recipe from its pages.

(Note: the recipe links below will take you to a picture of the recipe mentioned.)

The first book up: Kitchen Madonna, published by the St. Bronislava Rosary Society in Plover, WI. The typewritten recipes are divided into sections, with ballpoint-pen drawings adorning each page. It kicks off with beverages, most of them alcoholic, the only contributions to the book from the husbands in this town. My favorite drink recipe, however, comes from a woman, one Darlene Starosta, who is also one of the few women in the book not titled "Mrs. Husband's Name." I don't think this is a coincidence. A woman whose contribution to her church cookbook is "GIN & WATERMELLON COOLER" -- simply a fifth of gin poured into a "watermellon," which is left to sit for 24 hours, scooped out with a melon baller and served -- is way too fun to be known only by her husband's name. Also, she misspelled "watermelon" multiple times. Clearly a lush.

From there, the recipes move on to food, or dishes resembling food. Judging from the last names of the contributors and the section devoted to "Polish Favorites," Plover is a town filled with Polish immigrants. So there is an odd dance in the book between the typical American post-war fare of meals assembled from boxes and cans, and the traditional hearty Polish food the women have inherited and most likely grew up eating. There is, for instance, Salad Supreme, a particularly perplexing combination of warm applesauce, gelatin and 7-Up, topped with diced marshmallows, crumbled cream cheese and heavy cream which has steeped together overnight. I don't understand if you are supposed to eat it or use it to clear out a stopped-up drain.

But there are also, tucked among the cream of mushroom soup horrors, recipes like the intriguing Duck Blood Soup. Or Sauerkraut, which includes the instruction "Remove scum as it forms and wash and scald cloth often to keep it free from scum and mold." (Mmm...scum and mold. It's actually more appealing than Salad Supreme.) And there is the entire Polish Favorites section, which I am tempted to try a recipe from, but too many of them start out with lines like "Remove eyes and teeth from pig's head" or call for, like, snouts.

There are a few surprise ingredients that show up throughout the book. One of them is prunes which, along with raisins, show up in desserts, soups (Tasty Prune Soup!) and wine. Another is crumbs. I know that's not really an ingredient, but tell that to Mrs. Adolph Brillowski and her Crumb Soup, a puzzling concoction of flour, egg and...wait. Let me just show you the recipe and you'll see for yourself.

Thanks, Mrs. Adolph. For some reason, the milk added at the end is the most horrifying part. I imagine the crumbs themselves would be kind of like spaetzle or weird noodles.

It's hard to pinpoint when this book was printed. The LAPL website lists it as 197-?, and indeed there are quite a few cheese fondue recipes, but somehow the book feels older than that. Maybe I'm just baffled by this triptych of "Chinese" recipes and their accompanying illustrations. It's strange and somehow sad this was produced in the same decade as my birth.

First, Baked Chop Suey, with a picture of what seem to be three mushrooms:

Next, Chop Suey, with a picture of some sort of Chinaman cook:

Finally, Cantonese Casserole and its odd hybrid -- three mushrooms with Chinese faces?

Let's just be happy we've come a long way since then.

The recipe I decided to try is Prune Cake, contributed by the coy Mrs. Jerome Iwanski. Her recipe is merely a list of ingredients with an oven temperature and cooking time -- even the GIN & WATERMELLON COOLER came with better instructions, and that was written by a probable drunk. But I assembled the cake in a way that made sense, guessed at the pan size and ended up with a light, tender spice cake, speckled with small pockets of prune. It's lovely, especially topped with sweetened whipped cream. And eaten for breakfast.

Prune Cake

3/4 cup pitted prunes
1 teaspoon vinegar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 cup milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease your pan of choice. (I used a 13 x 9" rectangular pan, but a bundt pan would be even better.)

Place the prunes in a small saucepan and cover with water, plus the vinegar. Simmer over medium-low heat for 10 minutes. Let prunes cool in the pan, then drain and chop. Set them aside while you assemble the batter.

In a large bowl, beat the butter until smooth and creamy. Add the sugar, eggs and milk, beating until smooth in between additions. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, mixing with a wooden spoon until fully incorporated. Mix in the chopped prunes and pour batter into the pan. Bake on the middle rack for 15-20 minutes (for a 13 x 9" pan), or until a tester poked in the middle comes out clean.

As a weird-ice-cream-flavor aficionado, I was obsessed with Scoops while I was away from LA, forgot about it when I returned, then recently realized I live practically within walking distance. The obsession has returned full-force and I've been stopping in at least once a week. A cup with two flavors is only $2.50 and refills -- refills! on ice cream! kind of a dream come true! -- are only $1.75. Insert Homer Simpson drool here.

There's a board on the wall for people to write their flavor suggestions, which I always find inspiring and amusing. Glazed Donut is one I keep thinking about. I'm not sure exactly how it would taste, but if they sold it at Scoops, I would totally eat it.