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 Welcome to another Mid-Century Menu!!  This week we are cooking out of a kind of fun little cookbook I found while on vacation this summer.  It is Prize Winning Recipes (made better with American Beauty Macaroni Products) or Institutional Cooking At Home.  Just kidding about the last one guys. Kind of.

Anyway, this cookbook was put out in 1960 by the Duram Wheat Institute to encourage people to eat more macaroni products.  And with recipes from places like Miss Hulling’s Cafeterias, Inc., Pennant Cafeteria, Department of Institute Management at Purdue University, Detroit Public Schools and Evanston Hospital, how can you go wrong?  I mean, really?????

So, if you miss all those meals from when you were in the hospital, your wife can make them for you at home, too! Yipes.

Anyway, here is the choice for the week.  And it is a fun one.

Wow.  Two cups of sour cream.  Two. Cups. CUPS!! And a tablespoon of chili powder. Delicious.

And I was off.

Lots of sour cream and lots of tomatoes.  Doesn’t look too bad.

Sausage, onions and green peppers in the skillet.

The sausage, cooked and crumbled.

Tons of sour cream and canned tomatoes.  At this point, I realized that the dinner was actually a jumped up version of hamburger helper. 

So much sour cream.  I can’t get over it.   Anyway, here are the noodles on top of the tomato sour cream mixture.

And here it is with the noodles stirred in.  Doesn’t actually look that bad.

All done!  Actually, it smelled pretty good at this point. It does, however, totally look like cafeteria food. No lie.

Tom taking his first bite.

“So? How is it?”

“It’s pretty good! Kind of tastes like bolognese sauce. With a whole lot of chili powder in it.”

I took a bite.  It did kind of taste like a pasta sauce with chili powder in it, and a lot like hamburger helper. And it was really sweet.

The verdict:  Okay.

If I was going to make this again, which I might, I would leave out half of the sour cream, most of the sugar and add in some mexican spices or a packet of taco seasoning rather than just a tablespoon of chili powder.  But overall, okay. It was totally cafeteria food!

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