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Happy Wednesday everyone!!!  I am super excited this morning, and that can only mean one thing – it’s time for the Mid-Century Menu!!!  This week I have a fun cookbook that I picked up in Rockford, Michigan when I met up with Jan and Sara at Rosie’s Diner.  This lovely lady is “Easy Ways to Delicious Meals”, published by Campbell in 1968.  This cookbooks is awesome, because it is all about how to cook with Campbell’s pre-packaged products.  Which you know I always love.  Go canned food, go!

Anyway, this cookbook is interesting because it has ideas for food that don’t really need any additions (like 12 toppings you can put on frozen pot pies, and about every combination of different canned soups mixed together that you can imagine), and because it is probably the worst organized cookbook I have ever come across. Seriously.  Instead of being organized by ingredient, it is organized by convenience products, which means you can find recipes for chicken in 5 different parts of the book. I did a lot of paging around when my bookmark accidentally fell out while cooking.  It took me so long to find the recipe I was cooking that I seriously started to to think that I had imagined it and it wasn’t actually in the book at all.

But it was, and too Tom’s everlasting joy, Spaghetti ‘N Franks Casserole was finally on the Menu.

And V-8 A La Mode wasn’t far behind it.

I always wonder about something.  If THIS is the crap that made it in these books, what didn’t make the cut???  The taste-testing must have been Satan’s own buffet.

And for you eagle-eyed readers, yes, these are photographs of the recipes.  We just got a new computer, and the scanner hasn’t decided if it is going to be friends with the new guy yet. 

The big black blob off to the right is a cat.  She was keeping a close eye on those hot dogs.

The great thing about this meal is that a kid can make it.

I mean, the only skill-set required here is the ability to cram cheese into a split weiner. 

Oh, and the arranging.  Don’t forget that.

As a disgusting side note, Spaghetti-O’s smell exactly as horribly as I remember.  So that’s a plus, right?

Fun with tomato juice.

Drip.

I just wanted to show off Tom’s President William Henry Harrison glass here. He died in 30 days!!!

What kind of insanity is it to put CINNAMON on top of LIME SHERBERT floating in TOMATO JUICE. Who the…I…

Sigh.

Words fail me.

I put it in Tom’s favorite glass to take the sting out of actually having to drink it.

“So?  Is it awful?”

“Not really.  It just tasted like tomato juice and…Aagh!”

“What?”

“What is that taste?”

“Ummm…cinnamon.”

*Crickets*

“You put cinnamon in V-8?  You have got to be kidding me.”

Mmm….hot dogs fresh from the oven.  On a greasy bed of squishy, smelly noodles. 

Hot hot dogs, apparently. 

“How is it?”

“No surprise here.  It tastes like hot dogs in Spaghetti-O’s with cheese on top.”

I took a bite.  He was right. The thing that was most surprising was that the Spaghetti-O’s were almost edible with the addition of cheese and hot dogs.  So I guess it is true.  If you throw enough cheese on canned spaghetti, it is edible. I guess the cookbook authors succeeded.

The Verdict:

Spaghetti ‘N Franks Casserole – Edible, but not by much.  Just make sure you get hot dog and cheese in every bite.

V-8 A La Mode – Not bad, mostly just tastes like V-8 with the occasional un-nerving hint of cinnamon.

CONTEST ALERT!!!!

TODAY is the last, last, last chance you have to put in your nomination for the best consumer product for the Mid-Century Housewife!  Email me or go here and leave a comment.  There are embarrassingly few entries so far, so you still have a super good chance to win the 52 retro cards from What’s Buzzin’!

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