Recipes we love to death

By Susan Anderson
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 7:59 PM MDT

It's very easy to find your favorite recipe in the tattered old cookbook that lost its back cover and most of the table of contents.

This particular cookbook is missing any recipe starting later in the alphabet than the letter "M," which makes it very hard to locate my fool-proof recipe for quiche.

Being crazy about the quiche doesn't mean that I can ever remember if it's three cups of half and half plus one egg, or one cup of half and half plus three eggs.

Without that table, the only way back to your best brunch recipe is by aimlessly leafing back and forth through the book. When you finally see the most dog-eared, splattered page of all, you know you've found something good.

That smear down the list of contents was butter. The dots across the top came from the cream that was being whipped too enthusiastically to stay in the bowl. I think that's a trace of broccoli stuck in the corner.

Just looking at this heavily consulted page makes me hungry.

It's pretty simple: the more roughed up the page, the better the recipe.

Butter sandwich

Because I've kept some very old cookbooks, I have proof that cooking has changed.

Current kids' cookbooks seem to lack my very first culinary accomplishment -- cutting a hot dog in half and filling it with cheese, wrapping it with bacon, pouring melted butter over it and broiling it.

Let's see ... I think the fat grams for one dog totaled just under your monthly recommended amount.

My friends and I liked to swap our butter sandwiches made on white bread. I often had a simple (and very white) mayonnaise on white bread sandwich to use as barter.

It's only fair to warn you that you are reading a cooking column by someone whose first and still-favorite cookbook is the "The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book" by Peg Bracken. The woman who illustrated "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" also illustrated this book, which gives you an idea of the slimming possibilities of these recipes.

The most famous is the Sweep Steak recipe, which was given its name, wrote the author, because one year it swept the country. The ingredients are simple: one package of onion soup, three pounds of chuck roast. If you really, really want to, you can add carrots and potatoes.

Later, I went through a healthy cooking phase, but eventually had to make major modifications. At first, I enthusiastically substituted wheat or oat flour in any recipe and added wheat germ.

It seemed like you could have an entire meal in one very dense muffin for breakfast. Of course, it was moistened with applesauce instead of butter.

This muffin took some perfectly nice ingredients, such as cinnamon, and turned them into a food that easily could break any toe it was dropped on.

Vegan gone bad

My niece Corinna told me at length how to make vegan apple pie. In case you had to ask, as I did, vegans avoid animal products, which can include everything from meat, dairy and poultry to honey and beeswax.

She described using agave nectar instead of sugar, something she called "pretend butter" in the oats and flour and apples. It didn't really sound too bad for a pie that had no butter or sugar.

The weight loss potential was skewed a little when Corinna decided the pie just really needed a little something. The something turned out to be heavy whipped cream -- a lot of it.

To ease guilty feelings about using the banned dairy product, she hand-whipped the cream, assuming that the half-hour of using her arm to stir might be a kind of carbon offset for the fat grams.

If I publish a cookbook, it certainly will have vegan apple pie with cream. And it will have the motto, "I'm a vegetarian. Of course I eat hamburgers, but ..."

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