Highlights from the Tasteless "Stupid Recipes" Column

Kim Alexis' Carrot Cake

While browsing through Glamour magazine several years ago, I ran across an uncharacteristically flowery article describing in great detail the wedding of model Kim Alexis. One extremely generous thing Ms. Alexis did was to share her wedding cake recipe. Some months later, Glamour’s Letters to the Editor column was full of grouchy comments about the article and almost without exception, raves about the cake recipe. And so here it is, a cake fit for a supermodel and all her skinny supermodel friends.

Preheat oven to 350°. Grease and flour a 9"x13" baking pan.

• 2 cups sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup oil
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup walnuts
• 3/4 cup raisins
• 3 cups grated carrots

Frosting:

• 1/2 stick butter
• 4 oz cream cheese
• 1/2 pkg confectioner's sugar
• Dash vanilla

In large bowl, mix sugar, eggs and oil. Add baking powder, soda, cinnamon and flour. Fold in walnuts, raisins and carrots. Bake for one hour. Cool; blend frosting ingredients and spread over cake.

Spam Flakes

I got a dehydrator several years ago when I was naive enough to believe the Puyallup Fair lady when she said that this device could save me money. I guess it could, in the deft hands of Ron Popeil, but a month after a binge making little round chewy things out of a bumper crop of strawberries, I got my electric bill, and trust me, I didn’t save myself a dime over buying dried stuff from the store. Dehydrating foods became more an expensive art form for dehydrating canned spaghetti sauce and making celery worms. I did end up inventing one very unique thing, namely Spam Flakes, which recently won Best of the First Annual Spam-a-rama held at Metro’s West Point Sewage Treatment Plant. The design of this dish is a calculated balance of yin and yang of the pure and profane, bland and salty, cool and hot, green and brown, fresh and mucky. On an odd culinary level, this actually works.

INGREDIENTS:

A nice cucumber, a can of Spam Lite (Classic Spam and Smoked Spam are too fatty), a knife, paper towels, a dehydrator and a silver platter.

• Thinly slice the can of Spam Lite and cut slices into 1/2” squares .
• Place in dehydrator for 12 hours at 145 degrees, after which they should look like Bacos From Hell.
• Blot them with paper towels until you get tired of it. They should actually be kind of crispy with a tough but not unyielding texture.
• Peel, score with a fork, and thinly slice a cucumber.
• Reheat the Spam Flakes, chill the cucumber slices.
• Serve neatly arranged on a platter as an appetizer. God knows, presentation is everything.

Your entire house, everything in your linen closet, and your house pets will smell of Spam for weeks, but this seems to be the only way to dignify the stuff. And are Spam Flakes worth all the trouble? Try it yourself and see.

Well, okay. They’re not worth it more than once. Consider this a simple lesson I am passing on to you, much like the experience I had once with a recipe from Esquire magazine for Shaker Lemon Pie, where the guy writing this thing waxed poetic about the Zen of thinly slicing the lemons, and the religious experience of waiting 24 hours for the lemons and sugar to do some magical thing in the fridge, and the nearly sexual finale of cutting the first perfect slice. Well, I did all these things. This pie took a day and a half, and upon cutting it, it stood there like some kind of beautiful monumental reward to all my toil. And then I took a bite. It was bitter as a stick, because in the author’s thrall, he completely forgot to mention that you have to take the white part out of the lemon.]

Sweet Potato Pear Bake: At Last, A Good Reason to Go to the Liquor Store

Invited to a Vegetarian gathering and all you have on hand is Spam Flakes?

This recipe is courtesy of the lovely Marilyn Ray, who introduced us to this dish just in time for Thanksgiving a few years ago, and just in time for a round of potlucks with highly offendable people. It was a hit, and spared me the dilemma of what I could bring that would give the erroneous impression that I actually knew how to cook.

The pear brandy that really makes this recipe distinctive is somewhat expensive. A small bottle goes a long way. Suggested uses for the bottle you buy to make this are: Make this recipe about ten times, taking it to many parties during the holidays, give away a Sweet Potato Pear Bake casserole as a door prize every day of Advent or Hanukkah, or sample the pear brandy for reliability during your baking efforts.

INGREDIENTS:

• 3 large sweet potatoes, boiled, peeled and sliced 1/4” thick
• 5 large pears cored and sliced 1/4” thick

Alternate layers in a baking dish. Prepare sauce below and pour over layers.

Cover dish with plastic and cook in microwave 8 minutes until pears are tender and heated through, or bake in 350 degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes.

SAUCE: Heat in sauce pan

• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1/3 cup pear brandy or pear nectar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 Tablespoon grated orange rind

When sauce is hot, blend in

• 1 Tablespoon cornstarch

using a whisk. Cook until sauce is clear and thick.

Krup Kakor

These two following dishes should probably be filed under “Traditional Dishes” because nothing but tradition would compel most people to make them. They are traditional Swedish foods, usually made in obscene quantities, and sometimes viewed as not worth the work by those who have to make it without benefit of craving it as well. Family members may have a perverse historical interest in these foods, and non-family may find it amusing to see how some people mis-spend their time in the kitchen.

(Panni makes a dehydrated potato dumpling mix which you can get at import stores and better groceries, which approximates the real thing pretty well. Be sure to get the raw potato dumpling mix.)

INGREDIENTS

• 3 pounds raw Idaho Russet potatoes
• 1-1/2 pounds cooked Idaho Russet potatoes
• 2 lbs raw pork
• 1 cup chopped raw onions
• Salt and pepper

Grate the raw potatoes on a fine grater. Put the raw potatoes in a clean dishcloth and wring out all the water. Grate the cooked potatoes on a fine grater. Mix the raw potatoes and cooked potatoes together. Add salt to the potato dough.

Dice up the meat small, chop the onion in small dice, mix the meat and onions together.

Form a 3” meat-filled dumpling by making a patty of the potato dough, putting a bit of the meat and onion mix in the middle, and rolling it into a ball.

Drop the balls into gently boiling salted water. Cook about 45 minutes.

Serve with a stick of very cold butter. You heard me. And have a pound at hand.

Leftover balls can also be cut in half, browned in butter, milk added and heated, and served in a soup bowl.

Korv (Swedish Potato Sausage)

Picture this: Butte, Montana, 1924: The Womenfolk stuffing sausages in 20 pound lots with cow horns, Sonny at the boiling pot with a darning needle poking air bubbles in the cooking links, a real family event. The tradition carries on today, though more grudgingly and in smaller batches. Sonny still does the darning needle duty.

This recipe is for a modest amount of sausage. I personally have never seen Korv made in batches smaller than ten pounds, because after all, there’s a whole pig’s worth of casing to use up.

Korv can be eaten right away, and leftovers can be cut lengthwise and fried the next day. They freeze pretty well, so make plenty while you’re at it.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 lb ground round
• 1/2 lb ground pork
• 1-1/2 lbs potatoes (russets)
• 1 small onion
• 2 soda crackers
• 1-1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/4 tsp allspice
• about 2 small glasses cold water

Casing: Buy pork casing at a butcher shop. Soak the casing in water and rinse. Run water thru the casing and check for holes. If you come across a hole, cut it out or the sausage will split during cooking.

Mix the above ingredients and stuff into pork casing. Tie a knot in each end of the sausage. Boil for 45 minutes in salt water with 3 whole allspice.

After sausage has been cooking for about 15 minutes, pierce any air bubbles with a darning needle to let the air out.

Eggplant Parmesan

Bart Bartolillo's Grandma Mangiamele's recipe

Another family favorite, though not my family. We were too busy with the potatoes.

It took me almost a year to extort this recipe out of Bart, who was both reluctant to share the old family secret, and didn’t have the time to translate the hands-on process to paper for me. I had to write this down as he made a batch.

Bart spent a lot of time with his grandmother in Brooklyn, and his duty as a child was to get the big stone out of the garden to put on top of the eggplant discs to “press the poisons out.” So persistent a notion was this toxic-control measure, that Bart’s younger brother Mike, when told that we didn’t use a stone on one particular batch of eggplant Parmesan that we made, refused to eat any of if. So, the stone has been added to the recipe in case Mike, their grandmother, and half of Sicily are right.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 eggplant - approx 5" dia. x 12" long
• A big flat rock, preferably clean
• seasoned bread crumbs
• 1 egg
• milk
• 1 lb ground beef, pork or veal
• tennis-ball sized onion
• oregano, garlic, pepper
• 1 qt. spaghetti sauce, heated.
• 1 lb. mozzarella cheese
• grated Parmesan cheese

Peel the eggplant with vegetable peeler, chop off stem end. Slice it into discs 1/8 - 1/4" thick. Put eggplant discs on paper towels and press dry under the big flat rock.

Mix egg and milk, coat eggplant with this and bread with crumbs, fry in oil until brown. Lay on paper towels. Fry ground meat, with some onion, oregano, garlic, pepper.

In 9x13 glass baking dish, put some heated sauce in bottom, then layer of eggplant, all of meat, some more sauce, Parmesan cheese, half of the mozzarella. Then another layer of eggplant, rest of the sauce, Parmesan cheese, rest of mozzarella.

Preheat to 350 F, bake for half an hour, take a look after 20 minutes... Mozzarella should be brown but not burned.