Vintalicious- Awful Edibles From a Simpler Time

Bananas For Dummies

If you are too stupid to figure out that you cool bananas by putting them in the refrigerator, you and June need to go throw a tea party. Maybe Margie can come with one of her swell cakes!

LET ME HEAR YOU SAY
THIS SHIT IS BANANAS
B-A-N-A-N-A-S

This Shit Is Bananas And These Bananas Are Shit

B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

When I first saw the outside of this book, I thought awwww crap, this is some sort of 70's cookbook but even though there is no copyright, the drawings and nonsensical devotion to bananas lead me to believe that is in fact a 50's era treatise.

I thought that since it is like a Friday in Lent (and that means no meat! NONE) and all and me being a practicing Catholic a good 8% of the time that a bananas book would be a good book to get a meatless recipe out of.  But did you know that bananas allegedly are an essential ingredient in meatloaves and other meat dishes? No? Neither did I!  Because honestly, until I found this book, I thought the proper way to serve a banana was as follows-

1. Obtain banana
2. Peel banana
3. Give banana to someone else (possibly a monkey) because I really hate bananas

But no, even though the 1950's were a simpler time, serving bananas was not at all simple.

Good Wife Files: I'd Rather Go To Law School Than Cook 1095 Meals A Year For My Bratty Kids and Fat Husband

Holy crap, I'm surprised that more housewives weren't eating bullets after the first year of marriage. Maybe they were but their heads were too fat after eating those 1095 meals. This clip is pretty depressing as it features some of the, hmm, most light in the heels men you'll ever see (who work in the clerical field apparently) taste testing a dish that is made of cottage cheese, jello and an olive (no not kidding), an indepth look at table cloths and center pieces and then a mailman trying to get it on with a teenager named Bambi.

Bad Wife Files: Margie Has the IQ of Manual Toast

Ok with Smurf boobs, butthole cakes and now Margie beating the dough into soft ball stage, this blog is turning into softcore porn here and not even cool Bettie Page 50's softcore porn but really dumb kitchen innuendo porn.

You Are My Sunshine, My Special, Gross Tasting Sunshine

You know, it really is a wonder that my grandparents' generation even survived, you know with like the Nazis goosestepping all over Yurp and us having to go over there and shoot them, atomic bombs going off everywhere and people eating cakes with 9 FREAKING EGG YOLKS IN THEM.

Okay so on its face, it doesn't look that bad, nothing awful about this.  I mean sure, I had to figure out that a "tube cake pan" is 1950's archaic for "Bundt cake pan" which, like cake flour, I also did not own.  The  Target was fresh out of Bundt cake pans (rush on making special sunshine cakes?) save for one totally obnoxious blue one.

I cracked the eggs separated the yolks from the whites in my super cute egg white separator named Yolky.  This was his first time ever being used so I was real gentle with him.  Then like the instructions said, I beat the whites with my mixer for all their years of oppressing everyone else and then to add insult to injury I added SALT and then TARTAR. YES THAT WILL SHOW THEM. BEAT THOSE WHITES.

Then I was left with something that looked like meringue. And I said, aloud, to my cats who were cowering in the corner, scared that I was using a kitchen appliance, "Shit, this looks like meringue."  My mom would tell me stories of when she was growing up of coming into the kitchen and my grandmother's ass hanging out of the oven bitching at the meringue because it wouldn't brown? rise? do whatever meringue does? and then she would flip out and throw the whole pie away and start over again.  Then my grandfather would come home from the hospital and take the trash out and it would be full of pies and he would holler,"Jesus Christ Helen, what the hell is in here?" And she would cry.

ANYWAYS, I digress.  This did not turn out to be meringue because when I integrated the yellows back with the whites and tartars, the mixture turned into batter.  Hooray! We almost had cake!  I could almost taste special sunshine victory as I poured the batter into the blue silicone Smurf boob and shoved it into the oven.

I have to say, I did a pretty good job following directions and such as this was my first time ever baking a cake.  The cake even came out looking like a cake, or as my husband said as he came into the kitchen, a giant butthole.  Now icing the cake was a different matter.  I admit, I cheated and bought Betty Crocker icing instead and when I was done, the finished product looked like Wolverine iced a giant butthole looking cake.

NOW the taste test!!!  I was extremely concerned that this cake would not live up to the awful edible mission of this blog, but it certainly did.  I have a memory foam topper on my mattress and the other day when I was making the bed, one of my cats took a gigantic bite out of the foam and quickly discovered what a bad move that was, spat it out and ran from the room.  Well, my husband sort of did the same thing last night.  He took a big bite of the cake, spat it out in the sink and said, "Well, the icing is good."  This cake is AWFUL.  It has the consistency of memory foam and the taste of, well, memory foam.  We threw it in the trash and this morning, he grunted, "Jesus Christ, why is this trash so heavy?!?"

Keep It Clean

I didn't want to get cake flour all over my clothes so I had to stop off at a couple of stores and search for a totally cute and vintagey looking apron to cover myself.

And while those adorable cherries kept the cake flour off my melons, they didn't keep the cake flour, sugar and the egg whites from getting all over the stove, floor, microwave and my cats.  My husband suggested perhaps putting down saran wrap or cooking in someone else's kitchen next time.

June Isn't Sure Which Candelabra To Use...June Has The IQ of Toast

Now I understand why these people were AMAZED by toast.

Automatic For The People

While we're waiting for me to get up off of my butt and get to the store and get that cake flour I might as well share some of the treasures from inside the Sunbeam book.

I guess before 1950-and the invention of automatic toast making devices-making toast was some sort of laborious process that is now lost to history but I can only imagine it involved women standing over stoves with bread and tongs, burning piece after piece of bread (since there was no RADIANT CONTROL) until their husbands got so hungry and angry that they either  began yelling and breaking things in the kitchen or stomped out of the house and into town to find comfort in the arms of a bald headed lady of ill repute.  But after the Manhattan Project was over, the great scientists were freed up to turn their attentions to the problem of making toast automatic, and THANK GOD FOR THAT.

Listen, this is cooking that even I can do.  All you have to do is drop in the bread and the bread LOWERS itself.  I don't have to do a thing. I can use my valuable toast making time to file my nails, check stock prices or count the money in my wallet.  And then, as if in prayer, the toast raises itself silently, ready to be eaten.  Bravo, Sunbeam, bravo.

Strangely, Sunbeam seems to be concerned about banging or popping associated with toasters.  This totally reminds of the scene in Ghostbusters 2 when they pour the pink slime in the toaster and it starts dancing around on the pool table.  Was this a problem in the 50's?  I have a $7 toaster from Target and it has never banged or popped but I am sure there have been many advances in toaster technology since 1950.

Bad Wife Files: Why I Can't Cook

Okay, so when I went to the Giant today to get whatever "cream of tartar" is and "orange extract" is for my special special sunshine cake I even brought the cookbook with me and still managed to not understand that cake flour is different than regular old flour. Now how was I supposed to know that?  There seem to be alot of rules and and terms to cooking that I don't understand because I like went law school and stuff instead of home economics class.  Luckily, going to law school has enabled me to buy most of the dinners for my husband from Let's Dish! so I don't have to do anything other than operate an oven.

Anyways, this is not entirely my fault because my mom-who was supposed to teach me the stuff my grandma taught her-burned her bra and decided to put her sewing machine away and go to college and MBA school and pop out two babies and then go be a CEO instead of stay home and cook for my dad.  My mom taught me how to cook exactly three GREAT things- apple pie, macaroni salad and a lamb shank and one really nasty thing called PASTY (like a meat pie?) which is so, so, so gross that I could barf thinking about it.

False Start

HA!  FOOLED YA!

I have a nasty little  habit of starting blogs and abandoning them but this time I totally faked ya'll out and didn't even start this one.

I mean, I like totally meant to make something from 1950's How To Get The Most Out of Your SunBeam AutoMatic MixMaster tonight and subject my special husband to this experiment but after I trotted out to the Giant for my special special trip for my special special sunshine cake for my special special blog, I realized I forgot to buy something called cake flour that I am informed is not the same as the the plain old flour I have in my cabinet.

So they'll be no special special sunshine cake tonight. And depending on my level of laziness (current level: HIGH), there may never, ever be another post on this blog ever again.