This week felt like an episode of Chopped. “In your dessert basket, you have: ketchup! mint-apple jelly! and, walnuts!”

It’s pretty fun to see the results when companies make up crazy recipes featuring their ingredients in bizarre ways. It’s even more fun when they manage to convince customers to do that work for them. In 1957, Heinz apparently ran a contest, and published the winning results in the pamphlet “57 Prize Winning Recipes From H.J. Heinz Co. $25,000 Cook With Ketchup Contest.” And some of those recipes were apparently desserts…

Tropicana Sundae

1/2 cup Heinz Mint-Flavored Apple Jelly
1/4 cup Heinz Tomato Ketchup
1/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Combine jelly and ketchup in saucepan. Simmer, stirring, 5 minutes. Add nuts. Serve warm or cold over vanilla ice cream. Makes about 2/3 cup sauce.

ALRIGHTY THEN.

We’ve had an unusual string of successes recently. This is surprising — I’m not sure if I’m subconsciously learning to pick better recipes, because I’m certainly not doing it on purpose. Sure, I avoid things with spam, sardines, gelatin, Veg-All, or canned tomato soup, because they’re just bad ingredients. But is a recipe’s failure due only to a terrible ingredient?

Oatmeal, for example, is a pretty good ingredient. It’s a nice breakfast food on its own, you can make cookies with it, or use oats as filler instead of flour for more interesting flavor (or to feed your gluten-intolerant friends). But I had never heard of it in a soup.

Seriously. Soup.

Cream of Oatmeal Soup

To one cup cooked and strained oatmeal add four cups of highly seasoned chicken or veal stock; season to taste with salt and pepper and a tablespoon of onion juice, one-half tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Bring soup to boiling point; remove from range and add a half cup of scalded cream and the yolks of two raw eggs well beaten; mix well. Do not allow soup to boil after adding yolks of eggs.

I really don’t know WHAT to expect from this.

It’s often nice to have breakfast-for-dinner, especially since we’re usually so rushed in the mornings that we don’t have eggs and bacon very frequently. And today, we’re actually doing a recipe that was advertised as lunch… so this is breakfast-lunch-dinner. Or, blinner. (Budget blinner, no less.)

Egg Nests!

4 slices buttered toast
4 eggs
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. butter or margarine

Preheat oven to 350°F. Place hot buttered toast on baking sheet.

Separate egg yolks and whites, keeping yolks in half of the shell for later use.

Beat egg whites and salt until stiff, but not dry, and pile on toast slices. Make a well in the centre of each pile of egg white. Slip yolk into each well. Top with 1/2 tsp. butter or margarine.

Bake 15 minutes, or until whites are lightly browned and yolks are set. Serve at once with salad, milk and fruit. Makes 2-4 servings.

Eggs on toast, what’s not to like? But what I’m really wondering about with this recipe is whether it’s going to be worth the bother of separating eggs, beating the whites, and assembling everything on the bread.

This week we needed another quickie, and we also have heaps of leftover matzo crackers. They’re useful for general snacking, but much more fun when they’re retrofied! (Or retrofried…)

Cheese Balls

1/2 cup Manischewitz’s Matzo Meal
1 cup mild cream cheese, grated
1 egg, well-beaten
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper

Mix all ingredients well and roll into small balls. Roll balls in Manischewitz’s Matzo Meal, and just before serving fry in deep fat until brown. Serve with any fruit salad. This recipe makes about 10 balls.

I like a simple set of ingredients — nothing requiring a trip to the store! (We tend to be terrible at planning ahead for retro recipe night, and make last-minute grocery runs almost every week.)

I really do enjoy this blog more when I manage to update regularly. Doubtless you do, too! So, in the spirit of regularity…

All-Bran Fudge Squares! That’s right, All-Bran wants to convince you that its twig-like texture is ideal for a tasty chocolate dessert.

Honestly, I have a hard time just accepting that at face value. We are talking about a cereal that looks like mulch, after all. But I do like a good bran muffin, so maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

KELLOGG’S ALL-BRAN FUDGE SQUARES

3 squares unsweetened chocolate
1/3 cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup flour
1/2 cup Kellogg’s All-Bran
1/2 cup chopped nut meats
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt chocolate over hot water and add butter. Beat eggs well, add sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add melted chocolate and butter. Stir in flour, All-Bran, nut meats and flavoring. Pour into greased pan, making a layer about one-third inch thick. Bake in moderate oven (375° F.) about 20 minutes. Yield: Sixteen 2-inch squares (8 x 8 inch pan).

Passover is a fun time of year for recipes, and by “fun” I mean “frustrating” — it’s surprisingly hard to find foods that don’t involve leavening. Yeast is clearly off-limits, but depending on how loosely (or strictly) you want to interpret the restriction on leavening in memory of the Israelites fleeing before their bread could rise — if you consider chemical leaveners (e.g. baking soda or powder) to be forbidden, well, pretty much every baked good is off the menu this week.

Luckily, matzos are on sale everywhere, and luckily I’ve got a 1930 edition of Tempting Kosher Dishes, published by Manischewitz and featuring dozens of recipes you never even thought you might want to make with matzo bread or matzo meal. This is one of the far simpler ones…

2 Manischewitz’s Matzos
2 tbsp. sugar
2 tbsp. Manischewitz’s Matzo Meal
6 eggs
pinch of salt

Soak matzos, squeeze dry, and mash well with spoon. Add sugar, meal, salt, and egg yolks, mixing well. Lastly, fold in stiffly-beaten egg whites. Mix thoroughly but gently. Fry until light brown, and serve with brown sugar.

While matzos are everywhere, matzo meal is slightly harder to find; however, it’s just ground matzos, and a quick blender attack gave us what we needed. The process of soaking and mashing matzos, however, is rather bizarre.

These took a few minutes to really get soggy enough for mashing.

Then Buzz squeezed them out over the sink, getting a few teaspoons of water out.

Finally, he mashed them with a spoon, which worked pretty well. The burnt edges, though, weren’t as well-soaked and didn’t mash as well. (Not all matzos have these, but this box apparently came from a slightly overdone batch.)

Meanwhile I was separating eggs; for some reason I’m a lot better at this than he is.

The yolks and dry ingredients…

… all mixed into a sweet, mushy, matzo mess.

And somehow I have to incorporate this monstrous pile of stiff whipped egg whites in there.

Much folding and stirring later, it’s more or less uniform, although it still seems to be almost entirely egg whites. Oh well, let’s see what happens when it cooks.

Into the hot oil!

You’ll notice that these are a little bit beyond golden brown; I should have used a non-stick pan rather than an oiled skillet. My frying-in-oil skills are pretty poor.

For any regular pancakes, this would be an awful lot of work to go through, and they are a bit tough and chewy. But that sprinkle of brown sugar on top, plus the generous sugar in the batter, makes these sweet and eggy with a slight crunch.

And, all that effort does replicate fluffy leavened pancakes, thus making them kosher for Passover! Chag kasher v’same’ach!

A couple brief miscellaneous things:

1. Sorry for no post last week, it’s birthday season in our family. Trying to fit parties, presents, and special dinner requests into the everyday busy routine gets hectic!
2. Thanks to those readers who have been putting up some of my posts on Pinterest. I love seeing reactions to these concoctions, whether it’s in comments or on other social media.

And now, Ground Steak Parisian…

Buzz is a fan of blue cheese. Some people like blue cheese (or blue cheese dressing), including me; however, he definitely can be called a fan. He likes it extra moldy and extra stinky. (I like to be somewhere else, preferably out of town, when he’s eating the extra moldy stinky varieties.) Sometimes he likes to sniff the different blue varieties at gourmet food stores. Sometimes I like to pretend I don’t know who that odd person sniffing the cheese is.

For Buzz’s birthday, I bought him a copy of “44 FAMOUS RECIPES featuring ROQUEFORT CHEESE: the KING of CHEESE and CHEESE of KINGS,” published in 1964 by the Roquefort Association.

He soon had picked out a recipe and started reading me the ingredients.

Buzz: “Two and a quarter pounds ground round steak…”
Me: “So, hamburgers.”
Buzz: “No, it’s ground steak Parisian… ‘Divide into 12 oval patties’–”
Me: “That’s hamburgers.”
Buzz: “Ground steak Parisian. It’s steamed in wine.”
Me: “Hamburgers steamed in wine.”
[pause]
Buzz: Well, yes. But they aren’t served on buns. So…

It went on like that for a surprisingly long time. But, long story short, we’re making Ground Steak Parisian!

That’s right, retro readers, we’re not done with Campbell’s Soup yet!

MUSHROOM BURGERS. Mushroom-sauced meat patties! Mix 1/4 c. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup with 1 lb. ground beef, 2/3 c. dry bread crumbs, 2 tbs. minced onion, 1 tbs. minced parsley, 1 beaten egg; shape into 8 patties. Brown in 1 tbs. butter. Add 1/4 cup water to remaining soup; pour over patties. Cover, cook 5 mins. Stir occasionally. Serve on 8 toasted buns.

And yes, I’m still using my homemade soup substitute.

I think that Campbell’s Soup is one of the mainstays of retro dining. Not only did they widely advertise the awesomeness of canned soup, touting convenience, nutrition and affordability, but they increasingly came out with recipes that called for soup. We’ve visited these before — Shrimp Lamaze, Meatza Pizza, and even Tomato Soup Cake. In general, it only manages to rise to the level of “meh” — despite plenty of sodium, canned soup just doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor.

I clearly haven’t learned my lesson, though, because now I’m making a casserole…

Hearty Tuna Biscuit Pie

1 can Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 can (6-1/2 ounces) tuna, drained and flaked
1 package (10 ounces) frozen mixed vegetables, cooked and drained
6 refrigerated biscuits, cut in half
1 tablespoon melted butter or margarine
Parmesan cheese

In 8-inch square baking dish, blend soup, milk, and juice until smooth; stir in tuna, vegetables. Bake at 450°F. for 10 minutes. Stir mixture; top with border of biscuits. Brush biscuits with butter; sprinkle with cheese. Bake 8 minutes more or until biscuits are browned.

My 94-year-old grandmother recently moved out of the house in which she raised nine children to a more reasonably sized home — smaller, fewer stairs, and just generally easier to deal with. In the process of clearing out decades of accumulated treasures and trash, one of my aunts salvaged the “battered red-metal box” which held Grandma’s recipe collection. My aunts and uncles all agree that there was nothing particularly special about her cooking. And I can’t really blame her. With eleven mouths to feed, I would rely on spaghetti, tuna noodle casserole, and similar easy-prep dishes, too. “She always collected recipes, but that’s about as far as it went,” as her youngest son put it.

From the red box, my aunt created a combination scrapbook and recipe collection, weaving beloved favorite dishes into a narrative of family history. When our copy arrived in the mail, we flipped through it — and for some reason Buzz decided he really wanted to try this recipe…

Lemon Magic Pie

9″ prebaked pie shell, cooled
1 large tub Cool Whip [9 oz]
1 small can lemonade concentrate, thawed [6 oz]
2 T. lemon juice
1 can sweetened condensed milk

Mix last 4 ingredients together until smooth.

Pour into pie shell.

Refrigerate 6 hours or overnite.

You might think a refrigerator pie is an odd choice for February, but South Carolina is having a weird 70°F winter, so it’s not all that out-of-season.