The Easter Egg Cake

(Click to enlarge)

Vintage Hormel Easter Ham Magazine Ad From 1974

Corned Beef & Cabbage

 

It's the quintessential St. Patrick's Day dinner food in America, one as mandatory as turkey on Thanksgiving. But how did we come to eat corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day?

It actually might surprise some that this really isn't an Irish dish at all. 

The original Irish dinner actually used bacon in place of corned beef. And not the bacon strips that are a mandatory staple of American breakfast tables. Or even salt pork. 

In the 19th century, Irish immigrants to the United States began substituting corned beef for bacon when making the dish. Corned beef was more plentiful and cheaper than the bacon used to make the traditional Irish dish.

To make corned beef & cabbage is really simple.

You'll need:

-  3 pounds corned beef brisket with spice packet

This is a corned beef brisket.

This is not.

-  10 small red potatoes 

-  5 carrots, peeled and cut into 3-inch pieces

-  1 large head cabbage, cut into small wedges

 

Place the corned beef in a large pot or Dutch oven, add water (just enough to cover the brisket.) Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and let simmer for 50 minutes per pound. Add cabbage, potatoes, carrots and onions in the last half hour. Slice across the grain.

(Don't forget the horseradish, Guinness beer or Bailey's Irish Cream!)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

  

 

Wiener Wrap

Milton The Pop Tart Toaster

 

 1975 TV Commercial

The Return of Generic Products

Photo from Reddit

Apparently, generic products are making a return at Walmart....

Horrifying Vintage Meal Ideas

Wear-Ever Popcorn Pumper

The Wear-Ever Popcorn Pumper was a product from 1978 that used hot air to pop popcorn. It was a surprisingly good machine, albeit noisy as hell.

 Here's how they functioned.

I still have mine and I still use it. It's healthier than nuking microwave popcorn. And a lot cheaper.

1960's Sunbeam Rotisserie Carousel

These babies were fantastic. Basting your roast, chicken or turkey in it's own juices.

Christmas Tinner

 If you just can't put down the game controller of the PS4 or X-Box One Santa (may) bring you for Christmas, I have GREAT news.

Layer one – Scrambled egg and bacon
Layer two – Two mince pies
Layer three – Turkey and potatoes
Layer four – Gravy
Layer five – Bread sauce
Layer six – Cranberry sauce
Layer seven – Brussel sprouts with stuffing – or broccoli with stuffing
Layer eight – Roast carrots and parsnips
Layer nine – Christmas pudding

No need to break out the "good" dishes, just eat it right out of the can! (But then again, when your idea of interior decorating include fake bookshelf wallpaper, who needs formality?)

 Sadly for the rest of us, it's only available in the UK.... And completely SOLD OUT this year.....

http://www.game.co.uk/en/game-christmas-tinner-181968?pageSize=20&categoryIdentifier=10210

From The History's Dumpster Bookshelf......

More here ........

Cooking With The Stars: Food Products Made By Pop Stars

Frank Sinatra was one of the world's greatest pop music singers. So when Ol' Blue Eyes decided to come out with his own line of spaghetti sauce, the world wildly licked it's chops. Sinatra has often told of his family's famous pasta sauce recipe (and with Sinatra's family hailing from Sicily, you KNEW it HAD to be absolutely DELICIOUS.) Unfortunately, the spaghetti sauce bearing his name was a commercially processed sauce not much better than the Classico or other mid-level sauces. While fairly good, it was a disappointment. And a look on the ingredients label indicated why. They had pretty much the same artificial and preservative ingredients as any other of these sauces.

 

The late Linda McCartney had a wonderful idea - make a line of convenient and healthy vegetarian food products that didn't taste like nuts and twigs, the biggest fear of any foodie. That's easier said than done. Because you have to remove things like meat and anything resembling flavour. And usually replace them with tofu and strange things like oats and mushrooms to give it some texture. Her line was available in America for a few years in the '90s, but was discontinued (I haven't seen it in years in most food co-ops). However, you can still find it in the UK. The Chili Non Carne was surprisingly good.

http://www.lindamccartneyfoods.co.uk/

Country singer Dwight Yoakam came out with a line of microwaveable snack foods called Take 'Ems. They also come in cheeseburgers and pork rib sandwich varieties and chicken fries and rings. I've tried some of them and I'm pretty impressed.

 http://www.bakersfieldbiscuits.com/products.html

Sammy Hagar's Cabo Wabo Tequila - I got a bottle of this a few Christmases ago. Pretty good stuff.

http://www.cabowabo.com/age-gate?url=/

Forgotten Cable TV Channels

In the early days of cable TV, there weren't many channels. In fact, they were mostly your local over the air TV stations (with a few from the hinterlands, or over the border if you lived near Canada or Mexico.) The places where cable TV at that time was most frequently used were in areas too distant from cities with TV stations, where signals were too snowy and ghosty to watch - if they could be received at all.

That changed in the early '70s with the introduction of HBO and Showtime premium movie channels. By the late '70s cable began adding "super stations", over the air TV stations that offered their programming to nationwide cable (WTBS Atlanta - now known as simply TBS - the original Atlanta TV station was sold in the mid '80s. And WGN-TV Chicago and a few short-lived channels.)

The lineup was vastly expanded by 1980. And along the way, there were countless startup channels that grew and morphed into household names we know today: Lifetime, Fuse, MSNBC, Bloomberg, ABC Family and so on.

And now, let's take a look at the cable TV grid of yesteryear.......

- Cable Health Network (1982): Featured mostly medical and health related programming with some programming aimed towards women. Became Lifetime in 1984.

- SPN (Satellite Program Network, 1980-1988): Really low budget affair, ran mostly old public domain films from the '30s and '40s, some foreign programming and low budget, often politically biased programming. changed it's name to Tempo before being bought by NBC and relaunched as CNBC.

- The Video Music Channel (early '80s): One of the few pre-MTV video music channels and seen on selected cable TV systems as well. The VMC, like WTBS and CNN was based in Atlanta (but unrelated.) And it was one of a few major market over the air UHF TV stations that ran all music videos (others were in Boston and New York.) It's been said the original plan for Seattle's KTZZ-TV (now KZJO-TV) was to run primarily music videos, but the idea was scuttled after Viacom threatened to not carry the station on it's vast Seattle area cable system, lest it harm it's precious MTV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJcg0ZPf8NU 

- The Nashville Network: Cable TV's first video music channel aimed primarily at country music fans. The Nashville Network had some modest success, but later expanded into programming for men, adding wrestling, action movies and other fare and briefly rebranded as The National Network before becoming Spike TV. The Nashville Network however has been relaunched in 2012 as an over the air DTV sub-channel network.

- The CBN Family Channel: Launched by evangelist Pat Robertson as a "family friendly" TV channel  Initially all religious, it moved towards mainstream classic TV with sitcoms and westerns from the '50s. It was eventually sold to Fox and later Disney/ABC. But as a precondition, the network MUST to this day carry Robertson's own show, The 700 Club. Why? Because Pat Robertson owns the word "Family" (as trademarked/marketed as a TV network.)

- FNN (Financial News Network) An early business news channel. A pretty interesting one I must say - you never saw Frank Zappa hosting a show on CNBC did you?

- Alpha Repertory Television Service (ARTS): One of the first highbrow fine arts cable TV channels (along with Bravo and The Entertainment Channel.)

One of the early predictions of the expanding cable TV boom of the early '80s was these channels would be so successful, there would be no need for government-funded PBS (which the Reagan administration and all Republicans afterward absolutely HATED.)

Unfortunately, advertisers for these channels were hard to come by. Commercial advertisers were never big on classical music, opera, ballet and the fine arts to begin with and most finicky arts-oriented viewers resented the whole idea. Period. ARTS merged with The Entertainment Channel to form - what else, Arts & Entertainment or simply, A&E. 

Originally, ARTS aired on Nickelodeon's channel after Nick signed off. After A&E was formed, the evening hours formerly used by ARTS became Nick at Nite, originally running rerun sitcoms from the '60s and '70s.

- Kaleidoscope: A channel for those with disabilities. Looked like a great idea, but disabilities are far too wide ranging for one channel to specialize in.

- MuchMusic USA: MuchMusic (or simply Much) is a Canadian video music channel that stepped into the American market. with limited success. It rebranded as fuse in 2003 and has for the most part replaced MTV as the primary TV source of music videos, which the original MTV ended in the early 2000s to focus on solely on teen oriented "reality" shows.

- Fine Living Network: A network targeted to upscale viewers. It was replaced by The Cooking Channel.

- The International Channel: Became AZN, targeting Asian Americans. AZN folded in 2008.

- Trio: An unusual cable network. A joint venture of the CBC (yep, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and NBC, this channel specialized in American TV shows that were largely forgotten or unseen in most of America and Canadian and UK TV programs such as The Littlest Hobo, Follyfoot and Coronation Street and then-current Australian programs such as The Blue Heelers. It also showed the infamous American Pink Lady & Jeff show for the first time in nearly 25 years in 2002.

This is likely to be the first in a series. So many cable TV channels have come and gone, it's hard to name them all.

A Rock N' Roll Food Fight

Some bands/artists with food or food related names:

Smashing Pumpkins
The Lovin' Spoonful
Cranberries
The Honey Cone
Meatloaf
Lemonheads
Blind Melon
Bread
Cibo Matto
The Cookies
The Platters
Artichoke
Hootie & The Blowfish
Olive
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Cake
Dead Milkmen
Belly
The Raspberries
The Applejacks
The Honeycombs
Humble Pie
April Wine
Black Grape
Amy Winehouse
Taco
Pigmeat Markham
Fine Young Cannibals
Ambrosia
Matthew Sweet
Salt & Pepa
Pearl Jam
The Fat Boys
Soup Dragons
Gin Blossoms
My Cat Puddinhead
Spice Girls
Sugaland
100 Proof Aged In Soul
Cream
Vanilla Ice
Dave & Sugar
Sugarloaf
Neutral Milk Hotel
Ice-T
The Moldy Peaches
Green Jello (Jelly)
Brandy
Fiona Apple
Phish
Fattburger
Grapes Of Wrath
Chet Baker
T-Bone Walker
1910 Fruitgum Co.
Hot Tuna
School Of Fish
Wings
Sausage
Anita Baker
Uncle Kracker
Hall & Oates
Dishwalla
Buckcherry
Bowling For Soup
Korn
Vanilla Fudge
The Black Eyed Peas
Jon Butcher Axis
Breakfast Club
Country Joe & The Fish
Captain Beefheart
G. Love & Special Sauce
Wild Cherry
The Spoons
Richard Cheese
Feeder
Mudhoney
Meat Puppets
Fishbone
The Flaming Lips
Pop Will Eat Itself
A Taste Of Honey
Cherry Poppin' Daddies
Reel Big Fish
The Lemon Pipers
Fatback
Fischerspooner
Veruca Salt
Peaches
Moby Grape
Jello Biafra
Squirrel Nut Zippers
Peaches & Herb
The Electric Prunes
Sugar Ray
The Jam
Custard
Sugar Hill Gang
Mushroomhead
Everclear
Marc Almond
Mighty Lemon Drops
Neneh Cherry
Strawberry Switchblade
Sweet
The Brand New Heavies
Toni Basil
Tangerine Dream
Big Pig
Sugar
Heavy D
Strawberry Alarm Clock
Spacehog
Ultimate Spinach
Kid Creole & The Coconuts
Prefab Sprout
Vitamin C
Vitamin Z
Joy Of Cooking
Juice Newton
Limp Bizkit
Hot Chocolate
The Sugarcubes
DJ Quik
Apples In Stereo
Rachel Sweet
Bananarama
Eagle Eye Cherry
Jimmie's Chicken Shack
Chuck Berry
String Cheese Incident
Leadbelly
Hot Butter

Pizza Snacks

 

 

And who could forget these?

Jeno's Frozen Pizza

You gotta LOVE Jeno's Frozen Pizza.

Usually on sale for $1.50 or less each in most supermarkets, they are a cheap and super tasty way to get your tummy full in 11-12 minutes in a 450° oven. College students LIVE on Jeno's pizza and air.

But I'm also old enough to remember when Jeno's pizzas were also a little bigger than the 8" in diameter they are today. They used to be 12" in the '60s and '70s....

10" from 1983 to the 1990s. And 8" from then to today - mostly because of cost cutting, but also because Jeno's had been bought by it's budget frozen pizza rival, Totino's (both now owned by General Mills Inc.) Totino's pizzas are still 10" diameter.

Jeno's even made pizza mix. In fact, this came out before they made frozen pizza!

I always thought Jeno's tasted better than Totino's, even though technically, they are actually the same. But the one thing everybody complains about Jeno's is they never put enough mozzarella cheese on their pizzas. So you usually had to buy a bag of shredded mozzarella to compensate.

In 1967, they released this album, a selection of accordion music called Music to Eat Pizza By.

Western Family

Still very much around, but remember the CLASSIC cans?

Corning Ware Cornflower Cookware

Is it just me or did EVERY family have a set of these in the '60s and '70s? They were EVERYWHERE. And STILL easy to find today on eBay and in most second hand stores. They sold nearly a billion sets. from 1953 to 1983 when they discontinued this iconic pattern.