Jim’s getting a little carried away, though.

Don’t miss the giraffe!

Jim’s Pancakes

[Via Laughing Squid]

Charles Phoenix is adorable. And ridiculous.

Charles has developed this Dessert of the Future, the Cherpumple. Inspired by the terducken, this monstrosity… well, I’d better let Charles explain it.

Charles is taking his famous slide show on the road up and down the west coast this holiday season, and it is not to be missed. UNLESS YOU LIVE IN THE BAY AREA, APPARENTLY. Ahem.

The alien landscape of Watergate Salad

There is something intriguing about the idea that anything in 1979 would willingly carry the appellation “Watergate.” I recently discovered a nearly-identical Watergate Salad in a 1981 Lutheran church cookbook from Wisconsin. This little beast got around. More astounding, there is a Wikipedia entry for this affront to the culinary arts. According to the dubious, citation-less, stubbalicious entry:

No one is really sure of where the name came from. Kraft Corporate Affairs said, “We developed the recipe for Pistachio Pineapple Delight. It was in 1975, the same year that pistachio pudding mix came out.” Kraft, however, didn’t refer to it as Watergate Salad until consumers started requesting the recipe for it under the name. “According to Kraft Kitchens, when the recipe for Pistachio Pineapple Delight was sent out, an unnamed Chicago food editor renamed it Watergate Salad to promote interest in the recipe when she printed it in her column.”

This? This is the best the Kraft Kitchens could come up with to promote their new pistachio pudding flavor? I know pistachio pudding, I have enjoyed pistachio pudding, and these ingredients are not friends to pistachio pudding:

Watergate Salad recipe: if you recite it in front of a mirror three times, Nixon appears and bites your face off.

Mmm… slime

The green, slimy first stage of Watergate Salad — the precursor, if you will — had a certain je ne sais quoi.

My initial reaction to a bite of Watergate Salad was “it wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t have the mini-marshmallows.” My second reaction was, “oh, wait, no… it would be exactly that bad.” This stuff is vile. The recipe sounded dreadful, and boy did it deliver. Luckily, I did not have to bear the burden of Watergate Salad on my own: I was invited to a potluck dinner. The “salad” went untouched for nearly the whole meal, but at the end of the night, a few brave souls dug in — and liked it! Go figure. So, I guess there’s an audience for Watergate Salad after all.

There are step-by-step pictures, if you want to see the whole gory production (including multi-color mini-marshmallows in their native environment — Cool Whip!). Coming up next thanks to a request from Liz: Corned Beef Salad!

No. 1 Coke Salad from Texas close-up

It made sense to make this one first, because it’s relatively simple, and yet still horrifying — never have two words been less interested in sitting next to each other at the dinner table as “Coke” and “Salad.” And yet, here we are.

No. 1 Coke Salad from Texas

This is the "froth"

Making the “salad” (pictures here) required a bit of interpretation: are the “2 Cokes” 12 oz. cans, or the 10 oz. bottles that were possibly still kicking around in 1979? Is the “1 pkg” of Jello the small or large package? Or were the package sizes totally different in 1979? The recipe says that the 2 Cokes won’t quite make a “full 2 cups of liquid,” which tells me that we’re working with the small pack of Jello, but a cup is only 8 oz., and I can’t imagine a Coke so small that 2 of them won’t make 2 cups. I finally settled on the small pack of Jello (after all, I don’t think the demand for my “salad” will be high), and used one and a half cans of Coke.

The next sticky spot was the instruction to add the Jello to “hot Cokes” — I like to think that in Texas, this is just what they do when they accidentally leave their Cokes out in the sun… “Betty, darlin’, Bobbie-Jo left these Cokes out and now they’re hotter’n a whore in Hades — guess we’re having salad with dinner tonight!” I just microwaved mine.

I got to use my ring mold!

Now, your ordinary batch of Jello already has a crapload of sugar in it, but Betty thinks it needs more, so water won’t do, it’s gotta be Coke. And what else does this need? How about some syrupy, not-at-all-cherry-like Maraschino cherries? Plus, some pecans, which actually turn out to be a critical part of the recipe. I considered leaving them out, but trust me — they are a welcome respite from the sugar, sugar and sugar provided by the other ingredients.

The final result is actually rather lovely, I must say. And it tastes about like you’d expect: like one great big, sugary cherry Coke. By now you may have noticed that I skipped one suggestion in the recipe… I did not opt to serve this with a dish of mayonnaise in the center. Perhaps I’m betraying my rookie status at this “salad”-making business, but I just was not able to wrap my head around that one.

If you haven’t already, you simply must take a look at the other recipes in the 1979 Marysville United Methodist Women’s Cookbook. So far I have a request to make Watergate Salad, and a request to stay away from the Spinach Salad, but there’s still plenty of room for discussion.

Since, well, 1979 or so, I have been in the possession of one of the most startling and dangerous pieces of culinary literature of the 20th century… the 1979 Marysville United Methodist Women’s Cookbook.

I’m fuzzy on the details of how I acquired this little ticking time bomb… my mother grew up in Marysville, and my grandmother is still there, so I suspect that my grandmother had something to do with it. Grandma isn’t Methodist, and she’s cheap, so I can’t picture her buying this to support the church. She must have been given it as a gift and she turned around and gave it to us. At any rate, it’s mine now, and has been since forever.

The whole thing is an abomination, but the salad section is downright audacious in its abuse of the word “salad.” There is very little green in this section, unless you count the many instances of lime Jello. There is a recipe for “Vegetable Salad,” which sounds promising until you learn that it calls for 2/3 of a cup of sugar, a can of Chung King Chinese vegetables, and a can of something called “Veg-All.” But then comes “Asparagus Salad,” which you would think would at least have asparagus in it, but you’d be wrong. It has “asparagus soup” in it (surely Campbell’s Cream of Asparagus), a pack of cream cheese, mayonnaise, and lime Jello. So, you know, at least it’s green.

Asparagus Salad (curiously missing any acutal asparagus)

But it gets worse — oh, does it get worse. It’s hard to select just one recipe as an example of the horrors contained within, so instead I’ve unleashed them all on the world by scanning in the whole danged section.

Pretzel Jello Salad

Don’t miss gems like “Corned Beef Salad” (with lemon Jello and Miracle Whip!), “Super Salad” (with lime Jello, cream cheese, pineapple and marshmallows!), “Pretzel Jello Salad” (with, you guessed it — pretzels — plus Cool Whip, sugar, more sugar, and raspberry Jello), TWO! different “Coke Salads from Texas” (with cherry Jello, Dr. Pepper may be substituted for Coke if you’re feeling exotic), “Tomato Shrimp Aspic” (with tomato juice, lemon extract, lemon Jello and shrimp), or “Vernell’s Mint Salad” (with lime Jello, a box of buttermints, miniature marshmallows, mint flavoring, and green food coloring).

Vernell’s Mint Salad

There’s more — so much more. It just keeps going and going. Say what you will about these salads (oh please, do!), but it sounds like a photographic paradise to me. These recipes are just begging to be made real so that their jiggly, cavity-inducing goodness can be captured in full Technicolor grandeur. It must happen.

I’m taking requests — take a look through the recipes, and let me know which salad you think I should make next.

But in the spirit of getting shit done and moving on, I present to you crappy photos of my previous two paper wallets, taken today, on my desk under the yellow light of my K’nex lamp, with the bare minimum effort put into setting up the shots.

Today we have two paper wallets.

60s Legs Paper Wallet

NOTE: At the time these photos were taken, the wallet’s seen a few months of wear and tear, and is looking a little weathered not unlike an off-the-strip Vegas cocktail waitress (Sorry mom! No offense!), but when it was new it looked fly.

This wallet was made out of two extra-long postcards I found in some gift store. I thought legs would make a great theme. I was wrong. Still I like how it turned out, and it has only offended a few so far.

North Woods Inn Paper Wallet

NOTE: At the time these photos were taken, the wallet was so badly worn that I retired it (and made the Legs wallet above), so it’s looking a bit like the box to a “We swear it works fine” returned digital camera at Fry’s. When it was new, it looked badass.

I love Clearman’s North Woods Inn. A lot. It is so fantastic it deserves it’s own post here. But here’s the Cliff Notes: The North Woods Inn is a themed family restaurant in Southern California that takes it’s cue from the rustic romanticism of the snow dusted Klondike. It’s a big log cabin (and by big I mean freaking huge) with permanent, fiberglass snow on it’s rooftop. The place has not changed since it opened in the 60s … but is has also not fallen into disrepair. It looks pretty much like I imagine it looked like on opening day; preserved in time perhaps better than Disneyland. The food is good, the service is friendly, and the crowd has real appeal — multiple generations of families gathering to celebrate good report cards and new drivers licenses. I ate lunch there on a Sunday and must have heard Happy Birthday (sung to the real tune of Happy Birthday) and Happy Anniversary (also sung to the real tune of Happy Birthday) at least thirty times.

Anyway, at the gift shop I picked up a couple of North Woods Inn pint glasses, and a set of North Woods Inn steak knives, and of course some of these fancy North Woods Inn postcards, which I used to make perhaps my favoriteist wallet of them all: the North Woods Inn Paper Wallet.

I need to make a new one of these soon.

Wait! Here’s some photos I just found when the wallet was pretty new, and I took it back to the motherland to be reunited with cheese toast, their famous “two salads”, and a stein of Molson (okay, okay, it was probably Anchor Steam):

And now for the reverse angle:

I hope to post more, with better pictures, as I make new ones. And there’s a whole story about why I started making them in the first place. Watch this space for more!

Check out this atrocity: it’s a cheap, plastic, tiered punch bowl fountain, and it lights up. And because that’s not tacky enough, the lights cycle through different colors. I’ll tell you what it’s missing, though: it needs a sprig of fiber optics on the top. Now that would be fancy.

I kind of secretly want it. A lot.

MAKE’n Bacon
My bacon costume made it into MAKE Magazine! I dig the blog, and it turns out the mag is pretty terrific, too. It’s a special Halloween issue, you can pick it up at bookstores & a bunch of grocery stores, too. It’s a little steep for a magazine, at $10, but it’s money well spent. Check me out lookin’ all cured and tasty on page 18! The bacon costume also got a shout-out on the MAKE blog today.

Garth as Bacon

Bacon On, Garth
Garth over at Extreme Craft used my instructions to make his own bacon costume for the Indie Craft Experience that went down in Atlanta a short while back. Look how dashing he is as bacon! (And Garth, I’m sorry for making the lame “party on” reference, I’m sure you’re beyond tired of it. I feel dirty for even saying it. But then I see your beaming, bacony face, and I feel clean again.)

Bacon Takes a College Road Trip
One surreal morning a few months ago, a strange message popped into my email box: it was a plea from a director working on a Disney film, and he just had to have my bacon costume. The next morning. In Connecticut. Which is not very convenient from where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I spent the rest of the morning, afternoon and evening working out logistics with the production office. First, they were going to send a courier to come get it, but no courier service would deal with it because it didn’t have a box. “Well, what do you normally ship it in?” was the query from the production office — I had to point out that I am not actually a prop shop, I’m just a weird chick with a bacon costume. The next plan was for them to buy two plane tickets, so I could fly the costume out in person, with the bacon costume seated next to me. I didn’t want to take time off work, but I had my friend Mig all lined up and ready to hop on a flight — he’s good for these random adventures, and I love him so for it. But then we weren’t sure if we’d be able to get the bacon costume through security. So, finally, the production office made arrangements for me to take the bacon costume to a UPS Store, where they made a custom box for it, and then I drove the bacon costume to American Airlines Cargo at the airport, and bacon was on its merry, salty way. It arrived in Stamford bright & early the next morning, ready for its turn in the spotlight.

OMGRAVENLOLWTF?!?

I have no idea how they actually used it, and of course there’s a decent chance it’ll just wind up on the cutting room floor. But it’s exciting nonetheless, and I look forward to bacon’s big debut. The film? Oh my, that’s the best part. It’s a Raven-Symoné vehicle. By Disney. With Martin Lawrence. Called College Road Trip. Please, please, please let Raven be the one they put in the bacon costume. That would be seven different kinds of rad.

You Know You Want To
So, I got the costume back last week, and it’s in grand shape, ready for another outing. I loved being bacon last year for Halloween, but I think it’s someone else’s turn this year — anyone out there who lives in the Bay Area who wants to borrow it for Halloween? Make me an offer. Points for creativity over value in your offering.

Everyone here at the Junkyard Clubhouse love a good flapjack. So I was quite thrilled to see Neato Coolville‘s post about the Perkins Pancake House menu. It’s a great example of the wonderful design sensibilities of the the midcentury. The colors work well with our blog, too. Neato Coolville has full scans on the inside menu as, well.

I’m supposed to come up with five great places to eat in my area, which is Silicon Valley. There’s one problem, though… I’m having trouble finding good food in my area. It’s a common complaint of mine — how can a region that hosts a world-class university (Stanford) and the headquarters of some of the brightest, youngest, hippest companies around (Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and about a hundred more) feel like such a cultural wasteland? Don’t get me wrong — I’ve no doubt that there’s great food hiding somewhere around here, but I’m having to slog through a lot of mediocre meals in my quest to find it.

I’m not a picky eater, or even a finicky eater — when it’s chow time, I’m game for most anything — but I am a big ol’ food snob. I’ve only been here for a bit more than a year, and so far I just haven’t found five places in Silicon Valley I feel confident actually recommending. I can come up with one. Vive Sol in Mountain View is fantastic. I would love to find more places like Vive Sol — please, if you know of great places to eat in Silicon Valley (esp. towards the Palo Alto end), I’m all ears.

So, I’m going to recommend five places in Seattle, instead:

1. Palace Kitchen
   
   Palace Kitchen

   I lived in Seattle for nearly 30 years. I go back four generations in the Seattle area — on all sides of my family. I got some deep, deep roots there. The last time I went back to Seattle, this time to show Hanford my hometown, the very first thing I did was head straight to Palace Kitchen. I mean, straight there. We picked our hotel because it was the closest to Palace Kitchen.

   An example of how great the service is: on one visit, the place was packed, and we had other places to be that night, so we had to make it a quick stop for appetizers at the bar. It was crowded enough at the bar that we were about three people deep, but the bartender actually left the bar, and walked all the way around to take our order. Holy moley! That’s some serious service. She ably handled our order of some appetizers, too, and assured us that they’d find a way to fit our appetizer plates on the small ledge at the edge of the bar that would serve as our table. Sure enough, it all worked out just fine — and the drinks the bartender made were divine, prepared with a confident and experienced hand, and served quickly.

   Palace Kichen is owned by Tom Douglas, and it’s my favorite of his restaurants — it’s casual, but I think the food is more interesting than what you find at his other restaurants. The menu there is variable, based on what’s currently freshly available, and what flavors the chef feels like playing with. Tom Douglas beat Morimoto on Iron Chef. He’s just insanely good. I own his cookbooks, and his recipes make me look good. I love him. He’s my food hero.
   

2. Toyoda Sushi
   
   Toyoda-san, photo by Markus Kolb

   Simple, unassuming, and just-plain-excellent sushi. Toyoda Sushi is a small place, tucked in the middle of a row of nothing little shops on Lake City Way, between a hobby shop and a dance studio. Lake City Way is not where you go to get good food in Seattle, it’s where you go to buy cars. I went past this place a hundred times without even noticing it — and even if I had, I would have written off sushi in Lake City as a bad idea.

   But Toyoda Sushi is wonderful. If it’s not the best sushi in town, it’s very, very close — and the unfakeable neighborhood feel of it makes it my hands-down favorite. The tiny entry is always crowded with people who know the drill: write your name on the list, and wait patiently. The waiting area is plastered with about a hundred photos of Toyoda regulars — there’s a few photos of Paul Newman tucked in there, apparently he’s a fan, too. The walls of the restaurant are decorated with a mix of Japanese prints and crayon drawings by the younger regulars. They serve pie. Happy regulars on their way out the door call out “Thank you, Toyoda-san!” to Mr. Toyoda, who grins back broadly while happily slicing away behind the sushi bar. If you are able to get a seat at the sushi bar, Toyoda-san will keep slipping you delicious little cuts of extra fish, without a word. It’s the most loved and loveable sushi place I’ve ever seen, and it deserves it.
   

3. Paseo
   
   Paseo, photo by Mark Griffith

   Paseo ruined me. I found it only a few months before I left Seattle, and I cursed myself for not finding it sooner. It’s not really a restaurant, it’s a cash-only sandwich stand with a few tables. My love for their Midnight Cuban has sent me on a fruitless quest to find such a delicious sandwich again — but nothing comes close. The typical cuban sandwich out there might as well be a McDonald’s hamburger compared to the deliciousness that is Paseo’s Midnight Cuban.
   

4. Pagliacci Pizza
   
   Pagliacci, photo by lindes

   My first job when I moved out of the house at 16 was at Pagiacci Pizza in the University District. Being poor as dirt, pizza was my only lunch or dinner for months. But even when my pizza-slinging stint was over, I still kept going back. Over the years, I generally ordered a Pagliacci pie for dinner at least once a week. When I was working back in the U-District again (this time in computational biology — a much cushier gig), I found myself again eating pizza every single day for lunch, this time by choice — and still kept up with my regular pizza dinners. Like Coca-Cola, I will never grow tired of Pagliacci Pizza. I may be addicted.

   They have special seasonal pizzas that I always looked forward to each year: the Roasted Tomato was perhaps my favorite, but I also loved it when the Gorgonzola Pear pizza rolled around (I always added prosciutto). Year-round, my favorite pizza was the Agog Primo — whole roasted garlic cloves, kalamata olives, goat cheese, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, parsley, on an olive-oil base (instead of their tomato sauce — which was allso excellent). They also do all the traditional pizzas, and they do them really well.
   

5. Lighthouse Roasters
   
   Lighthouse Roasters

   Okay, you don’t actually eat coffee, but it’s an absolute essential to many a Seattleite, and I was no exception. It’s Seattle’s ultimate comfort food. It was one of the things I had to wean myself off of when I left — there was no good coffee near me when I lived in Los Angeles. When I lived in Seattle, my ritual nearly every weekend morning was to go get coffee at whatever was the best, closest coffee shop/stand. My favorite, and the one that was walking distance from my final residence in Seattle, was Lighthouse Roasters in Fremont. I loved starting my weekend mornings with a groggy stroll through the neighborhood, past the smiling topiaries, to be greeted by the quietly-friendly baristas, and given a cup of the best damned eye-opener. The stroll back was always a little brighter, and my day was off to a running start.
   

Okay, that’s my five! A few more orders of business for this meme to be completed:

The list:
It’s a little chain-lettery, sure, but it lets you see some other cities that have been profiled. If I’ve tagged you, just look at the page source to copy & paste the code with all the links.

Nicole (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, USA)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
tanabata (Saitama, Japan)
Andi (Dallas [ish], Texas, United States)
Todd (Louisville, Kentucky, United States)
miss kendra (los angeles, california, u.s.a)
Jiggs Casey (Berkeley, CA, USA! USA! USA!)
Tits McGee (New England, USA)
Joe (NE Tennessee, USA)
10K Monkeys (Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA)
Big Stupid Tommy (Athens, Tennessee, USA)
Newscoma (Weakley County, Tennessee, USA)
Russ McBee (Knoxville, Tennessee, USA)
Atomictumor (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA)
Oh Really? (Oak Ridge, TN, USA)
Mark Steel (Knoxville, TN, USA)
Swanky (Knoxville, TN, USA)
Humuhumu (Seattle, WA, USA, and Silicon Valley, CA, USA)

And now to tag five other folks who are bound to have five restaurants in their area to recommend:

Tiki Mama
Bowling Trophy
Spectre Collie
Jurgen Nation
Moose in the Kitchen

How many kinds of Pocky do you think there is? 5 or 6? Try more like fifteen. No, wait, scratch that. Try more like ninety-four. With flavors like Choco-Banana Pocky, Sweet Potato Pocky, and even the mysterious Fortune-telling Grape Pocky, Jelly Bellies don’t have shit on Pocky. Check them all out at the Gallery of Pocky. [Via Deus Ex Machina]

Ben and Jerry’s ice cream on the left; Album from the 1960s band Banana Splits on the right

Here’s a closeup of both logos:

Since Ben & Jerry’s are (A) known for exploiting the nostalgia of the 60s to sell ice cream, and (B) unforgiving in their endless barrage of shameless product tie-ins, I wouldn’t put it past them to license the classic bubble-gum band to shill for them. I’m sure the Splits would do it.

I picked up the carton and scanned the entire package to see if there was any credit or trademark assignment to Hanna-Barbera, who signed the Banana Splits supergroup to their label and gave them a show back in the 1970s. I did find a copyright notice for the cow illustration that appears on the back of the carton, but I found nothing to indicate that Ben and Jerry’s had licensed the Banana Splits logo.

Is is possible that Ben & Jerry’s is the most recent company to pull a Todd Goldman and appropriate someone else’s art to pass off as their own? I contacted Ben & Jerry’s to find out more, but I have not heard back from them yet. So I decided to go straight to the source and talk to the Banana Splits themselves.

Not The First Time

I got in touch Bingo, the enigmatic second-banana of the Banana Splits (although most music scholars agree he was the “John Lennon” of the group), for his comments. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was unaware of the situation. Like most bands from the 70s, the Splits signed over all of their rights to their record label in exchange for fame and fortune, and lost control of their image.

“We have no say any more, and Hanna-Barbera doesn’t really care about us. They cater to your every whim if you can make them some coin, but once the money stops coming in, they forget about you! It’s like you’re off the bus” Bingo commented. “And so they just let golden opportunities like this slip past them. This is not the first time it has happened. We’ve been trying for years to get royalties from Bob Marley’s estate, who lifted the chorus melody of Buffalo Soldier directly from our theme song. But Hanna-Barbera just hasn’t bothered. They don’t realize the gold mine they’re sitting on” Bingo lamented. He then hit me in the face with a pie.

So what’s the verdict? Well, the jury is still out on this one, so stick with us here at JYC for full scoop (har har) as this story unfolds. If I see that Ben & Jerry’s is planning a Sour Grape flavor, you will be the first to know.

Note: All images in this post were lifted from various places on the Internet without permission or credit

The waffle bricks didn’t really have the precise engineering of real Legos, so they really didn’t interlock at all, and in my toaster I could only cook two sheets of Legos at a time. So I decided to keep the Legos together and use two waffles to build a rectangular Eichler-style ranch home. How did it come out? Delicious! Check out the Lego Eggo website this morning!

When I was a tyke growing up in Seattle, Sea Galley was the height of fine dining, as far as I was concerned. On our birthdays, my brother Bob & I got to choose any restaurant in the entire city for our special birthday dinner. The answer was always Sea Galley, much to my parents’ chagrin.

In my eight-year-old eyes, Sea Galley was fancy. It had enclosed booths, and nets, and nautical bric-a-brac everywhere. It was dark, and mysterious, and it felt like you were being led through a maze when you were led to your table. And there was a salad bar. It was the first place in town to have a salad bar (as far as I knew), and it felt extravagant. The salad bar had baby corn. Baby corn! We’d never seen baby corn before, it was so dainty and adult. And they let you have all the baby corn you wanted! It didn’t even count as part of your meal! What a magical place!

The kids’ menu was shaped like something — I don’t remember what exactly, probably a diver’s helmet — and it included a list of non-alcoholic tropical beverages with crusty, sea-dog sounding names. As far as I’m concerned, Sea Galley is at least 70% responsible for my love of tiki bars, even though it was nautical, and completely tikiless. Since my love of tiki bars is a fairly massive part of my life, I still have a lot of reverence for Sea Galley.

There are two places I’ve been in my adulthood that look a bit like Sea Galley, and they’re both in Los Angeles (it’s no coincidence that I adore L.A.): Bahooka in Rosemead, and the Warehouse in Marina del Rey. But I see them with adult eyes, and while I love them, the mystique is not quite there. There is only one restaurant that still gives me the same sense of childlike awe: the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’ve searched high & low to find my adult Sea Galley, and the Mai-Kai is it, no doubt.

Right about when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, Sea Galley started a new advertising campaign, advertising their crab legs.

Dancing crab chefs at Sea Galley, from Sanderson Studios

We’ve got crab legs!
Sea Galley!
We’ve got crab legs!
Sea Galley!
We’ve got snow-snow-snow,
king-king-king,
Dungeness, too!

Get your crab legs!
Sea Galley!
Get your crab legs!
Sea Galley!
We’ve got crab legs!
So come get… your… crab leeeeeeeegs… TONIGHT!

This compelling bit of lyrical artistry was sung by a trio of half-chef, half-crustacean people, who literally had crab legs. And they danced. And they REALLY wanted you to eat their crab legs. I remember it being a pretty big deal — they did a whole series of commercials, and I remember all of us kids lining up Rockette-style in the schoolyard and singing “we’ve got crab legs!” complete with high kicks. I think there is an entire generation of Seattle children who cannot see crab legs without singing the song, at least under their breath. I know I can’t.

By the end of the ’80s, Red Lobster rolled into town, and ruined everything. By that time, I had finally moved on from Sea Galley, so I don’t know what kind of shape the restaurants were in towards the end. It’s probably best that I never saw what became of my beloved Sea Galley.

Hanford has heard all about the glories of Sea Galley, and has heard me sing “We’ve got crab legs!” enough times that he now sings it unprovoked himself. Can you imagine my joy at actually finding the commercial on YouTube today? Probably not. Unfortunately, the quality isn’t very good, but you can still sort of make out some of the nets & other nautical decor. Bebeya, thanks for making my day.

In 2002, the band Ween was approached to write a jingle for one of Pizza Hut’s Desperate Product Reconfigurations of the Month, the Insider pizza. The Insider pizza was the one where they put a layer of cheese inside the pizza’s crust. Never has a new pizza design so captured the imagination of the nation, with the possible exception of the P’zone.

Pizza Hut wanted to hire an edgy band come up with an edgy jingle for their very edgy new product, hence Ween. Ween came up with a funk-infused ditty, “Where’d the Cheese Go?” Click play to hear it:

Pizza Hut didn’t like it, or any of the other attempts that Ween made at giving them what they wanted. They wrote, they re-wrote, and finally, tired of it all, they wrote “Where’d the Motherfuckin’ Cheese Go At?”

In case the title doesn’t make it obvious, that one’s NSFW, unless you’ve got headphones handy. And thus, Ween’s association with Pizza Hut ended before it even really started, probably to the delight of all.

Mmmm… haw

Contains haw, sugar,
water and red dye.
But mostly haw.

What are haw flakes, you ask? Why, they’re flakes. Made out of haw. Just like it says on the package. They may look like firecrackers, but they’re a delightful candy treat. Each roll has a couple dozen super-thin wafers of hawiness. They look like monochrome Necco wafers, and taste and feel somewhat like a desiccated Fruit Roll-Up. I think they are delicious, but a few people have said they “taste like ass.” Most people seem to like them, though. Even if you don’t go for the taste, the packaging is so colorful and fun, they’re hard to resist. Unless you’re just really disappointed that they aren’t really firecrackers.

Haw flakes, in the buff

They are dirt cheap — possibly literally. I used to work for a dirt company, and dirt can get pretty pricey. As I said, each roll comes with a couple dozen wafers, and ten of those rolls come in a pack. I bought a bag of about a half-dozen packs for just a couple bucks. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,400 flakes. I don’t understand how that is possible, what with all the elaborate packaging involved, and the shipping halfway across the globe. I would love to see pictures of a haw flake factory, they’re probably lots of fun to watch in action.

I brought some with me to Forbidden Island last week (that’s our favorite bar, we tend to be there on Wednesdays), and they were a big hit. I might try crumbling some up into some Schnapps of some sort, and call it Hawschläger.

Easter Bunny Cut-Up Cake instructions

This book is from 1973, and it isn’t nearly as cool as my 1959 booklet of Cut-Up Cakes, from a design point of view — but it has more cakes in it, including this great, full body Easter Bunny cake. Marie was asking for this — I hope it does the trick!

Another Bunny Cut-Up Cake

Here’s another, simpler Easter Bunny, from the same book.

Wendy McClure found a collection of Weight Watchers recipe cards in her parents’ basement a few years back — no one in the family would admit to having purchased them, and she got to keep them. Photos of midcentury food are always a spectacle, but it’s her addition of MST3K-like commentary that really makes it something else. Not that the recipe cards need much help being ridiculous, with names like Snappy Mackerel Casserole, Fluffy Mackerel Pudding, and the relatively straight-forward Mackerelly. Weight Watchers was really pushing the mackerel.

I first saw these when they were posted on Tiki Central a few years ago; Tiki Wahine brought the thread up again the other day with a new link (the old one had died). Now Wendy McClure has a book out of these culinary masterpieces, The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. I actually kind of want to make the Frankfurter Spectacular.

Oh so pretty meat cake, by David Seah

Inside the meat cake, by David Seah

This lovely little confection looks sweet as can be… but it’s MEAT! That’s not cake, it’s meatloaf, and that’s not frosting, it’s mashed potatoes. Genius! The meat cake pictured here is by David Seah, but the originator of the meat cake craze is Black Widow Bakery. David’s has a stuffing filling (it’s a turkey meatloaf, made for Thanksgiving), and Black Widow’s has gravy filling and a rendering of a T-bone steak in ketchup on top. Both sites have helpful step-by-step instructions on how to make your very own meat cake. The Black Widow site has a whole gallery of other people’s meat cakes. Thanks to Tiki Avengers for the heads-up!

[Via A Sampler Of Things]

Yet another way you can be bacon-clad: Arche McPhee is selling this bacon-print tuxedo… and it’s bacon scented. I tried to infuse my bacon costume with a bacon scent, and it didn’t really work. I don’t know how they do it. They say it’s “tailored from chemically treated latex print fabric.” I still don’t know how they do it. It’s a miracle of modern science, people. How long does the bacon scent last? If you hang it in your closet, will your entire wardrobe start to smell like bacon? The mind reels. Thanks once again to Miss Delirium Tremens for the heads-up.

For years, I scowled at the yogurt section of the grocery store… how could there be “low-fat” and “non-fat”, but no “all-the-yummy-fat” option?

Then I found Brown Cow. Brown Cow is the yum. They’ve got the typical, blah, low- and non-fat versions, but they’re smarter than the average cow: they also offer a full-on whole milk lineup, which have a thick layer of cream on the top. The chocolate, coffee and maple flavors are probably delicious, but I can’t bring myself to try them — if I wanted dessert, I’d be eating ice cream. I stick to the fruit flavors. It’s seriously delicious, I don’t even think about eating any of that silly low-fat nonsense anymore. They also manage to be organic & environmentally friendly without spelling yogurt with an h, which I appreciate.

Dinner in the Sky

Dinner in the Sky is an outift in Belgium that will strap you and 21 of your nearest & dearest into four-point restraint, revolving seats around a Benihana-ish dinner table, and use a crane to hoist you 150 feet up into the air to enjoy a meal. I’m not sure if they make you wear those dippy chef hats. And I’m also not sure what you’re supposed to do if you feel a need to visit the restroom mid-meal. An eight-hour rental will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 euros. [via Cynical-C]

Last year for Halloween, I was bacon. If you’ve never been bacon before, I highly recommend it. Everybody, you see, loves bacon. It is, as my friend Monica says, the Candy of the Meats.

People do not want to be quiet about their love for bacon, they want to declare it, often loudly. Even the most shy people at least muttered “bacon!” under their breath as they passed me. I have never been so popular, so adored (and strangely, so hit-on) in my life.

I won the costume contest, which was novel for me — I’ve never had a costume that would have even been considered a contender before. It might have been influenced by my handing out bacon to everyone at the party. But I couldn’t be the very embodiment of temptation that is bacon without following through with some actual meaty goodness — as it was, I had more than a few people trying to bite me.

It was a beautiful experience, and one that everyone should be able to join in, so here are the instructions on how you, too, can be bacon for a day:

1. Buy two sheets of foam from a foam supply store. The sheets I got were 2′ x 6′. You’ll also need 2 or 3 colors of spray paint, some big plastic bags, stick pins, a hot glue gun and glue, and a few feet of heavy-duty 2″ velcro.
2. Lie face-down on one of the foam pieces, letting your feet hang off the edge, and trace the edges of your face on the foam with a big black marker. If you’re like me, you’ll wind up with black marker on your face, so be sure to wash that off quickly.
3. Cut out the face hole.
4. Lie down on the foam again, this time to mark where the top of your shoulders will be when your face is lined up with the hole. Mark the edges of the foam with a black marker.
5. Glue the two pieces of foam together at the top, above the shoulder lines, leaving enough room for your head. I used a combination of spray-mount glue and a hot glue gun. I’m a little embarassed to own a hot glue gun, but making this costume makes me feel a little better about it.
6. Use the black marker to trace an uneven, bacony outline on the foam.
7. Cut away the edges of the foam. Bevel the edges of the foam, to give it a slightly rounded, and less-obviously-foam appearance. Try to not freak out at the sight of all the little squirrelly bits of foam that are all over your living room.
8. Leaving room for an arm hole, glue one side of the bacon together. I used my hot glue gun, with slightly less shame this time. Be generous with the glue, this is where your costume is going to get strained.
9. On the other side, apply some nice, wide velcro to the opening (again, leaving room for an arm hole). I used industrial strength, 2″ wide velcro, and it worked great. It’s self-stick, and it adheres to the foam just fine.





10. To make a template for painting, take a large garbage bag, cut the sides so it’s one big flat piece of plastic, and pin it to your bacon. Cut a free-form design in the plastic. I based mine off of this bacon bandadge. You’ll want one template for the tough, red, meaty edge, and another for the marbled pink flesh. You can re-use the templates on the front and on the back; use multiple bags if neccessary.
11. Pick a color to paint first. I started with red, but it doesn’t really matter which you start with. Pin that template to your bacon, making sure to really secure the edges of the template.
12. Using an even, sweeping motion, spray your paint onto your bacon. Make sure you get any exposed edges. When the paint is dry (which happens really quickly), go back and do a second coat.
13. Repeat with your other paint color and template.
14. Repeat with both templates on the back.
15. The next part was a little tricky — I wanted the bacon to have an overall mottled brown appearance. I like my bacon undercooked, so I didn’t go for a crispy bacon look, but you could if that’s how you like your bacon. I mixed some brown paint with water, and daubed it all over the costume. It was pretty messy — a light coat of brown spray paint might have worked just as well.
16. As a final treatment, I added a couple of coats of clear sealer, but I don’t think it did anything.
17. Climb into your costume, and prepare to hear an entire evening full of meat-based puns!

Eat Me!

Being bacon was, in a word, astonishing. Random people still come up to me and ask, “were you bacon?” The fine folks at Fuzzy Dude even gave me this button weeks later to commemorate the event.

If you do make your own bacon costume, please tell me about it! Maybe we can all get together and just be bacon sometime. Y’know, go hit the town, going from bar to bar as bacon. We could be a whole pack of bacon, come to life! An army of bacon! My goodness, it would be beautiful.

UPDATE: My bacon costume has been getting lots of love — read all about it in a new blog post — plus, you might be able to borrow it yourself this Halloween! Read the post for details.

Humu’s last post about Floratina’s Funny Face cup reminded me of Way Out Junk‘s post about Goofy Grape Sings. After all these years it’s so great to finally match a voice to that Funny face … and it sounds like Boris Badinov. Yes, all the voices are done by Paul Frees. The songs are available for download, but personally I just like the album cover.