Per a request from Trott (before he realized that he was facing the very real danger of actually having to eat the salads I make), the next salad I made manifest from the 1979 Marysville United Methodist Women’s Cookbook was the dreaded Watergate Salad.

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!

It was a struggle identifying which of the plentiful bounty of misnomered “salads” from the 1979 Marysville United Methodist Women’s Cookbook I should make first, but the No. 1 Coke Salad from Texas (submitted by Betty Rayner) kept calling to me.

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.

1979 Marysville United Methodist
Women’s Cookbook

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.

You just know this cat has been trying to get a DJ night at the lounge down the street:

Also, his vinyl collection is extensive, and far more esoteric than yours.

[via Trott]

I challenge you to find a more adorable drummer…

Be sure to keep watching to the end, he really brings it home.

[via Trott]

Smiles, everyone… smiles!

Hervé Villechaize Memorial Park

Our Hero, Hervé Villechaize

About this time last year, I learned about Portland’s Mill Ends Park, which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Smallest Park. Frankly, I think that’s horseshit. Mills End is a massive expanse of an entire two feet in diameter, a pastoral paradise of gargantuan proportions, a wasteful use of Portland’s finite downtown real estate.

The park, it is so wee!

Today’s cosmopolitan lifestyle demands a more aggressive approach to public greenspaces. My contribution: Hervé Villechaize Memorial Park. Hervé Villechaize Memorial Park is situated on a sunny 2″ (inches! eat that, Portland!) diameter patch of land in a back parking lot at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. Where Mill Ends Park has leprechauns, Hervé Villechaize Memorial Park has hobos, and occasionally a jug band.

I think Hervé would be proud (even though his park does get run over by a car every now & then).

I don’t think I’ll be dong this any time soon…

… I’m more of an electric pickle girl, myself. How long ’til we see it on MythBusters? My money’s on Busted.

[via TUAW]

So, I broke down and bought an iPhone (about 20 minutes after the price drop was announced) — my first purchase of an Apple product. I didn’t even have an iPod, that’s how out if it I’ve been. Of course, now I’ve drunk the Apple Kool-Aid, and I think this phone is the greatest thing since, I dunno, the Newton. It’s fab (especially now that we’ll get some legit third-party apps soon). But this video is fabber.

Make it Happen

This has been kicking around in low-quality form for awhile, but this version was uploaded to YouTube by someone who was at the video’s original mid-’80s presentation, and he had a high-quality copy. He says:

[W]hen I saw this ‘live’ at the Mac introduction, we, as Apple Dealers, all LAUGHED OUR ASSES OFF at time marker 02:47 - when the guy carried a 60 pound LISA computer under his arm like it was a laptop!

What I really want to know is — where did this wooden sign wind up? I hope it’s still up in someone’s cube in Cupertino.

Electric Punch Light Fantasy

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.

My beloved bacon costume has had some adventures lately:

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.