Maroon Elephant:: Seven Hours Fatal Bean Legume

A while back I was having a conversation with my girl Andrea, and we started in reminiscing about the hideous food we used to have to eat when we were kids. Odd thing was, the same recipes came up, her and me. Now granted, there was a perceived 'poverty' mentality going on in both cases...I think everyone who had kids back in the 50's and 60's was required by law to assume they were one step away from some horrible rat infested Dickensian poorhouse situation-and being poor means you have to eat shitty food that tastes bad. At least it did then. Now apparently it means you suck warm lard out of the bucket and chase it with bacon. But back then if you didn't serve your family institutional grade ground beef at least three nights a week you were just DOING IT WRONG.

1. Swiss Steak.
What the hell was this shit and what was so goddamn Swiss about it? Seriously. To this day nothing about this dish says 'Switzerland' to me. It doesn't look like the Matterhorn. It isn't made of chocolate. It IS made of cow, of course, and they do have a lot of cows in Switzerland, but they have a lot of cows here too so it could have just as easily been Sumas Steak, except then it would have bacon and lard in it.

ingredients:
1 huge round steak (you never see these any more. They used to be the size of a fricken manhole cover and they wept nearly 1/3 their total mass in cooking as water. Aquatic beef? Sliced dugong? What? )
1 can of tomato paste
1 can of tomato sauce
1 yellow onion
1 can of canned tomatoes
1 cup flour
a mallet with poky things on one side
1 cup water or 2% milk
pepper
diced tomatoes

methode:
-slap the steak out on the counter and dump one half of the flour on it. spread it all around with the side of your hand.
-Take the mallet and, using the poky side, beat the living shit out of the steak, making sure that flour flies all over hells half acre and forms a weird pink doughy scabby thing in the neddles of the mallet. Pick this off and attempt to wham it into the surface of the steak, which should by now be thin enough to read a newspaper through. Fail to make scabby thing adhere. Pick off surface of mallet and eat. Wasting food is a sin.
-Slap steak into frying pan into which several scoops of vegetable shortening or used bacon fat are smoking. The steak should immediately being shrinking. When it has shrunk up until it fits into the pan, boil in the resulting cast water for 1 hour.
-place in a 9 inch baking pan tomato sauce, tomato paste and canned tomatoes. Do not combine. IN fact the more they resemble the container they left the better.
-slap boiled steak into pan.
-dump onion and diced tomatoes into hot frying pan, making sure that everything sticks uniformly. When smoke appears, chip off the bottom of the pan onto the top of the steak.
-Season with pepper and add water. Sprinkle remaining flour over top.
-Bake for three hours, or until substance in pan no longer resembles anything found in nature. Serve with....

2. Wooden beans
Once again the motto 'It's a sin to waste food' should be your watchword here.
ingredients
-Three double handfuls of late beans. Beans so late they resemble the gnarled, swollen, knobby fingers of arthritic people. Beans so late they cannot be snapped-not even over the edge of a table. Beans so late that the strings really are made of string; a string so tough and durable that it is used by third world countries in making radial tires.
-The fat end off a slab of bacon, cut into giant greasy wads about the size of a shooter marble. At least one of these should have a black hair stuck to it.
-1 yellow onion, coarsely chopped
-water to cover
methode: dump all ingredients into a pot and bring to a boil. Boil for three hours. Beans are done when they are khaki green.

3. Tuna Casserole with frozen peas
because tuna is cheap, mayonnaise makes it stick together, and peas make it pretty!
ingredients
-1 can tuna, drained
-1 yellow boiler onion, chopped coarsely
-1 package macaroni noodles
-1 cup mayonnaise
-1 tube saltine crackers, broken
-1 stalk celery, chopped coarsely
-1 package frozen peas
-optional: barbecue potato chips, fried onions, Corn Chex cereal, corn flakes cereal, croutons (assume an 'or' in between each item in the preceding...or not. Its a free country. I'm not your boss.)
methode: thaw peas. Do NOT drain. Cook macaroni noodles until swollen three times their original size, drain. Combine all ingredients and pour into a 9 inch baking dish, top with optional ingredients. Bake in a 350 degree oven for three hours. Top should be blackened and sides should be at least one inch away from the wall of the pan. Saw into slices and serve.

4. Macaroni and cheese with hot dogs
Better living through chemistry! Mmmmm! Kids love hot dogs....and kids love macaroni and cheese! Please those picky eaters with this double whammy of deliciousness! Dont' forget the Benadryl chaser to treat those pesky allergic hives! We all know the little bastards just fake anaphylaxis for the attention anyway.
ingredients
-1 package instant mac and cheese, preferably Kraft as you'll be using their 'cheese' in this also and we want things to stay matchy matchy.
-1 package Oscar Meier hot dogs. Because they have the cute ad with the kids singing about how they want to all grow up to be weiners. I just think thats the cutest thing...and they're all marching along having a little parade? It's so cute! I know the whole song too!
-1/2 cup Velveeta cheese, cut into small squares (at least one of these should have a black hair stuck to it)
-optional: 1 can of chopped pimientos. You can't taste them; its just to be fancy. They just make it look pretty. Seriously, they just taste like salt water or something.

methode:
-open package of hot dogs and put into boiling water. When burst, remove from water and cut into bite sized pieces. Let dry on counter until dark red and somewhat pliable.
-make the mac and cheese according to the directions on the box. When finished, pour into a 9 inch baking pan.
- stir in hot dog pieces and optional ingredients
-bake in a 350 degree oven for three hours.


Italian Spaghetti
a taste of the old country for todays busy modern cooks
ingredients: SAUCE
1/3 cup tomato catsup
1 can tomato paste
1 can tomato sauce
1 can diced tomatoes
1 yellow boiler onion, diced
celery salt
garlic salt
pepper
1 lb hamburger, boiled in its own juices until grey, drained

methode: combine all ingredients and boil for three hours. Serve over spaghetti noodles. Cooked, preferably.

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...Ever wondered why everyone in our generation is diabetic? Wonder no more.