Cooking Catalog Humor

While most women flip through clothing catalogs filled with the latest styles, I get my giggles from thumbing through cooking catalogs. As I was flipping through the Spring 2009 issue of The Good Cook catalog, I noticed something about the inside cover had changed. Was it the editor’s hairdo? No. She’s had that for a while. Glasses? Don’t think so … but I never really looked that close before. Then I took a closer look at her opening message. It was written in verse … she had rewritten the words to the song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. Here’s what she(Beth Goehring, Editor-in-Chief) had to say (hum along ... it works):

Bubbly lasagna and hot, buttered bread,
Peppery T-bone and pimento spread,
Fresh guacamole and salsa and chips,
This is the comfort I put to my lips.

Spicy shrimp gumbo and clove-studded ham,
Buttermilk biscuits and blueberry jam,
Choc’late chip cookies and homemade ice-cream,
These are the calories of which I dream.

When it’s raining, when the kids fight, when the bills are due,
I put on my apron and open the wine and make up a big beef stew!

While that alone was worth reading, I continued to scan the pages of cookbooks. Most of them I had seen before, except for the gem on page 9 titled “The Cracker Kitchen”. I did a double take and then skimmed the description to see if it was an experiment with Ritz, Saltines and the like. No siree bob. It was “A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-Fed, Down Home Family Stories and Cuisine” by Janis Owens. Alrighthy then. Moving on.

By page 19, I learned that according to the Washington Post, Corinne Trang, author of Noodles Every Day is “the Julia Child of Asian cuisine”. Good to know. I wonder what the Asian version of Julia’s vanilla pound cake tastes like? Probably not the same. A few pages later, I discovered there’s a cookbook titled “365: Dish a Day” and the authors were thorough enough to add an extra recipe for leap years.

My final bit of entertainment was towards the end of the catalog. The cookbook is titled “The Pleasure Is All Mine: Selfish Food for Modern Life”. Here’s the image of the cover. Check out the dress, stilettos and wine bottle.

This gal knows how to have a good time … by herself … as the title says.