Tales from Community Cookbooks: "Ideal" Edition

On the first Friday of spring break, Daphne took Charlotte over to her Grandma's house for a "girls night". I had the afternoon to shop around.

It's always creepy when you buy a couple of scary movies, and the receipt adds up to $6.66.

("The Innkeepers" is slow, but really watchable. "Horror House on Highway 5" is not.)

After I left Half Priced Books, I headed to a south side flea market. In a back room they have bookshelves crammed full of cookbooks.

I don't want to take the time to dig through all those books, so my litmus test is to blindly pull a book off the shelf and then ask two questions:
1. Is this a community cookbook? Although great for preparing meals, professionally published cookbooks rarely provide unintentional humor.
2. Does a random page make me laugh? It doesn't matter if it's a recipe, a strange title, or a surprising name. If I can just flip to any page, and it makes me smile, then it's coming home with me.

So I yanked a small book off the shelf, and here's the first page I turned to.

 My first thought was, I don't think my mom has a pickle lilly. And if she did, she probably wouldn't show anyone. Sold.

The unnecessary quotes on the cover only solidified my decision to buy this.

 I suppose The "Ideal" Kitchen has some good recipes, but I haven't been able to get past the chapter artwork and the seemingly arbitrary quotes.

I'm not eating anything until you define "loving".

"Spankling" colors?

I think you're suppose to pluck the turkey before you cook it, and why do the Ss look like 5s? Fi5h makes me think of a bad ska band. A gurgling ska band.

"Psst. Don't eat Aunt Mildred's ca55erole. It's made of ketchup and cat hair."

Since this page doesn't have a quote, I'll provide one. "Ah... the Dastay, cooling in the kitchen, while Father's in the background, riding on that chicken..."
Nice silo, by the way.