Recipes You Have No Business Making for Thanksgiving Dinner

For a good part of the 20th century, people lost their everlovin’ minds when it came to food.  Maybe the Great Depression and wartime shortages did permanent damage to everyone’s brains, or maybe the Nazis secretly infiltrated the homes of American housewives and successfully convinced them it was ok to put lettuce in a Jello mold.  That totally sounds like something the Nazis would do.

All I know is that the picture above is of a salad.  A salad covered in aspic, which, in case you didn’t know, is congealed meat juice.  And for someone to look at this meal and say to themselves, ‘Yes!  I have successfully suspended boiled eggs, peas, shrimp (?) and other unidentifiable foods in beef grease!  I’m the best!” and then serve this abortion to their loved ones, you know some mass madness had to be afoot.  And here are a few other foods no one should be serving up on Thanksgiving Day.

Ambrosia

Here’s a tip:  If you’re going to name a dessert after the ‘food of the gods,’ you’d do well to not apply the name to a dessert that looks like curdled vomit.  Because curdled vomit is not the food of the gods.  Curdled vomit is what you get when you’ve been washing down cottage cheese with vodka on a hot summer day.

Even if you know don’t recognize the name ‘ambrosia,’ surely you recognize the food itself.  It’s the one with pineapples and apple chunks and coconut flakes in whipped cream.  The one where you think you’re getting something good, because Cool Whip is involved, but then a sneaky mandarin orange unexpectedly pops up on your tongue, and you do a spit take because you had no idea you had put a mandarin orange in your mouth.  Then you get sent to the corner.

Maybe you disagree.  Maybe canned fruit in Cool Whip is exactly what the doctor ordered as the perfect after turkey treat for your family.  All I know is that when I was a kid, I had to figure out how to tactfully avoid this glop every year, and tactfully avoiding food is hard when you’re little.  You can’t say you’re watching your figure when you’re shaped like wall.

Macaroni Mold

As fond as housewives used to be of bubble flip hairdos, hula hopping and form-shaping undergarments, what they really loved in life was to shape their food into geometric shapes.  It was some kind of national obsession for a while there.

And if you have the technology to mold your your garden patch salad into a donut shape, what’s going to stop you from doing the same thing to your mac and cheese?  Nothing, that’s what.  The best part is imagining some woman sculpting her mac donut by hand.  And the squishy cheese gets under her nails…and then there’s the sound – it’s a well known fact that the noise macaraoni and cheese makes as it is stirred is the nastiest sound on the planet.  Eat up!

Liver Sausage Pineapple

That’s right.  You heard me.  The trick about this dish is that there’s isn’t a pineapple involved at all…that picture is of liver and sausage shaped like a pineapple, because people used to be tricky like that.  And if you really wanted to mess with your guests’ heads, you could buy a real pineapple and put the top of it on your liver sausage war crime of a appetizer.

PS, that’s not American cheese on the outside of the pound of liver, it’s mayonnaise. Mayonnaise and unflavored gelatin, topped with olives.  Why not, right?  If I were making this meal, I’d put Tic Tacs in the olive holes, just because I bet they’d fit so nicely.  And then on the Tic Tacs, I’d put dots of mustard, because it would just seem like the right thing to do.

Speaking of the right thing to do…

Perfection Salad

Not only is this a real thing, but, I kid you not, people are still making it. Google  ’perfection salad’ and you will get 278,000 results, and they are all variations of what you see above.  And just about all of them involve lime Jello.  Some of the recipes put potatoes in the Jello, others top the whole shebang with mayonnaise.  This one involves pimento, cabbage and lemon Jello.

I should invent a salad that includes Gummy Bears, cornbread, grits and fingernail clippings.  Perfection!

Hot Dog Madness

I wish I could wear this crown and declare myself queen of the hot dogs.  Excuse me, ‘queen of frankfurters.’