Shocking Cookbook Expose DANGER THRILLS BREAST IMPLANTS

                             We need to have a talk about those Fundraiser                                                               Cookbooks, people.

         You think you are getting authenticity, but                                      it's all a LIE.

               I am talking specifically about fundraiser cookbooks. Not fake titties. This is what's called a visual metaphor.

Companies that help folks publish fundraising cookbooks have been around for a very long time. Take this outfit for example. What the company does is glam up your cookbook. They provide you with a selection of features like pretty covers, household hints, weights and measures, equivalent ingredients, index, glossary, artwork, things like that. You send in all the recipes you've collected, they print them, and it all looks nice.

Thing is, those bitches in the Garden Club don't always step up to the plate and offer their own recipes because they're all talk, those broads, just talk talk talk and then nothing but excuses, and you have to put out a cookbook; and do they care? No they do not. But the publishers understand. So...

                      The publishers also provide recipes, 'standard favorites,' to pad out the content.  

And all of this is fine, except the standard content is, well, standard.  And this is what I'm trying to get across to you - 

Most of the fundraising cookbooks you run across can be 90 or even 100% standard content. 

The companies even add fake contributors' names!  

Do these programs let you in on that?  No they do not.  You are lead down the primrose path by the  Ladies Fundraising Committee of Pacific Luthran Church thinking that Mrs. Peterson of Omaha Nebraska actually contributed her prize 'Olive Tuna Ring' recipe to the Ladies Fundraising Committee of Pacific Luthran Church, when actually there is no Mrs. Peterson and that Olive Tuna Ring recipe was dreamed up by someone at a desk in Missouri who hated humanity and disliked dogs.

When I go thrifting I often see women with tall stacks of these church/fraternal organization/ etc. cookbooks, heading to the checkout, exclaiming in delight about how charming it all is, and I don't disabuse them because why take away someone's happy? But if they took the time to flip through that stack they'd soon realize that they're buying exactly the same content over and over and over again. Particularly if the books are all from the same small town,  because (and I congratulate  myself on this discovery) different agencies will tend to use one publisher whose name gets passed around on the grapevine. Like, some poor volunteer in Milton-Freewater ass of nowhere Oregon gets stuck on the Cub Scouts 'Cookbook Committee' and doesn't have a goddamn clue, so s/he calls the Milton-Freewater Fire Station or the Library or the Hospital and asks the poor person stuck on their Cookbook Committee what publisher they use, and...there you go.  Five organizations in Milton Freewater ass of nowhere Oregon put out fundraiser cookbooks that year, and all five have the same goddamn content, and most of it was written by that asshole at his desk in Missouri.

When I am out trawling for cookbooks, I'll take a stack to the Furniture department, pick out one of the cleaner armchairs, settle in and flip through those sapsuckers before I buy. Damn straight I will.  Go ahead and stare me down, nervous young thrift store employee. I know you're worried that I'll fall asleep or die or set up camp here and have to be escorted out at closing. I know you're expecting me to piss up this cushion. Suffer. I did not come here to throw my money away.

 I've flipped through literally thousands of fundraiser cookbooks over the years. You get to recognizing the signs.  I mean the publishers imprimatur is usually right there in the title page, or on the back cover, so there's a giveaway (duh, it took me ages to figure this one out, which is sad.) Sometimes there are no title pages - but after time, you learn to recognize the stock recipe lineups and get a feel for the writing style, the type and appearance of the feature pages. And a lot of times - bring your reading glasses for that fine print - you'll find that the publishing company is taking money to promote different grocery distributors, so it'll be nothing but recipes with 'Sunshine brand Margarine' or 'Hormel Brand canned brain of something'. 

No, cookbook aficionados, what you want are the fundraisers that some earnest volunteer cranked out on a mimeograph, or on one of the first Xeroxes, and another volunteer collated off a table and stapled together on one of those stand thingies.  If it has title pages or any other features, those will have been drawn by someone's kid.* Maybe it was decorated by some sincere soul with a calligraphy pen, no skill, and benevolent motives. Maybe it's made of hand-laid paper, or grocery bag stock, and hippies have been involved somehow. Maybe it was put out by a cult, a commune, or a maniac food philosopher (like Jethro Kloss), or some isolated, obscure rural organization. And maybe, if you are very very lucky, it was put out before 1950. THERE YOU GO. That's your treasure. That's the really good stuff. 

You want content that was volunteered by real people. That is where you find the gems. That is where you get the most readable, fun content. That is where you find the best food atrocities, and where you find the really good recipes too, the things that people in that time and place really ate and enjoyed and have passed down.  

So there you go. Now go grab your garage sale money and hit the streets, eager young space cadets! Answer the call of the food of our ancestors, some of whom were crazy as shithouse rats! Go forth and refuse to let this stuff die! 

106 Tarantulas in a Subaru

 I have been way, way up the ass of my current project. So far up it's ass that I fell into a stupor in front of the computer this afternoon, and had to go lie down. I had two source texts open, two maps, and was scrolling a set of manuscript images that I was enlarging.  I was juggling seven different main questions and keeping two windows clear for incidental queries, and I got so wound up in all this shit that I began to be able to read Latin.

I am dead serious. 

Not word for word, but I was getting the sense of it. I must have suddenly begun using all my subconscious crossword skills and figuring out word roots and prefixes and suffixes and tenses and shit.

However, when you begin to understand Latin, it is time to take a break.  I don't understand Latin now, and somehow I am super relieved about that. 

This is not humble bragging. Much. This is an indication of how much my ability to concentrate and focus has improved after experiencing a certain transformative event recently.

Shit I'm interesting. Right? I am so interesting.

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There are three subjects that get worse the more you read about them:

1. Jeff Daumer

2. Ed Gein

3. St. Catherine of Sienna

It seems like nobody wants to come right out and put down all the facts in one place. And maybe that's a good idea. Maybe that's why we have cops and medical specialists. We hire them to know these things so we don't have to.  Of course, I am the exception to that rule. 

I have read a lot of gross stuff in my time, but Daumer? Honestly it's enough to make you give up on humanity completely, some of the things that man did. Not just the stuff that everyone knows. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's details that were never widely disseminated, and I seem to be on a mission to hunt them all down.*  

Same goes for Ed Gein. At the very least, he had way, way too much time on his hands, did Eddie. Every time you think 'Dear God that's got to be it' though, you find out about another over the top, horrible...say, facet of his interior design philosophy. Or his fashion sense. Ahem.

Neither of them are a patch on St. Catherine of Sienna, though. St. Catherine of Sienna knew exactly what she was doing - and she was doing it to herself.

St. C of S was a perfect storm of time, place, intellect, mania, credulity, dissimulation dressed as grace, batshit insanity and circumstance. This woman was driven by things that modern medicine was invented to prevent, and driven hard, as though she was being run by terrible electrodes in her head. Everyone around her supported her behaviors, though, and encouraged them, and it all devolved into starvation, bleeding, crying, levitation, miraculous healings, extreme demonstrations of faith and obedience, and people handling the deceased and no no no no. 

There was a secular book written in the 1980s that goes into her plight. It's called 'Holy Anorexia' but anorexia was the least of this woman's issues. Under the impression that God was constantly demanding that she humiliate herself in extreme ways to purify her soul, she resorted to, among other things, eating 'corrupt flesh and matter' and you know what, use your imagination.

______

The last few weeks have been interesting like this. My back has been slowly releasing tension, and I am not the limping wreck I had been for the last five or so years.  I had been developing a misers' squint  in my right eye; that's going away. I swear to God my hair is beginning to come in thicker too. It's a trip, is what it is. I had been battling a few compulsive behaviors, nothing new in my depression/ADHD co-morbidity wonderland - those have gone away. I'd super like it if I spontaneously developed the ability to do math, or drive a stick shift.

I have lost 25 pounds.

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So why did I blow off a whole month?  Where was my ass when I should have been blogging?

Out enjoying my newfound clarity. It's just amazing. I keep on expanding outward into life, squishy as that sounds.  

I have worried that this is how dementia starts, and if I might have had a mini-stroke or something, honestly. If that's the case, I really like how it's turning out.  

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*Why?  This is such a chick thing! I'm being such a typical chick! I can't get enough of those true crime serial killers, the grosser the better! Ann Rule would understand.

 

Purgatory Smith and his Ailing Leg

 Here for Jon is my next post - THE WATKINS COOKBOOK!

Is it the Rawleigh Cookbook?  No it is not. Now, I have owned the Rawleigh Cookbook in the past and I might have one now, but that would mean getting up from Command Central here and digging through my bookshelves, which I am not going to do because I am snuggled in with my modern Jazz and my Big Ballard.  Anyway I already took the pictures for the Watkins one.

                                       

              

Oh no wait it's the Rawleigh one. OK then.

So anyway, Rawleigh. It was a door-to-door sales outfit that purveyed ink, veterinary nostrums, patent medicines, cleaning agents, herbs, spices, extracts and whatever else shit.  Their old bottles are pretty collectible. I've owned a few over the years, in fact - a Beef Extract and

- well who gives a shit. Anyway, if you put in an order, they'd include one of these cookbooks for free!  

They put a lot of thought into them, too.  Rawleigh assumed very little cooking experience, expecting that new brides (who presumably didn't know squat) and cheap mother-in-laws (who couldn't be bothered to buy a birthday gift for the trollop who married their angel, oh but look I've got this thing lying around, I'll just wrap it for the bitch) would be the ones most appreciative of this offering . They also assumed total ignorance on the part of the buyer with the concept of 'flavor' - and once again, they nailed it. If you lived someplace like Pollock, California, Spangle, Washington, or Lastine, Oregon, this being the late 1950's, you were very unlikely to have grown up eating much other than Vegetation and Things in Cloudy Water.  Consequently, these recipes are dead simple.  

Incidentally, all the same things can be said for The Watkins Co. Cookbook. It's around here somewhere.

BAM SHAKALAKA we got a message from the desk of hang on. 

We got a message from the president of the company!!!  

I mean read this over. If they still wrote copy like this I'd have an empty bank account.  All these years later I'm thinking 'My, what a nice fellow.  OO and look, company letterhead!'  You can also see the date of publication - 1959.

Now let's get to the recipes and pictures. Mainly the pictures. 

This is a classic of advertising photography IMHO.  And the staging - it doesn't get more 'Heartland, home and family' than this stuff.

Let's begin with the absolutely dead basic

ROAST BEEEEEF.

Behold - roast beef!  You wipe it down and throw it in the oven. Just add a sprinkle of salt and pepper.  Rawleighs pepper.

Pork done well develops it's best flavor. You know why? Because it kills all the roundworms. Nobody wants raw roundworm. You gotta cook pork well done because pork in the 1950s is crawling with trichinosis, which is roundworm, and it'll crawl out of that underdone meat while you're still chewing and eat straight through your cheeks.  Incinerate that pork so you don't die of encephalitis, which is when roundworms crawl around in your central nervous system and your brain and eyes and shit. No, like, they actually shit, and lay eggs, and chew holes in your brain, and die and float around in you. 

Why are we cutting and slashing and doing this stuff with pineapple juice to this leg of lamb?  What provoked this?  And listen - I live in Dilly freakin' Oregon. Population 301. Where do I come by Dry Burgundy out this way in the 1950s? 

Nowhere. That's where.

Let's take a second look at the finished product.  I mean...

OK this might not be a triumph of food photography.

Yikes sorry sorry sorry that was frightening. OK. Here. Look at this nice ham on this pretty dinner table. And breeeeeeeeeeathe.

 

Ah, but then....we have THIS ^^^. What the fuck is this.  Why does it look like a giant tick.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS.

 

Now here is Mr. Rawleigh getting all Ethnic on us. 

We are not going to dwell too much on the olive plate to the right. We are not juvenile. 

It's just an oval.

 It's fine.

Here we are back again in the Land of the Bland WTFs. I hope none of you are from Maryland. That is not how that recipe is supposed to go.

I know this is an emotional roller coaster.

Now see, this is pretty. I like this.  I don't know what to think about the dish of tiny weenises to the lower left there, but it's not all weenises, and look; there's a dish of crudites, which is French for 'hard throbbing vegetables.'  

It is. 

That's what it means.

And here is the recipe.  And also a recipe for freakin' LOBSTER SAUCE.  You know what, Rawleigh, I live in Wapato, Washington and it's 1959. 

Where the fuck am I supposed to come up with LOBSTER SIR. 

For BASS. 

FOR BASS.

Shh shh OK I'm fine, I'll calm down. See?  Here's some nice average stuff that your mom might make you for lunch, and you would be happy.

Ignore the Ham Salad Mousse.

Ignore the Molded Vegetable Salad, and particularly ignore the Jellied Vegetable Salad. 

IGNORE IT.

Here we are again at a wonderful piece of food staging artistry. I love everything about this picture.  I love the butter bowl and I love the rolling pin, and I love the shiny, shiny bread products, and the tablecloth.  The recipe is fine. It makes the slightly gloopy kind of white bread that Franz Bakery used to make back in the 1960s. I figure that's due to the shortening.

Aw, it's Easter!

And Peter Rabbit is out there with the Hot Cross Buns and the marmalade and the strawberry jam! He's headed straight for the butter!

With his tongue hanging out, mad as hell, ready to chew some human faces, followed by his band of  beakless baby fowl!

I put this in because Blueberry Pie is my favorite pie.  

 

At the very end you get a page on how to use spices, which is adorable.

You also get two pages about vitamins.

Unless you are standing in a meadow literally chewing on a cow, your food is falling far short and its mostly your fault because you cook, and cooking sucks. 

Vegetables are not your friend, they do not like you, they deliberately belch all their food value into the aether leaving you with nothing but a wad of plant cellulose while the god of plants laughs at your plight.  

Even the Sun hates you. 

Malnutrition looms.  

Listen. You live way out in the country and its 1959. You already have a lot to worry about when it comes to recognizably human offspring. See, and here you don't even realize that you're nutritionally deficient and a menace to the future, you ignorant clodhopper. But you are.

Do you want to have mutated babies? Do you want to have a kid that looks like a possum?  Or a clam? Because you will - if they make it nine months. Thats right. 

YOUR BABY IS PROBABLY GOING TO CROAK.

Why can't Johnny read? Look at the shit you let him eat. 

You see Grandpa over there suffering from lactation, infections, worry, fear, pregnancy, lack of sleep, rapid growth, fractures, surgery, and change of climate??? BITCH HE NEEDS OUR VITAMINS.

So yeah. 

This is the back cover. 

And this is a pair of salt and peppers that look like dolphins, and the salt comes out of a hole in the middle of the dolphins' face.

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The Rawleigh Company is still in business!

    

Same content as Ken but way less classy

Why in God's name is Trump fucking with Canada?

    Welcome to our political nightmare, world. The inmates are in charge here and we are freaking out.

Canada is fantastic. Canada is beautiful. I honestly do not know a single American person who is not secretly jealous of the Canadian system, the social supports, the free health care, and the positive reputation of her citizens. It's why we lie and say we're Canadian when we travel abroad - particularly these days.  The people of Canada are our neighbors and friends!  Shit, your dog can wander into Canada, and the Mounties will help you look for it!  This actually happened to me! Thats how excellent and chill the Canadian people are!
                                         

  15. "It’s like being a kid and witnessing your father in a drunk stupor trying to fight your best friend’s dad. It’s embarrassing and horrible."

-Buzzfeed, 'Americans Are Sharing Their Unfiltered Thoughts About Canada During This Wild, Political Beef Going On, And It's Jaw-Dropping'     

I am ashamed as an American and as a human being that the vile, posturing lunatic currently in office has stooped to rattling his tiny sabre toward our Canadian neighbors. Trumps' appalling public pronouncements and outbursts are NOT emblematic of what the vast majority of the American people think, and are certainly not representative of the way that we view Canada. Nobody hates Canada! These comments from Buzzfeed say it all, and I agree with it all, including the thing about geese.

 

18. "I believe the whole Canadian tariff and 51st State thing is a false flag to cause outrage and distract us all from the actual crimes and destruction of our democracy. It’s a coup, folks, and nobody is stopping them." 

-Buzzfeed, 'Americans Are Sharing Their Unfiltered Thoughts About Canada During This Wild, Political Beef Going On, And It's Jaw-Dropping'  

We here in the U.S. know and agree that Trumps Canadian attacks are bullshit, utterly senseless, cheap, and demented. 

We also know that the hand up that orange muppet's ass belongs to Putin. We know Trump is and always has been nothing but an attention whore, a criminal and a tool, a wealthy, balding Karen addled by painkillers and cortizone injections, nothing but a mouthpiece for the foreign interests who invested so heavily in his campaign and bought him the Presidency. 

                                                                     I speak for the majority. 

Not the sullen, diabetic misogynists who peaked in high school, not the daddys' girls wearing 'Grope Me Mr. President' hats as they march up the aisle in their camo bridal gowns. I mean the 99 percent of us. The people who have actually read a book.

 

   "His Holiness the Pope surrounded himself with none but craven guzzlers, gross pretenders and a host of fawning dignitaries who grimaced through their days at court with no more grace than beggars I had entertained in days gone by — though they had neither choice nor wit to rise above themselves and in that they had a reason.

Oh that I had ways to surely serve their putrid masquerades and twittery to make a dragon from the very menagerie within the Vatican itself."

-Leonardo Da Vinci, who knew a fraud when he saw one      

Canadians out there past and present, you are right to be offended. We're with you. I'm with you.  

                                                                RESIST THIS PRICK!

A Big Ol' Heap of Genitalia

Here are some chicken boobs.

                                         I mean dang, those are some chicken boobs right there. 

I really wish I'd spent more time polishing the last two posts, but I felt that if I didn't get it out there for the record, I would have skipped over the whole thing and posted some stupid shit about villainous breakfast cereal  or the super chunky results you get when you search nonsense words like mabooga.  That would have been in character. That would have been so easy to do. 

I don't like to come here and reveal a lot about myself. I was guilty of that shit at times back in the day, I'll admit, but by now, I figure if you don't know me by now, you will never ever ever, ever ever know me. I have moved the fuck on; and now here I am with a pile of unread cookbooks and this immense transformative experience that just happened to me.

So let's recap quickly.  I went through eighteen years of hell. Mental, physical and sexual abuse and neglect. You want details; shit, visit any website devoted to childhood abuse, read the accounts (or maybe don't because ew) and pick any three horror stories. It probably applies to me.

What I've been mostly silent about is that the bullshit did not stop when I was eighteen, nor did it stop after I was officially kicked out of the family when I was 25. No, my parents handed that job over to my cousin here in town, who enthusiastically maintained a campaign of petty harassment against my husband, my daughter and myself that lasted from 1985 until that man's death two years ago. 

No shit.

It was nothing more than a lot of low-level invasions of privacy over the years, but always intrusive enough to make me aware of the fact that he was still out there, the sniggering prick, fucking with me on behalf of my family of origin.

    This dude ^^^. President of an investment/personal finance company, philanthropist, occasional member of city government, net worth in the millions. This grown-ass man with multiple degrees stooped to the level of stalking my daughter, among many other things.

   

Meanwhile, I was in therapy.  There was a big emphasis on 'ceremonial acts of closure' back in those days. Doing things like writing letters to dead abusers, naming objects after memories or events and then burning them, revisiting the scene of the crime and destroying an object from those dark days there.  I'd always sneered at that idea because it sounded too much like religion to me. It turns out, those symbolic gestures are important. That hindbrain stuff has to happen. I was drawn to write that memoriam in defiance of whatever dignity I retain. Certainly despite my better judgement. Once I got started it just rolled out of me unstoppably. And I hit 'post'.

Then came the next day, when, in an un-self-conscious state of mind, a shadow over me that I had not realized was there simply peeled away and left me forever. I was high for the rest of that day, and all through the next, and the next, and I am now; on what I do not know, but I am different, and lighter.

 Maybe there are some of you out there who need to know about this. That's why I'm revisiting this event for emphasis. I want to tell you people out there, I want you to know, you adults who were tormented as children, that yes, goddammit, there comes a time that you not only know, intellectually, that it's really done and over, but that your body finally realizes that it's over too, and releases all its clenched muscles and bug-out plans and hypervigilance, and chills the fuck out; and you FLY.

ANYWAY.   

On to the big ol' heap of genitalia.  

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Big ol' heap of genetalia

OH HOLY SHIT oh goddamn oh fuck I did not expect whatever that is.  Don't look at that. 

But that's what comes up when  you search 'Big ol' heap of genitalia'. 

This is close to what I was expecting to find:

Did you ever imagine in your youth that there would ever, ever be such a thing as cartoon animal porn?  I mean look at this mess. This is all alien blue-veiner and pterodactyls and buttholes of something.

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HOLY CRAPBALLS BATMAN or whoever

 The most amazing thing has happened to me. Absolutely amazing. Utterly amazing.

OK so I wrote that last post, and I was all verklempt, because writing that 'memoriam' had taken a lot out of me.  You can tell that I was rattled when I posted. The writing is not well thought out and I'm all over the place. That whole fucked-up 'thing' that had been hanging over my life gave me a last few feeble kicks that evening, is what happened.

I slept out the last of it in some sad dreams that night. 

I woke up the next morning and began my day, and did my ordinary stuff, and then, as it closed in on 2:30 in the afternoon

IT ALL JUST DIED AND LIFTED AWAY.  

It was the most astounding sensation you can imagine.  When people say 'the weight of the world suddenly lifted off my shoulders' that shit is literally what it feels like. It is a real sensation. Everything slowed down, one, two, three, as a huge, huge, huge psychic weight simply rose up off me and dissipated.

Today I am still walking around in that astounding head space. Everything looks bigger. The world feels wide open. I can see everything.

 Years ago, I fell in love at first sight, and that is exactly what this feels like - minus the falling in love part, but the feeling of all the doors and windows of the world being opened.

   

Pastrami on rye with kosher dill pickles:  Peak spiritual experience 

So you know what I did?  I pulled the trigger on that Star Trek Cooking manual. 

Fuck yeah. I'm worth it. 

Unpleasantly unpleasant

 

Well, I went ahead and did it.  I had been promising myself I'd do it for decades. What I did was leave a painfully true 'In Memoriam' on my fathers' obituary page.

I feel small and mean spirited at the same time that I feel decades of women and girls inside me cheering wildly.

I won't post a link to it here because who needs that shit.  I've done enough posting for one evening anyway. I wouldn't even have done it except that I read the other 'memoriam' post and it was, just, a complete work of fantasy.  Some random niece  looked at what a lifetime of dissimulation and familial denial wrought and wrote a spun sugar account of my parents marriage and my late fathers' character - and it lit me OFF. Just thinking how this kid had bought the whole, alcoholic family LIE.  Thinking about all the shabby, shitty treatment I've endured over the years from this revolting group of people - like I said, it lit me off.  

My feeling is, OK. That side, they had their say.  Now I've had my say.  And only six people have visited the site since he passed away so what the fuck does it matter in the long run.

Honestly, I have been having a wonderful life these days. I never think of this shit, or if I do, it's without bitterness. It happened a long time ago and I spent a lot of time in therapy getting straightened out, and it worked. 

But damn.  Just DAMN.