'Special' Recipes and a bit o' Nostalgia

Yup, Campbells advertised their special soup shakes made by simply blending together your favorite soup with a can of milk. Mmmm mmmm good. I don't think it caught on well.

But here's something we all can do, thanks to the Weiner Queen. Her 'recipe' seems to consist mostly of a skewer and a source of heat to make them warm. Other than that, she uses them as a craft material, quite successfully it appears, if you notice the leer she has elicited from her admirer as he uses the rear approach to nip off a piece of crown. I can't decide what to make first, a wiener crown or the tres chic wiener necklace. I am thinking mine might include those teeny cocktail wieners for variety. I suppose this costume has some disadvantages if any dogs are in the neighborhood, and of course one would have to wash her hair and sweater set after every wearing.
I wonder what ever happened to the Weiner Queen, hope she went on to live a happy weinerless life from here on in. Or maybe she discovered Bratwurst and moved back to the mother country to really live it up.

My personal (ahem) favorite of my early years was cut up hotdogs simmered in a combination of grape jelly and ketchup served with little toothpicks. Gourmet appetizers of the 50's, and a nice complement to that dark orange cheese spread in the brown ceramic crock.

I do have to thank my dad for one thing and that is taking me around to the saloons of Buffalo 'back in the day'. They would have huge glass jars on the bar filled with pickled eggs and I still love them. He introduced me to 'blind robins' which was some sort of dried herring I think, like a fish jerky. I could never get enough. Also on the bars were vats of pigs feet and I was eating those before I understood they actually were feet-of-pig. The other thing he would bring home as a delicacy was tongue. My parents introduced it to me by thin slices and it was wonderful- tongue sandwiches with mustard. It wasn't until I saw the un-sliced version that I understood it was really a gigantic tongue. 'Tongue' to me at that point was only MY tongue, it never occurred to me that I was actually eating somebody's tongue.

Buffalo was a hotbed of all sorts of Eastern European immigrants working the steel mills and grain elevators back then, and he took it as his personal mission to try all their food he could find. And how I loved the Polish sausages! Since there was a saloon on every corner of the working class areas, differing only on who owned the places, the food was free with the beer. And little girls weren't turned away either on those Saturday's when I would go with him to the office.

When I cleaned out my parents house after they were gone, I encountered a big jar of pickled pigs feet way in the back. Since they had been infirm for some time I was leery of the age of the jar so had to reluctantly toss it.

And that is the end of my memorial day meandering. Back to 'process' next post.