The first recipe I did was a Pizza Bianca with hand-rolled dough, a white sauce of ricotta and olive oil, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses. I also added some fresh chopped oregano and rosemary. After it’s cooked, you top with arugula for some bitter crunch. I forgot to add the parmesan before baking, so it got sprinkled atop the arugula. This was just as good cold as piping hot – yum!

Each Everyday Food has a section of recipes that use veggies or fruits currently in season — the June issue spotlights cucumbers, which I love. I did this cold cucumber and buttermilk soup with olive oil drizzled on top. It tastes like liquid cucumber, really delicious! With the rest of the buttermilk, I made my own ranch dressing (a huge improvement over store bought) from a recipe elsewhere in the issue.

Another cucumber recipe I tried was this side salad with English cucumbers, celery, tuna and poppy seeds, tossed in a rice vinegar and olive oil mixture. We’re bringing this to a Memorial Day weekend lunch with some friends. If it’s as good as the other stuff I’ve made, it should be a hit.

General Foods’ Home Meal Planner from 1961 was a booklet that Christopher found on the Free pile at his workplace. It outlines how to plan your meals smartly and efficiently — involving lots of General Foods products, of course. Amongst the tips and recipes are some wonderful typography and illustrations depicting a perfect housewife preparing meals for her nuclear family. For dealing with something as mundane as meal planning, the whole thing is incredibly elegant and Betty Draperish. Several images from the booklet were scanned and posted in my Cool Vintage Illustration flickr set.

Speaking of Betty Draper, we’re finally getting into Mad Men. Seemingly everyone I know was raving about the show when it first premiered, and I subsequently checked out an episode. It was … just okay. Beautifully crafted with a committed cast, but also cold, excessively dour and (worst of all) having a smug, revisionist attitude about the ’60s. I decided to give it another try when Amazon had a sale on the DVDs last year. Although the first few episodes still have that annoyingly smug tone, both of us were soon wrapped up in the drama and storylines. There were still a few so-so episodes from that year, but now we’re halfway through the second season DVDs and there’s a noticeable improvement in the acting and plot development. Can’t wait to check out the following two seasons — what an enthralling drama.

Anyhow, let’s indulge in something that Betty Draper would obviously find quite handy (whenever she isn’t fretting about her heel of a hubby):

Something else that will brighten up my 2010 — Dr. Pepper Heritage. I’m sure my dentist will love that one.

Then again, maybe not. Let’s instead focus our energies on the chapter heading artwork from The Ground Meat Cookbook, forgotten bits of ephemeral cuteness which count among the latest additions to my Cool Vintage Illustration flickr set (note: this isn’t the first time I’ve been enamored of a Culinary Institute cookbook, nor will it likely be the last). Drawn by a lady by the name of Selma Quateman, these illustrations have a clunky charm that brings to mind some of Warhol’s pre-Pop Art stuff. It’s always funny to me how these old meat-based cookbooks never fail to sport drawings of adorable cows, horses, lambs, etc. The one of farm animals sniffing out a succulent meal is particularly sick. Have a looksee:

Thomas Kemper Black Cherry Soda. Yep, it’s been several months and I’m still making my way through the specialty bottled sodas I bought last Fall. Truthfully, I need to be in a special mood for a full-on serving of sweetened soda. Whenever I want something sweet, it’s more than anything else likely that I’d do a mixture at a restaurant soda fountain (try four parts Diet Pepsi to one part Manzanita Sol Apple; it’s delicious). Bottle-wise, my next victim was the honey-sweetened black cherry flavor from Portland-based Thomas Kemper. This was really good, fizzy in texture with a subtle woodsiness to the cherry flavor. The sweetness didn’t hit me over the head, which is just the way it should be. The root beer is Thomas Kemper’s signature flavor; now I want to try that.

A little background: I savored the original Taco flavored Doritos as they existed in the ’80s, especially when one would find the odd chip with a crust of excess taco powder. It makes my heart beat faster just thinking about that stuff. After a long dry spell without my precious Taco Doritos, the company reintroduced them into the market a few years back. Unfortunately, the new taco chips can only be bought as part of their Collisions line, sharing bag space with blah chipotle ranch chips. They also taste subtly different from the old formula — but, hey, I’ll take ‘em any way they make ‘em.

This bag of Late Night Tacos at Midnight made for a subversive afternoon snack. Immediately I wondered if the formula on these is different from the Collisions chips. They are. For one, they smell exactly like a real taco — with tomato and lettuce, even! My hat is off to the nameless Frito Lay test kitchen employee who came up with a way to make a tortilla chip smell as if it contains lettuce. Luckily, the leafy green scent doesn’t translate to the taste. Actually, they taste somewhat wimpy and unappealing. Guess you have to be a pothead with the munchies to truly enjoy these.

p.s. I haven’t tried the Last Call Jalapeño Poppers Doritos. A tweet from my pal Bob calls them “disgusting.” Think I’ll pass.

Also, how happy am I that Pepsi is planning “throwback” versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew containing genuine sugar sweetening (not icky high fructose corn syrup). This also comes via Pop Culture Junk Mail — Gael is on a roll! More info here; April can’t come fast enough.

Oh, and everyone needs to check out TCM’s beautifully done documentary The Age of Believing: The Disney Live Action Classics. It repeats on December 28th. Don’t be fooled by the toothache-inducing subject matter; it’s excellent.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). Heard a lot of good things about this when it turned up on several critics’ “Best of” lists last year. This grim Romanian drama follows two college co-eds as they attempt to arrange an illegal abortion. Although the film is a period piece set in the ’80s, it reaffirms the fact that Romania is one of the few places on earth doing original, thought-provoking films. Not an uplifting piece, for sure, but I loved the aching, lovingly detailed milieu Cristian Mungiu sets forth with a small cast of fascinating characters. The film is deliberately paced but never boring, and beautifully photographed with many long unedited takes. One scene in particular, with actress Anamaria Marinca dutifully attending her boyfriend’s family dinner party while her mind is obviously elsewhere, is an understated marvel.
Sprecher Cherry Cola. I’ve been falling behind on my soda reviews, but just wanted to mention this super-sweet delight from a bottler in Wisconsin. Ever have a Coke with a shot of cherry at Sonic? This concoction is like one of those with ten shots of cherry. It’s cherrilicious to the point that the cherry taste bludgeons the cola taste to death. Just thinking about it again makes my mouth water.

10,000 Maniacs — In My Tribe and The Ramones — Ramones. A couple of classic albums to fill out my iTunes library. Amazon had the digital edition of In My Tribe, an album whose grimy cassette I wore out during my college years, for just $1.99 this week. Revisiting confirms that it has not a single dud track, although Natalie Merchant’s earnest preachiness grates more easily now than it did in ’87. This particular download lacked the band’s cover of Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train,” but I did manage to find it elsewhere (sure, it seems like a label-induced sales gambit, but the album doesn’t feel complete without it). I always wanted to hear the Ramones’ debut. Although the album cuts don’t measure up to iconic tracks like “Blitzkrieg Bop,” the album is as raw and goofy and fun as everyone has said. I liked the extras on the CD edition, too — strangely enough, the early version of “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” might be the only example of a song where the demo is more polished sounding than the final product!

Our first subject will be Waialua pineapple, a soda originating from Hawaii. Although the label on the bottle sports a retro-style hula dancer, the company in fact got started only a few years ago by a newlywed couple who noticed the lack of soda bottlers on the islands. Right away I noticed that the drink has an appealingly light color, not the screaming piss yellow one would normally associate with pineapple soda. The lightness also extends to the taste. It’s got a really refreshing flavor — good and pineapple-y, sweet but not overpoweringly so. The fact that they use pure cane sugar and not corn syrup as sweetener makes a huge difference (that’s why hardcore Coke drinkers prefer the insanely sweet concoction from Mexico over the U.S. version). Now that I’ve tried the pineapple, I’m very curious about Waialua’s other three flavors … especially the mango. Guess we’ll have to schedule another Pop The Soda Shop trip!