Date I made these recipes:
June 8, 2015
Pig Out With Peg –
Secrets from the Bundy Family Kitchen by Peg Bundy as told to Linda
Merinoff
Published by: Avon Books
ISBN: 0-380-76431-8
Purchased at Arc's Value Village
Recipe: Middle Age Spread – p. 56
Today's Random Thoughts on Recipes:
1) I
should have made the meatloaf.
2) I
realized I don't really like nutmeg.
3) What
have I ever done to cream cheese to make it hate me so much?
4) It's
a terrible day when your Cuisinart
"turns" on you.
Ooof! Folks, I am on
a dangerous roll here. The last few blog
posts have included some very easy recipes and yet, if there is a way to screw
them up, I seem to have found it.
Take the Jell-O
recipe from the end of May. The recipe
said to add Jell-O to your smoothed
out cream cheese but when I did it, the mixture got all chuncky as if I
substituted cottage cheese instead. I
did not. The taste was great but the
appearance was not like the example in the photo.
Then today, I made this very easy shrimp dish. I gathered all my ingredients, straight out
of the refrigerator, threw them all, as directed, into the Cuisinart, and then
pressed the "On" button. I
noticed that the cream cheese that I added got stuck and instead of just
turning the machine off, I took two seconds out of my day to turn to grab a
spatula to un-stick the cream cheese and boom – instant puree! Waaaaaaaaa!
So instead of making a middle age spread, it seemed I inadvertently made
a middle age dip. But isn't that the way
things go where your body is concerned?
One minute, it's all looking good and then next minute, gravity hits and
it's all looking terrible and worse, it's all heading for the floor at the
speed of light.
Which is why, I suppose, this makes this the perfect dish
for our fictional Peg Bundy.
I never watched the TV show, Married with Children, but that didn't mean that I didn't keep
track of things. And so when I had the
opportunity to snap up the cookbook, Pig
Out With Peg [Bundy], I snapped it up.
And then all I needed was a reason to cook from it and...
...and on Memorial Day, I broke my self-imposed 12-year
boycott of going to a movie theater (long story, best told over cocktails), and
went with a friend to see Pitch Perfect 2. I only got around to watching Pitch Perfect this winter, recording it
on my DVR, and was amazed at how much I liked it. Sometimes the movie hype is so high that I'm
often left wondering why I bothered but luckily, this was not the case for this
movie or the sequel.
At any rate, so there I was, in a theater at 10:10 a.m. (the
first showing was at 9:30 but I refused to get up that early on a day off) for Pitch Perfect 2, and who appears on
screen by "Peg Bundy," also known by her real name – Katey
Sagal. Katey plays the mother of a new
"Bella" ( of "The Barden Bellas," the university's a
cappella group) and appears at the beginning and end of the movie. When I mentioned her appearance to my
husband, he reminded me that she is a bona fide singer, having done backup
vocals for Bette Midler as one of The Harlettes. Well, that works for me!
At any rate, the movie was – as the saying goes – "Aca
Awesome!" Once again, I set myself
up for disappointment because sequels often do that to a gal, but this was
funny. And may I just say that the guest
appearance by my Green Bay
So while Pitch Perfect
2 (and Katey) were indeed awesome, the same cannot be said for this recipe
for Middle Age Spread. Sigh.
Where to begin? How about with
the first thing I said above: I should
have made the meatloaf.
A lot of recipes in this book sounded really good, including
the meatloaf, but nooooooo, I just had to make this recipe for Middle Age Spread because, well, the
name says it all and just cracked me up.
This should have been an easy-peasy recipe had it not been for the Cuisinart turning all evil on me. Because "spread," the operative
word in that recipe moniker, was not what happened when I switched on my Cuisinart. Oh no—we're talking Middle Age
"Dip." Any resemblance of
shrimp, an ingredient that should have stayed chucky, was gone. And I tell you what, [working with] cream
cheese is turning out to be like dealing with a little kid: you turn your back on it for two seconds and
all hell breaks loose, namely, the "liquidation" of my recipe.
And then there's the nutmeg issue and we need to discuss
this because the more I look at this recipe, the more I am convinced that
"Peg" meant to say something like add a teaspoon of "Old Bay Seasoning" or "Cajun
seasonings" or something with a bit more zip. Because nutmeg? It does not go with shrimp. In fact, the thought of the two together
right now does not please me at all. But
I do have to give it credit for making me realize, all these years later, that
nutmeg is not a good spice match for me.
I don't like the taste of it, much in the same way as I don't like
Marjoram nor do I care for Tarragon. So
there – I have now hit the "spices I hate" trifecta.
So. Were I do to this
entire thing over again (not bloody likely), I would substitute that teaspoon
of nutmeg for Old Bay
Oh, and were I to make this again, you can bet your sweet
bippy that I will not turn my back on my Cuisinart
again. Will not.
Middle Age Spread –
Makes 2 ½ cups
½ pound cream cheese
3 cups cooked tiny shrimp (about 10 ounces)
½ cup sour cream
2 ½ tablespoons lemon juice
1 ½ teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Toss the cream cheese, shrimp, sour cream, lemon juice,
Worcestershire sauce, and nutmeg into a blender. *Sure you can use a food processor if you got
yourself one for your husband's birthday.
Run the machine until everything's mixed but you still have specks of
solid shrimp. Add as much Tabasco , salt and pepper
as you like.
*Funny she should mention gifts we got ourselves for our
husband's birthday: this year, my
husband and I were in NYC for his birthday and of course, no trip would be complete
without a stop at my favorite cookbook store, Bonnie Slotnick's. Andy joked then "So how many cookbooks
did Ann buy for your birthday, Andy?"
He knows me well.
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