Poultry for the Glum

NO cooking this week. Too busy at work. How many more days till Summer Vacation?

The Gallery of Regrettable Food. I stumbled on the book while browsing Amazon for books about 1950's lifestyles or I could have been looking for retro cookbooks, I don't remember. Anyway, I ended up buying a whole mess of books including, Retro Housewife(cute for the illustrations, but not a lot of substance), Googie Redux(awesome pics, haven't read much yet), Bless You're Heart Tramp(vert funny Southern gal) and The Gallery of Regrettable Food. This has got to be the most hilarious book I've come across in a while! I have nearly laughed myself silly over the last three nights reading it. It's the kind of book you could easily sit down and read in an hour or two, but I've purposely made myself read just a little at a time, so that I could make it last a bit longer. The book features lots of pictures of really odd and inedible looking food from1950's cookbooks. Such as a black and white picture of something that looks like it MIGHT be chicken wings sitting in a bowl of runny mashed potatoes...the heading for this particular section of the book is "Poultry for the Glum". The pictures are entertaining, in a weird sort of way, on their own, but add Lileks commentary and it's downright hysterical...Irreverant, gross, smart alek, and awful in an Avenue Q/Idiocrasy kind of way, but laugh out loud funny.

I know you aren't all going to run out and buy the book, but you might want to check out the author's website www.lileks.com You can find an earlier version of the Gallery of Regrettable Food in his "Institute of Official Cheer" section. And there's lots more to see in the institute section, my favorite ...Meet the Dayalets. Creepy yet hysterical. He also has a section on there somewhere of motel postcards from the 40's and 50's that are really cool. It's a fun website to visit if you have some time to kill. As for me, I'm going to go have some ice cream, park on the couch and read about disembodied 50's housewives and the scary food they cooked.

Remember, that's www.lileks.com