The Return of I Cook So You Don't Have To

aka Epic Celery Fail

I am a fan, and have linked before, the 1974 Weight Watchers Recipe Cards. There is something so compelling to me about how dieters used to eat and what they thought was acceptable.

It's been a long time since I first made an old recipe that couldn't possibly be edible, so naturally it was time to finally make one of these crazy 1974 recipes. Enter the Chilled Celery Log.



First you start with a 10 ounce package of frozen cauliflower. Cook it up and mash it. To that you're going to add a finely chopped green bell pepper, 2 tablespoons of chopped pimento, 1 tablespoon of chopped celery leaves, 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley, and a little salt and pepper.

Incidentally, one of the things I love about these old recipes are some of the more antiquated ingredients. I rarely use pimento these days, and about the only time I eat it is when it's shoved in a green olive (though I'd much rather have one stuffed with blue cheese or a clove of garlic, and I'd like it even more resting in a martini glass). But I digress.

You're going to heat up 4 cups of water and 4 chicken bouillon cubes. Take a bunch of celery and trim off both ends of the stalks. Simmer the celery stalks in the broth for 10 minutes. Yes, that's right, we're cooking celery.

Take that limp gummy celery and fill the ribs with the cauliflower stuff. Here's what mine looked like:



You're supposed to arrange the celery stalks back into the shape of the original bunch and tie it with string. Good luck with that unless you have many hands. I opted to roll my stalks up tightly in saran wrap instead, and in so doing could already tell this wasn't going to resemble the original recipe. It just wasn't...solid enough. I made quite a mess getting it to the log stage.



Refrigerate this bad boy for 45 minutes. What you're then supposed to do is cut the log into 1-inch slices and serve on lettuce leaves. What happens in reality is that you remove the saran wrap, and everything falls out into a mess.



But you're a trooper, so you don't let that stop you. You'll slice that celery up into smaller pieces and eat it, figuring how bad can it be?



The answer to this became the name of this image. Stupid, tasteless mess. It's not bad, it's not offensive. It just...tastes like celery. Chewy, boiled celery. I like cauliflower. I like green pepper. Hell, I even like celery. Whatever flavor any of those ingredients had somehow has disappeared. This is exactly what you'd think of when you think of diet food.

So now, I'm wondering how to make this stuff palatable. Dice it up real fine, add some soy sauce and mix it into rice? Cover it with a load of hot sauce? Right now it's shoved into the back of my refrigerator, waiting.