Just add water.

When inspiration palls, what's a Horrifying Chef to do?

Run this blog through the Dialectizer, of course, choosing the oh-so-appropriate, Muppety-fresh Swedish Chef dialect.

Enjoy, and bork bork bork!

Talk about cheesy!

Tonight I felt too lazy to get out of the extremely comfortable armchair I'm sitting in, so to find a topic for today's post, I did a search for "cream of mushroom soup." And can you believe it--this was the first recipe that came up.

It just goes to show you that whenever you go looking for your heart's desire, you shouldn't go any further than your own back yard.

And now with a tip of the hat to the lovely and talented Judy Garland, I bring you:

Broccoli-Rice Cheesy Bake

INGREDIENTS:
2 (10 ounce) packages frozen chopped broccoli
3 cups instant rice (I use 3 cups of plain rice, which cooked is about 6 cups. It's a lot.)
1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of chicken soup
1 1/4 cups water
1 (16 ounce) package processed American cheese, cubed
salt and pepper to taste

DIRECTIONS:
Cook broccoli and rice according to package directions. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
In a medium saucepan over low heat, mix cream of mushroom soup, cream of chicken soup, and 1 1/4 cups water. Gradually stir in cheese until melted. Be careful that the cheese doesn't burn.
In a large mixing bowl, combine broccoli, rice, soup and cheese mixture. Season with salt and pepper. Pour mixture into a 9x13 inch baking dish.
Bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes, until bubbly and lightly brown.

---
This is almost Horrifying Foodstuffs nirvana. I mean--two cans of condensed soup? Not to mention instant rice and processed cheese?

However, I'm sorry to say that this recipe's purity was sullied by the inclusion of frozen chopped brocolli. Oh well ... nothing's perfect. It's a fallen world we live in, after all ... but at least I can take comfort in the fact that the brocolli was frozen.

Also, the one and a quarter cups of water? Let's hope it's polluted.

How the mighty have fallen.

If you're like me (although, luckily for you, you probably aren't) you don't just have a perverse fascination with Junior League cookbooks and recipes involving heavy artillery, like condensed cream of mushroom soup or Cool-Whip™, you also have a perverse fascination with awful-sounding recipes that you've seen over and over and over on boxes of packaged foods. You grew up reading the backs of cereal boxes, and you got into the habit of reading boxes. You spent years reading any box or can you saw. You started to wonder about these recipes you kept seeing--the Dream Whip cake, the Campbell's Tomato Soup cake, and most of all, the Ritz Cracker Mock Apple Pie. What are they actually like?

Yes, I've thought long and hard about back-of-the-box recipes, but never--before today--did I have the nerve to actually cook one of them.

This afternoon I wanted to make cookies--without having to run out to the supermarket to buy any ingredients. I rummaged around the baking supplies cupboard to see what I had on hand. To my surprise, I found a package of Nestle's Butterscotch flavored chips. "Where the hell did these come from?" I wondered silently to myself.

And then it struck me. I could make Oatmeal Scotchies!

Maybe you haven't been as fixated on Oatmeal Scotchies as I've been some people have. But for me many people, Oatmeal Scotchies have been the subject of intense interest.

As the lovely and eloquent Caryn puts it:

"One of our families favorite cookies. I often bake these to take to different events and am always asked for the recipe since they are such a different cookie from the standard cookie."

(By the way, did you know that eating butterscotch morsels kills brain cells? Or that butterscotch morsels consume 48 times their weight in excess punctuation marks? But I digress.)

So anyway, today I fulfilled a long-cherished dream. I baked a batch of Oatmeal Scotchies. I creamed the butter, I zapped the brown sugar to get it soft enough to pack into the measuring cups, I used organic vanilla extract--I did everything right.

Then it was time to add the butterscotch morsels. I opened the bag. They were a bizarre orange color. I put one in my mouth anyway. Ew. The taste was very artificial and vaguely boozey, and the texture was both revoltingly greasy and tongue-coatingly waxy.

I realized what butterscotch morsels taste like: they taste like a Butter Rum Lifesaver enrobed in a tasty layer of Crisco.

I baked the cookies anyway. After all, I had gotten that far. But, as the poet asks, "what happens to a dream deferred?" And I answer, "it vomits up a bunch of cookies."

I took the pan out of the oven. They. looked. like. dog. vomit. See?

Thank your lucky stars that shot was out of focus. Trust me; you don't want to get too close to these things.

And the weird thing was--the recipe actually yielded more cookies than it said it would. When does that ever happen?

Here--take one. These are some of the choicest of the batch, because there were lumps of brown sugar in them. So they give the best technicolor lumps-of-dog-hurl effect of all.
Extreme close-up!!!!!!!


Run away! RUN AWAY!!!!!!!!

p.s. Guess what? My husband loved them.