Anger Burger

I have a lot of sympathy for cookbook writers, if you can believe it.  It can’t be easy to compile a couple dozen recipes and have them all be interesting or reliable.  In the several years I’ve written Anger Burger I can maybe – maybe – construct a cookbook of recipes that aren’t outright stolen from other writers and bloggers.  And theme?  The Anger Burger cookbook would best be described as a tectonic collision of ethnic misuse.

But all that being said, there’s one cookbook  that has repeatedly made 2011′s Top Ten cookbook lists, and it’s a book so disappointing that I was angry that I wasted calories carrying it home from the library.

Pam Anderson’s Perfect One-Dish Dinners has great range.  We have:

• Curiously banal Perfect Spinach-Artichoke Dip that is made “perfect” by the substitution of low-fat cream cheese and low-fat mayonnaise for the full-flavor versions.

• Hilariously questionable Indian Six Layer Dip consisting of layered curried sour cream, cheddar cheese (?!), yogurt chutney, flaked sweetened coconut, peanuts and green onions.

• Guaranteed super-flop Braised Salmon, which has you boil carrots, shallots and potatoes in unseasoned broth until tender, remove them to a platter kept in a warm oven, then simmer salmon fillets and asparagus in the same unseasoned broth until cooked all the way through, removed to the platter with the vegetables, and then watering down the broth and heating it in the microwave to pour over your totally fucking bland and overcooked fish and vegetables.  THIS IS PERFECT IF YOU’VE RECENTLY BEEN HOSPITALIZED FOR STOMACH SURGERY.

• Roasted Almond and Cream Cheese-Stuffed Green Olives, which is a cocktail olive that you remove the pimento center from and replace with a little piece of cream cheese and an almond and then serve on a platter.  Which, you know.  Okay.  But It’s not like I’d ever put this into a cookbook, which is pretty much the same thing.

There are plenty of normal-sounding main dishes, but they are all just that: normal sounding.  They’re on the whole blander and plainer than I cook, though I appreciate having solid recipes to personalize.  But I don’t need to be told how to make enchiladas from store-bought enchilada sauce and pre-cooked chicken.  And I don’t think anyone in my family would eat a stew of cubed pork, sweet potatoes and prunes.  And I realize that I should back off and let the good recipes stand on their own, but I keep coming back to wondering how this made more than one Top Ten list.  But people love it.  They repeatedly describe it as “simple” and “doable,” which I can’t argue with.  And lord knows I respect a woman that refers to a pan of macaroni and cheese as a “complete dish”.  But I’m once again reminded of how entirely I am not the intended readership of the cookbook industry, and that makes me grumpy.