Vegetarians Anonymous (Best Of)
It’s the Pitts
It may come as a surprise to many regular readers of this column to learn that such a serious writer as myself has written two cookbooks. (Now out of print to the delight of serious cooks everywhere.) One of my cookbooks, The I Hate Chicken Cookbook, was actually my second best selling book. And I can’t even toast bread!
Go into any bookstore, if you can still find one, and you’ll notice the cookbook section is one of the largest sections in the store. You can find everything from Anorexics on a Diet, The Cannibal’s Cookbook and the The Oat Bran Cookbook, for excellent bathroom reading.
I’ve noticed lately a new and disgusting trend: there is now a plethora of new vegetarian cookbooks filled with quick, easy and “cruelty free” meatless dishes. I even found one called, “I Love Animals and Brocoli Cookbook.” Unlike my own cookbooks, these new cookbooks are filled with recipes such as un-tuna sandwiches, black bean soup, curried chickpeas and garbanzo bean burgers. Yum, yum! I got gas and indigestion just reading the titles.
Most of these vegetarian cookbooks are trying to make a political statement rather than make good vittles. Most are written by well known Hollywood animal rightists or greenies. But I must admit, there’s a certain temptation to write my own vegetarian cookbook as a way of cashing in on the current craze and I’ve already got my first recipe for my all new “Vegetarian’s Anonymous All Meat Cookbook.”
I’ll share it with you now to tickle your tastebuds and get you prepared to shell out big bucks for a bad book. It’s a recipe for “Vegetarian Fruitcake,” which I admit is redundant but I am sure you will enjoy it as much as I did. You can find the following ingredients at your favorite health food store.
• Four pounds of fermented grapes harvested by Union Labor. (If unavailable you can substitute with two gallons of cheap red wine).
• Three pints of vanilla extract.
• One jar of maraschino cherries.
• One pound each of organically grown pitted dates, chopped nuts, grated lemon peel, dried apricots and kumquats soaked in a light rum sauce.
• A sack of unbleached flour. Not the self rising kind.
• Two eggs from a range-raised consenting chicken. Do not beat the eggs or the animal rights folks will get upset.
• Two or three quarts of brandy.
Cooking instructions: Preheat the oven to 325 being careful not to get the liquid ingredients too close to the flame. Do not use a microwave oven, because it makes politically incorrect radioactive waves.
Taste the brandy to make sure it is of premium quality. Get a large mixing bowl down from the top shelf and rest. Once again sample the brandy by drinking three overflowing cups. In the large mixing bowl blend together all the fruit. Mix with a screwdriver... the one containing orange juice and potato squeezings.
At a slow speed pour one level cup of vanilla extract into a glass. Blend and fold into your mouth as required.
Toss the fruit out the back door and curry the nuts out to the trash.
Test the cheap red wine for impurities. Fold in a teablespoon of flower, sniff what’s left of the vanilla extract, add a little thugar and wix mel. Grease the oven and turn on the pan... I mean turn on the oven and grease the pan. Now pur the whole mess into the pan and gook, excuse me, I mean cook. Finish off what’s left of the brandy and bo to ged.