Retro Recipe: Mushroom Cocktail

I’m on a diet so everyone else should suffer too.

My husband suspects something is up when he sees my digital food scale out on the counter. At that point he knows the only thing to do is to slowly back out of the room, avoiding eye contact.

Once he attempted to placate me with chocolate. The nerve! 

I don’t know why mid-winter is diet season. I guess we are all so bloated and pasty after the holidays we think it will take us the five months until summer to whip our flabby heinies back into shape. And we are suffering anyway, so why not pour on another layer of misery.

I’m at the point where Jillian Michaels is leaving me recruiting messages on voice mail. She thinks she can have me bikini-ready by July. Of 2017.

I’ve been skipping Weight Watchers meetings so long, I didn’t know my local center had moved. I dusted off my little book where they track your weight and went back last week. Oh, the humanity.

Who knew my shoes were so heavy. This week remind me to wear lighter shoes. It was definitely the shoes.

I thought it would be fun to get some old diet cookbooks like my mom used to have. I remember her eating endless amounts of plain tuna, tomatoes on cottage cheese, and grapefruits. Also, there were savory gelatin entrees made in a copper mold shaped like a fish. Mmm, tasty and slimming.

But it worked. I remember the fattest women of my youth being slimmer than some of the average women of today. I never really knew any truly obese women back then.

In the 70s, my mom had a box of appetite-suppressing candies sadly named “Ayds”. I think their slogan was “Nothing makes you skinny like AYDS!” No wonder they went out of business by the 80s. 

Mrs. Bob Cummings is a naughty little minx.

The way they worked was by leaving a bad taste in your mouth. I wish I’d known that before I ate the whole box when I was three. I also ate all the Barney Rubbles out of the bottle of Flintstone vitamins. Most kids prefer the Dinos, but I have a soft spot for the underdog.

Speaking of things that look like they emerged from under a dog, my first retro recipe is Mushroom Cocktail.

Ladies, how can you resist this tempting appetizer? Imagine the looks from your friends when you serve at your next dinner party. That hussy Betty will be green. With envy, of course.

It takes minutes to prepare. What? You don’t have one sherbet, let alone six? Your family and friends must not have loved you enough to give you a complete set on the occasion of your wedding. Hang your head in shame!

You can just throw it in a bowl, you slattern.

My honest opinion–it was really tasty. The texture of the mushrooms was indeed very shrimp-like. I was shocked it was edible, but I guess you can slather cocktail sauce on anything and have it be delicious. The lettuce seemed a waste, but presentation is very important I suppose. I’m going to just wipe it off and use it for something else.

The takeaway from this for me is a pretty good little cocktail sauce recipe and fond memories of pretending mushrooms are shrimp.

I’ll be in jeggings in no time at this rate.