Recipes Of The Damned–July 3, 2000: Chicken Taco Wedges
From Come & Eat! Great Food For Busy Families, Pillsbury, November 1999.
This booklet is the 1999 holiday edition of a Pillsbury circular that appears regularly at supermarket checkstands among the tabloids and booklets about using astrology to lose weight and choose your lottery numbers. It has a bit more value than these other types of publication, since most of the recipes provided are edible and more or less nutritious.
“Come & Eat!” bills itself as a resource for busy families (read: busy moms), aiming to “help you meet the challenge of preparing daily meals and put some fun back into cooking.” You’d have to be an idiot not to figure out for yourself that the other major goal of this publication is to encourage you to buy more Pillsbury products. Breakfasts feature Hungry Jack pancake mix, Pillsbury crescent rolls, and Green Giant creamed corn (not all in the same recipe, thankfully); lunches include Progresso soups and Old El Paso salsa; desserts make use of Pillsbury cake mixes and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. None of these are necessarily bad things in and of themselves, and I’m the last person to deny you refrigerator crescent rolls if you don’t have time to raise and knead your own. But the recipes tend toward the bland and salty for the most part, and this is particularly unfortunate for those items that aren’t that hard to make somewhat better with fresher vegetables, actual tortillas, or Boboli or other prepared pizza bases instead of PIE CRUST, for heaven’s sake!
When I was flipping through the booklet a few months ago, this recipe caught my eye because of the use of pie crust in the place of flour or corn tortillas. The rationale for this substitution is that “little hands can manage these pie crust shells better than hard shell tacos.” Maybe so, but little hands can probably manage steamed flour tortillas too, and they’ll taste better in combination with chicken and salsa. Upon reopening the booklet to prepare today’s column, I was shocked and amazed to discover that mayonnaise is an ingredient in this misguided concoction. Now I could understand sour cream—but mayonnaise? Good grief! But the true highlight was this little blurb at the bottom of the page:
Did you know that salsa counts as a vegetable? The tomatoes and peppers are ripe with vitamins C and A. Use salsa as a dip for vegetables or baked chips and encourage healthy helpings on tacos.
And I thought we had come so far from the benighted days of the Reagan administration, when government officials claimed, without even giggling audibly, that ketchup and pickles counted as vegetables in measuring the nutritional merits of school lunches. (This, of course, was before we gave up entirely and handed responsibility for school lunch, perhaps the only reliably balanced meal of the day for low-income kids, over to Pizza Hut and Burger King, whose attitude toward nutrition has always been rather accommodating of saturated fats and rather cavalier about leafy greens.) You heard it here, folks; salsa is a vegetable! I don’t mean to be unkind; salsa is obviously more nutritious than ketchup. The jar of a rival brand of salsa that I have in front of me lists tomato, fresh onions, bell peppers, and garlic among its ingredients, any one of which probably puts it ahead of ketchup. But it’s not quite the same “serving of vegetables” as, say, a large scoop of grilled squash or a tossed salad, now is it? The rest of the suggested menu doesn’t help us much, either, proposing tortilla chips and cheese on the side and a dessert of pineapple slices with caramel ice cream topping.
I don’t mean to suggest that the only valid cooking steps for a busy family require preparing everything from scratch and spending hours over the stove. But I do think that when using prepared or convenience foods, one should try to use the best and most appropriate prepared or convenience foods available, which includes using tortillas as tortillas and pie crusts as pie crusts and not the other way around. There are prepared pizza crusts out there that will support your pepperoni and olives much better than a pie shell; there are inexpensive tubs of sour cream available to mix with your salsa; there are zip-top bags of pre-cut and tossed salads. Heck, maybe Pillsbury even makes some.
Chicken Taco Wedges
1 (15-oz.) pkg. Pillsbury Refrigerated Pie Crusts
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup Old El Paso Salsa
1 cup cubed cooked chicken
1 cup chopped tomato
1/4 cup sliced green onions
4 oz. (1 cup) shredded Cheddar cheese
Step 1. Heat oven to 450 F. Unfold pie crusts; place on ungreased large cookie sheet. Press out fold lines.
Step 2. In small bowl, combine mayonnaise and salsa; mix well. Spread mayonnaise mixture evenly over each pie crust. Sprinkle half of each crust with half of all remaining ingredients. Fold untopped half of each crust over filling; do not seal.
Step 3. Bake at 450 F for 14 to 18 minutes or until golden brown. Cut into wedges to serve. If desired, top with shredded lettuce, sliced ripe olives, sour cream and additional salsa.
From Come & Eat! Great Food For Busy Families, Pillsbury, November 1999.
Side Dishing
It’s reader mail time again. The kind reader who let us in on Sunshine Hot Dog Surprise sent three more recipes my way, all from Better Homes and Gardens Meals in Minutes. “Bologna Bake” (of which our correspondent says, “I don’t know if it’s “damned” per se…but it’s definitely scared : )”) includes hard-cooked eggs, mayonnaise, and potato chips; “Sweet and Sour Tuna” includes chicken boullion, margarine, soy sauce, and chow mein noodles. (Of course to me both recipes are flawed because they contain bologna and tuna, respectively—but I recognize that I’m being too judgmental here.) The winner is the fruit salad dressing, however; it mixes ice cream and mayonnaise. Our correspondent concludes with a comment on the “clone” recipes:
I agree about the copycat recipes…why would I take two hours to make silly little Twinkie molds or make homemade Baby Ruths when a plain sponge cake without the mystery icing is much more delicious and Baby Ruths are three for $1 at Rite Aid? Makes me think of Martha Stewart’s recipe for Homemade Girl Scout Thin Mints. Shell out $4 and help the girl get a cookie patch!
Reminding us again that there are plenty of good reasons to let someone else do the labor.
Another reader was intrigued by the recipe for Deep Fried Field Rat, noting:
The idea of eating rat didn’t in and of itself send me running. It was the part about letting it dry, garlic covered, in direct sunlight, for a day. Ugh. And double-ugh. I have eaten squirrel before, and found it quite palatable. On the vegetarian side, day lilies—the tubers and the petals—are quite good.
We don’t often consider how many perfectly edible foods are around us in the United States, foods that we don’t turn to because they don’t fit into the European dietary system. Day lilies, camas, and wapato are just a few examples of foods that kept Native Americans healthy and happy for centuries but that we don’t give a second thought. In her book The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, Sallie Tisdale notes wryly that European settlers and explorers arrived in a New World overflowing with nourishing but unfamiliar plants and animals, and “almost starved” when faced with such alien foodstuffs.
Another reader shares the results of her recent web search for actual recipes, providing a link for “Pasta From Hell.” Be warned: the name is more apt than you might think. As our correspondent notes: “I was expecting something devilishly hot (lots of red pepper flakes, for example) but what I found was something that sounds quite revolting, combining goodies like pineapple, cilantro, bananas and red bell pepper with fettucine. The killer ingredient for me, though, is ‘4 T finely chopped habaneros or 6 oz. inner beauty.’…The need for inner beauty does hint, though, that maybe this recipe comes out looking (and tasting?) like something only a mother could love.” Follow the link and you’ll realize I don’t make this stuff up.
Finally, a regular reader tries to defend Peanut Butter Rarebit. “Haven’t you ever eaten a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich?!? I don’t even like pb and j, but grilled with salty potato chips…yum!” I’ll grant that this sounds interesting, though I haven’t quite dared to try fixing it myself. But I also think it sounds more appealing than viscous, gooey peanut butter sauce poured over toast. Still, I suppose it can’t hurt to repeat that this is a purely subjective column, and you may like the stuff I find frightening. Trust your own judgment.
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