Recipes

Guys, it’s time! Ancient Holiday Appetizers, Part 9! In this series, I dig through old cookbooks and recipe mags searching for edible Christmas treasure. Sometimes the dishes are best left in the past, but more often than not, they’re just as good now as they were back when every jacke

I love everything about November. The weather, the colors, the food, and especially that abstract low-fi vibe that just begs us to laze. It’s hard to get November wrong. You can celebrate constantly and it’s perfect, or you can do absolutely nothing and it’s still perfect. November i

Time for my most important article of the year: Ancient Holiday Appetizers! Every December, I dig through old cookbooks looking for edible holiday thrills, no matter how out of style. This has been my favorite Christmas tradition of the past decade, full stop. I couldn’t imagine letting

Today I made Boris Karloff’s guacamole. No, really: Some of you should be familiar with this 1960s newspaper clipping, where Boris Karloff — yes, as in Frankenstein’s Monster — shared his recipe for guacamole. The recipe is pretty “web famous,” and I’m hardly the firs

If you’re gonna survive the 2020 Halloween season, you’ll need to make your own fun. Many of the things we formerly relied on will be closed, or altered to the point of pointlessness. It’s a DIY-or-die situation. Here’s an idea: Cook spooky stuff! Buy one of those overpriced recipe

No, really, it’s a thing. Thousands have done it. I don’t know how I went so long without hearing about ROASTED STARBURST, but now that I have, there’s no going back. I will never eat another fruit chew without burning it first. I can’t claim credit for this tutorial. I followed th

There I was, paging through an old Nabisco cookbook, as one does when they’re on the 735th day of quarantine. When I spotted an entry for what Nabisco called Very Beary Peanut Brittle, I knew that everything was about to change, and change big. It was a common (if simplified) recipe for

For the seventh consecutive year, here’s a new edition of Ancient Holiday Appetizers. Let’s make some weird food, dudes! If you’ve been with this series from the start, you know that I usually pull recipes from old cookbooks. This year, I thought I’d try something different. Y’al

There I was, on our weird couch, lazily paging through the December 1978 issue of Family Circle. (Shut up. It’s how I decompress.) I love those old holiday magazines. Many are technically before my time, but not really, because my mother kept a stack of them in our old kitchen cabinets.

In Garfield’s Thanksgiving, Grandma saves Jon’s disastrous date with Liz by covertly preparing Thanksgiving dinner. It’s the best part of the TV special, which should go without saying since Grandma Arbuckle is the best part of anything in which she participates. While Jon entertains

It’s pumpkin season! If you don’t have one already, surely it’s on your radar. So I’m here to make a preemptive pitch: When you carve that sucker, DO NOT throw away the seeds. Instead, roast those mofos. Roasted pumpkin seeds are fantastic, and with a bit of extra work, you can mak

If you missed the news, Pumpkin Spice Spam is a real thing that really exists. It went on sale this past Monday, and sold out in mere hours — partially thanks to the many resellers who are now trying to flip goddamned SPAM on eBay. I set an alarm to make sure I wouldn’t miss

I’m going to teach you how to make Halloween Chex Mix. Yep, in the middle of June. Above is a print ad from an October 1988 issue of some random magazine. Homemade Chex Mix is traditionally more of a winter thing, but thanks to this recipe for a “Hot ‘n Devilish” version, you’re

This was a good day. The weather was nice, I won a cheap eBay auction, and oh yeah, I made VINCENT PRICE’S SUPPER CASSEROLE. Back in 1977, Vincent Price shared this wonderfully weird recipe on behalf of Creamettes Macaroni. Price never shied away from paid endorsements, but since he was

Wellp, it’s time for my favorite Dino Drac feature. Get set for more weird holiday appetizers! As is now an annual tradition, I dug into my vast collection of ancient recipe books, searching for snacks that’ve fallen out of fashion. I’ve been doing that for longer than I’ve even ha

You know how I bombard you with weird appetizer recipes every Christmas season? I’d like to start doing the same for Halloween. You can’t stop me. I’ve been collecting these little Halloween recipe books for longer than you’ve been alive. They’re placed near the registers in ever

Well, it’s that time again. Time to make the weird old appetizers. I grew up surrounded by recipe books that were published many years before I was born. They fascinated me as a kid, and they still do now. Not every dish is appetizing, but there was such a colorfully crude artistry to it

Here’s my recipe for stuffed mushrooms, which has gotten a surprising number of requests. Like at least three. I make these for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, because my habits are my comforts and if you fuck with them you die. (And also because it’s one of the few dishes my fa

Time to break out the super old cookbooks again! As longtime readers know, I never let a holiday season slip by without trying out some old and iffy recipes. These are typically plucked from the pages of ‘60s and ‘70s cookbooks, back when chicken drumsticks looked like Flintstones food

Let’s talk about artichokes. Many of you do not fully comprehend artichokes, and that’s understandable. They’re vegetables with fifteen asterisks, and they look like tiny sleeping Audrey IIs. Hell, even I don’t fully comprehend them. Nevertheless, in my family, no Thanksgiving or C

Well, here’s my recipe for Thanksgiving stuffing — a perfect fit for this ‘80s/’90s nostalgia blog. Stuffing is my only must-have Thanksgiving dish. The turkey is okay and I love a good artichoke, but all I really need is the stuffing. Piles of it. Enough to build a decoy Matt

What a ridiculously great time to be a Ghostbusters fan. Even aside from the new movie, the toys are starting to trickle into stores, and they’re all such must-buys that I’m already testing out shit faces in response to May’s AmEx bill. Then there’s Ecto Cooler’s return, now conf

I know everyone’s giddy over the return of French Toast Crunch, but don’t forget about this one! Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch is the second of General Mills’s two new holiday-themed cereals. I covered Holiday Sprinkles Cookie Crisp a few weeks ago, and as great as it was, I think this s

Every holiday season, I’m inspired to dig through my ancient recipe books, searching for meals and appetizers that haven’t been in fashion since before I was born. Why? I DON’T KNOW. No matter how this odd passion took form, it’s been a part of my holiday celebrations for as long

“It’s the first day of summer” is both the truth and the opening line to my debut rap single, I Can’t Stand To Sit. I thought we’d celebrate the shift in seasons with the most summery thing imaginable: Bamm-Bamm Rubble beating the shit out of cereal. New from Post, it’s Pebbles