Behold the power of cheese....

...Cream Cheese that is! Boy Howdy, do I love me some cream cheese, and Mara is definitely a card carrying member of the fan club as well. But, friends, this was a lot of it. a lot a lot a lot. Almost every layer of this delightful sandwich loaf had some cream cheese in it, and as if that wasn't enough, it was FROSTED in it. Why? Why ask why. That's how the recipe was written, and who are we to argue? Although I do question the sanity and sobriety of recipe writers of the 1970's.

Basically, this is a large "loaf" comprised of salmon salad, egg salad and two other cream cheese based spreads.

** Okay, I realize that this post has been forever in the offing, and for that, I am sorry. This was the last recipe that Laura and I did together, (tear, sniff sniff) as we have both moved far far away from each other. I went back above the Mason-Dixon and have settled in Rochester, NY. Laura is now back with the fam in Fayetteville, NC. We are both doing ok; are well loved, well fed, gainfully employed and anxiously anticipating the end of the Bush Administration. Our glorious friend and self proclaimed "Polyester Gourmet Commissioner" let us use her kitchen to make this monstrosity, I mean, this Sandwich Loaf, and I tell ya- we had a time. She wishes to remain nameless, and I will respect that. After all, we do have thousands of fans that read this site daily, and it's only a matter of time before one of them becomes crazy and tries to kill us all. So again I shall beg your forgiveness, and I do promise that sooner than later Laura and I will begin to make more recipes and update this blog. Enjoy Darlings.**

**Side note #2. So, I realized as I started writing this up that I don't remember all that happened. See, that is the trick to this whole 'make something, blog about said something' - you have to do it quickly so you won't forget. So, I'm just going to do my best. sorry. Also, the formating is really wonky and I have no idea how to fix it. So, you know.**

Mara enjoys making ingredient piles, so we let her. This is a picture of it.

Pretty Cool, Huh? Notice, 4 bricks of cream cheese are going into this bitch. Repeat after me folks "Yummy"!

Mara got right to work cutting the crusts off of the bread, not because we are those annoying types of freaks that can't eat crust, but the recipe mandated it. Remember, we don't question the recipe.

She's quite the cutter, so please, as a public service announcement to all of you faithful PG readers, if you see her in a dark ally just run for your damn life. Let the story of old "one eye" Jake be a lesson to you all.



Here is Mara chopping onions, she chopped celery too but I accidentally erased that picture. I think you can imagine what that must look like. I find closing my eyes really tightly helps when imagining.

Okay, in my humble opinion, the salmon salad was the grossest part of the whole thing to make. A) the can of salmon was icky. B) you have to fish (pardon the pun) the bones and junk out of the can of salmon. C) ick.

Yes, those are some of the bones and junk I was referring too.

I Herby proclaim you "Bowl of Disgustingness", which I will now add lemon juice to.

And the celery that Mara so expertly chopped.

Nice team work, eh?

And lo and behold, Salmon Salad. If you've never had salmon salad, it's tuna salad, only with salmon. No way, right? I know!

We didn't make the egg salad. No where on the recipe card did it specify that we had to make it. So, since we had spent a little too much time at the pool that day, we picked some up at the handy dandy Kernersville Harris Teeter. But, we did take a picture of it. Here it is. Notice the expert angles and subtle back lighting. Photo Journalism degree, here I come.

So, I will now begin with the cream cheese section. I would like to reiterate how much cream cheese is in this god forsaken loaf. I would also like to reiterate that I may be cream cheese's #1 fan, so trust me when I say "holy too much Batman".

I'm getting the shakes just looking at this picture. Mom please make it stop.

One of the spreads was a simple green olive and pimento mixture. Quite good when spread inside celery, so why not in the loaf? Green olives, man, what can't they do? They are amazing in everything. Think about it, what would macaroni salad be without the green olive? Dirty Martinis? Pumpkin Pie? All made better with the green olive.

The second had nuts, celery, and maybe onion or something? I'm sorry, I don't have the recipe card, that is safe in Mara's house down in Fayetteville, NC. (Coincidentally, that is my birthplace) (But not Mara's.) (I don't know why I shared that. I guess I just feel the love and trust here on this blog, with you my blog readers. Love you.)

Okay, So.... here are the pictures of all the bowls, ready to go. From the Left.... From the Right.... Beautiful daahhling....

The construction of the beast wasn't too bad. We placed a layer of bread down, and spread the salmon salad on 'er.

Then we just pretended it was a yummy yummy lasagna, and started layering more bread and more layers of sandwich fillings.

What was I wearing? I don't know.

So, after assembling this monstrosity, we needed to frost it. So, into the cream cheese (gag, more) was added green food coloring.

We were also instructed, by the recipe card, to color some of the cheese yellow, to accent and make pretty the sandwich loaf. See what I mean about questioning the sobriety of recipe writers in the 1970's? Unless they too understood the power of green olives and had a few dirty martini's whilst writing this recipe.... geniuses. Brilliant.

Alright, let's decorate. HHeeeyyyyy.

A

After I finished frosting, Mara took over and worked her decorating magic.

Lovely, No? We all took a nice slice of the loaf, took a deep breath, signed our living will and took a bite.

Now, honestly, the salmon salad? Good! The egg salad? Good! The two cream cheese spreads? Good! But put them all together, and frost it with cream cheese..... BAD. It's just too much. Ick.



Alas, that is the end of the Polyester Gourmet recipes folks. The project is far from being over, I hope to continue making more of these lovely recipes, as does Mara. We'll just do them from separate kitchens, in separate states.

Thanks for reading, hope to see you soon!

I know....its a long time coming. So we give you two for the price of one.

** This post is not "finished" in a sense. It has been sitting here in our unpublished blog section since August and I'm sick of it sitting there. So, I'm going to post it and let that be that. Really, the only thing of note that you should know about these two recipes is that they tasted fine, the beef dish tasted like Hamburger Helper without having to use a box of Hamburger Helper, and the green beans weren't as good as the usual green bean casserole, but still weren't bad. We both ate and were full. The most important thing that happened that night is we obtained our first Polyester Gourmets injury. That's right, Laura burned her finger, and screamed like a bitch, which in turn scared the crap out of me and I think I screamed too. My cat was very annoyed and confused. Now, I leave it to you to follow the pictures and fill in for yourself what happened throughout the night. much love - Ashley**


First, let me say that both Argie and I apologize profusely for the extended absence of a recipe. However, we feel that we had good reason. We actually did BOTH of these recipes a long time ago, so you'll have to forgive us if some of the details are a bit fuzzy. We've both been on vacation, both been readying to move to new cities( more about that later) and have been giving our notice to work and interviewing. (Pray that we both find something good in our respective new locations!)


Secondly, I'm apologizing beforehand for the poor quality of the pictures. I'm not a professional photographer, with professional equipment. We're lucky I've moved to a digital camera.

First things first....the sour cream. Let me just tell you, I don't know what it is about the stuff....but the people in the 70s loved this stuff. Practically every recipe has some sour cream in it. Which I guess is better than mayonnaise....but still not great.


So we mixed the butter and the sour cream together.











Now, its time for the cream of chicken soup.

If by "Budget" you mean TASTELESS...

mmmmm... tasteless cooked beef.

Really, this wasn't a bad dish, I ate it happily and was left feeling full. It did it's job. But this is Not the kind of recipe that inspires Ina Garten to write cook books.

We started out shredding the carrot and potato, and then chopped the scallion and onion. My guess is that their intentions were that the carrot, potato and cottage cheese would be used as some sort of filler and would enable the cook to use less of the expensive meat. However, when you shred it so small, it doesn't take up much room. Further, it's so small that its taste is lost in the dish. Honestly, crumbled saltines would have made a better filler.

I am happy to report that during all of this chopping, we didn't once sing "She's chopping broccoli", for which I think we should be commended. (Yay Us. Giggity)

Into the bowl with the carrot, potato, onion, scallion, an egg and a mess of cottage cheese. Nothing says "this is gonna be a great dinner" like gross looking orange stuff.

Maybe adding the meat will make it look less disgusting?

Wrong again.

Okay, into the dish, into the oven, cross your fingers and let's go watch the new Netflix documentary that came today. (We watched "Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price" by Robert Greenwald; it was quite good and I highly recommend it to you.)

WARNING: The following contains graphic images that may be disturbing or offensive to some viewers

Viewer discretion is advised.

We took the cottage cheese meatloaf out of the oven and really, the first thing, the only thing, that we could notice was the shocking amount of grease that was pooled around the edges. Now, we're a couple of girls who don't mind grease. In fact, give me a greasy hamburger or steak and cheese sandwich any day of the week. But this is ridiculous to be quite honest.

Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion. Grease is the way we are feeling...

We were looking at it and figuring out how we could impress upon you the amount of grease floating around this mess.....when Mara thought showing the depth of the grease would be a good idea.

Plus there's the added benefit of soaking out some of the Fluid O' Fat.

And yet it wasn't quite enough...our meatloaf was still swimming in the stuff. It was sort of like taking a Tylenol after a bear gnaws your arm off; right idea, wrong drug.

So, Mara then suggested we get out the turkey baster, and end this madness once and for all.

And you know we measured it. Yes folks, 2/3 of a cup. Say it with me, "niiiice".

Okay, grease crisis averted, and we are back to eating the cottage cheese meatloaf. Really, it didn't taste bad, it just didn't really taste. It was literally as if we put the meat in a pan and cooked it through with some chopped onion. You couldn't taste any of the scallion, and it really could have used some garlic or any kind of spice really. And it wasn't really that budget conscious either, it was about $3 cheaper than the fantastic Swedish meatballs we had last week. Save your money folks, buy some Ramen...its cheaper, tastier and resembles actual food.

Stay tuned...more next week. We will try to have our first guest commentator and if anyone has any requests for a particular type of food, we may entertain entertaining them.