Stegosaurus Milk Shakes & Indian Spiced Walnuts

 I am pretty sure this cookbook could not have had a longer title. Favorite Brand Name Best Loved Recipes of All Time doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  I picked this cookbook because I thought it would be one of the harder ones for me to find something to make.  With a name like Favorite Brand Name Best Loved Recipes of All Time, you must think I am a little bit off my rocker. If they are best loved, then my problem would be too many recipes to choose from, right? Not the case for me. Best Loved, is not the part that I fear, it was more of the Brand Name.  When I think of brand names, I think of preservatives and additives and artificial sweeteners.

A little over half a decade ago I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Macular Degeneration in my right eye. It was a scary time for me, and I thought I was going to go blind over night.  After the panic wore off, I sat down and did some research on what I could do to slow down my inevitable doom. The simple answer was diet and exercise.  Diet required me to cut out MSG, artificial sweetener and high fructose corn syrup from my regular eating habits.  It is a lot harder than it sounds, and makes buying name brand anything a question of morals. Do I like my vision over how much I want something mindless to eat? The answer was pretty easy.  I like ability to see the world around me, so mindless food is off limits. Their is a sad truth that a lot of name brand recipes will have one of the three things I shouldn't eat in it.

Now with that said, you are probably wondering why I even own this cookbook.  Before I was diagnosed, my mother had given me this cookbook for Christmas. I kept it because it was a gift and I had the greatest hope that I would use it, and even if I never did, it would still make me think of my mother and how much we both love to talk about what we are cooking and what recipes we are trying.
With all of this said, I decided to be brave and take a crack this book and hope that I don't go blind in one eye.

  I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a bunch of recipes for Lipton or and Nestle and of other name brands that I have heard of but don't eat, but that wasn't all that was encompassed inside.  They  had recipes from the Walnut Marketing Board and Canned Food Information Counsel, plus countless others. I have never even heard of either of those organizations until now. With the power of the Internet, I found out that one of the organizations is still in existence and the other is known for a sexy robot advertisement. You can take a moment to figure out which is which.  I found two recipes that I would simple to make and sounded interesting and didn't take a lot of time and several other that I thumb market to check back later.  There was also a surprising amount of food trivia in the cookbook that I had not counted on, and made each page interesting to read.

The beautiful thing is that it didn't specify a brand, but more of a product. Meaning that I could easily find something that I could eat without my inner monologue going off about how I will never be able to read again, because I went blind off of poor eating choices.

In less than a half hour I accomplished a tasty nutty snack that used up some of my over flowing stock of cumin, and required no shopping at all, and a milk shake named after an extinct reptile that would be offended if you tried to milk it.  The Indian Spiced Walnuts turned out well, and the taste tests on my husbands and my friends proved favorable. This is definitely something that I would try again and may even attempt to make in multiples for possible food related gifts.

 The Stegosaurus Milk Shakes were simple to make, but I quickly discovered that my blender has a limit to the capacity to which it can hold and that four servings of anything is stretching its limits.  I have no idea why they called it s Stegosaurus Milk Shake.  It tasted good, and looked like a normal milkshake. It is clear to me that some one has a sense of humor somewhere, or at least a good marketing plan that involved how they should throw a dinosaur in with a milkshake so that all the cool kids will want to drink it, because kids love dinosaurs and milkshakes.  Or perhaps Peach Milk Shaker sounded too boring, and that Stegosaurus Milkshake was much more interesting. I guess it doesn't really matter why they called it Stegosaurus Milk Shake, because it was enough to get me to try it, so what ever was the reason it worked.

Over all for this being cookbook 4 out of 58 in the cookbook challenge, and with it supposed to be one of the harder to talk myself into using cookbooks, it really wasn't bad, and there were some recipes that I would be willing to go back and try out. I can only hope that the rest of the cookbooks surprise me pleasantly as this one did.