Cookbook Challenge # 18 - Life After Pizza
Life After Pizza: A Cookbook for the Fast Food Crowd (Favorite Recipes Press, 1988) was the cookbook that taught me to cook. Oh, my mom was a good cook and a gifted baker, and I learned a lot by watching her, but she didn’t push me to cook or do chores in general—I think as the youngest of four children I was just a tiny bit spoiled in that regard—trusting that I’d learn when I had to. And I did, from this book. It’s every bit as simple, breezy, and basic as the title makes it sound, and I’ll still grab it off the shelf every so often to remind myself of basics like how long to cook a hardboiled egg. I do have one go-to recipe I still make from it, a quick mock minestrone made by combining various canned condensed soups and broths with ground beef, beans, an onion, and pasta. But the point of this challenge is to choose something I haven’t tried already, so I made Bisquick Oven-Fried Chicken and Crazy Cake. Both turned out perfectly tasty in a straightforward, old-school way.
Bisquick Oven-Fried Chicken
Whole chicken cut up or chicken pieces (I used 4 thighs and 4 wings)
¼ cup butter
¾ cup Bisquick
(I ad-libbed and added a generous shake of Cajun seasoning to the Bisquick and dipped the chicken pieces in an egg wash so the batter would stick better.)
Melt butter in a baking dish in a 350-degree oven. Shake chicken in Bisquick in a paper bag until coated. Place in prepared baking dish; do not allow pieces to touch. Bake for 30 minutes; turn chicken. Bake for 15 minutes or until tender.
Crazy Cake
2 cups sugar
3 cups flour
½ cup cocoa
2 tsp baking soda
1 T vanilla extract
2 T vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar)
¾ c vegetable oil
2 cups water
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9×13-inch cake pan.
Combine sugar, flour, cocoa, and baking soda and place in prepared pan.
Make 3 wells in dry ingredients. Pour vanilla into 1 well, vinegar into 1 well, and oil into remaining well. Pour water over all. Mix with fork until smooth.
Bake for 30 minutes or until cake tests done. Cool in pan. Frost cool cake as desired.