I found the best worst best cookbook ever

inverted pizza casserole, anyone?

Hi, clowns!

Oh, how I’ve missed you all. We’re at the end of our first full ten years of January already, huh? Davida and I spent our time off mainly hanging out with both sides of our families, so part of our holiday was spent up north in Wisconsin, up in her hometown. One day while we were up there, she and I decided to pop our heads into a thrift store to see if we could find anything interesting to take home.

When I browsed through the used cookbook section, one particular cover caught my attention. This book featured two women who looked mildly surprised to have their photo taken, and it had an interesting title.

It was called The Phony Gourmet, written by Pam Young and Peggy Jones, also known as the SLOB Sisters (which I’ll get to in a second), and it originally came out in 1995.

Basically, The Phony Gourmet involves recipes using pre-made secret ingredients in order to trick people who are eating your food into believing that it’s way fancier than it actually is. The thing is, this book takes this shortcut gourmet thing to the extreme. It features dishes with names such as “Fraudulent Lasagna,” “Mom’s Numskull Turkey Casserole,” and “Chicken Rapture Under Wraps.” And yes, it’s genuinely funny the whole time.

As I was leafing through it at the thrift store, I stumbled across a gem of a recipe called “Weiner Schnitzel Michelin.” These ladies were apparently ripping Michelin star jokes before I was old enough to know what they even meant. And get this: The instructions in this recipe tell you to tenderize the meat with your car, which is an experiment I tried nearly two years ago, without even knowing about the existence of this book. Incredible.

The SLOB Sisters (which stands for “Spontaneous, Light-hearted, Optimistic and Beloved”) weren’t even known for their superior culinary skills, either. Though they were real-life sisters, their main mission was to help people declutter their lives from the burden of physical junk. They were so popular back in the day that they made regular appearances on big shows like Oprah.

Davida took one look through the book and said, “We have to buy this.” And she picked out a recipe for today’s edition of Food is Stupid that we found particularly, well. You’ll see.

Oh, and The Phony Gourmet is now way out of print as far as I know (you can get a used copy easily), so I’m going to roll the dice and put the recipe up today. I believe I should be okay doing this, but, uh, better save a copy of this newsletter in case I do get in trouble.

Blue Cheese Chicken Italiano

By Pam Young and Peggy Jones, The Phony Gourmet (1995), pages 82-83, originally published by HarperCollins

Only a fool would turn a piece of pizza upside down, because all the stuff would fall off it. That’s why no one has ever seen the underside of a piece of pizza. When you serve Blue Cheese Chicken Italiano you will actually be premiering the underside of a Totino’s Party Pizza. It’s very pretty. It looks a little like a soda cracker with a puffy surface and little holes in a geometric design. When you cover the zesty chicken entrée with the mystery top, even Columbo wouldn’t be able to figure out what has made the fabulous pastry topping or what has given this dish its tasty assortment of mushrooms, meats, and cheeses.

Quick, easy, delicious, and very SNEAKY!

Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 55 minutes
Serves 4

3 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 5 ounces each)
1 (10 3/4-ounce) can Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup
1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese
1/2 cup sour cream
2 whole cloves garlic
Salt and pepper
1 (10.9-ounce) Totino’s Party Pizza
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

1. Pound the chicken breasts to flatten, and place them in bottom of a buttered 11-inch pie plate. Smear half the can of soup on the breasts.

2. In a blender, blend the other half of the canned soup with the blue cheese, sour cream, and garlic. Pour over the chicken breasts in the pie plate. Add salt and pepper.

3. Place the frozen pizza upside down on the chicken; cover with foil and bake in a 375-degree oven for 45 minutes. Remove the foil, sprinkle with the cheese, and continue baking for 10 more minutes, until the cheese melts.

   Tip: We suggest using Totino’s “Combination” or one of its three terrific new party pizzas, any of which are excellent: Zesty Italiano, Supreme, or Three Meat. Sounds like a commercial — it’s not. The new party pizzas are a little larger than the originals, so cut around the edge to fit the pie plate.

   Note: It’s very important to cover this dish with foil so the pizza crust can soak up the delicious sauce and stay tender during cooking. The crust will get crisp when the foil is removed and the dish bakes for 10 more minutes.

So, uh, yeah.

If you were reading carefully through this recipe, there’s a lot of unusual shit going on here, even if the Blue Cheese Chicken Italiano doesn’t exactly have a lot of ingredients in it. There’s blue cheese blended with part of a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, which is already a bold move, but a whole inverted Totino’s Party Pizza baked directly on top? What the hell?

This is equal parts genius, absurd, and potentially horrible, which is exactly why a casserole pan of this shit had to go straight up my gorgeous and pear-shaped ass. The fact that the SLOB Sisters even had a preferred variety of Totino’s pizza for this recipe indicates pure earnestness to me, which is what makes it even more endearing.

I started by pulling one of the chicken breasts out of the grocery store package and I thought that it felt suspiciously enormous.

Just for the hell of it, I slapped it on my kitchen scale and realized that it weighed a full pound and a half. The recipe only called for about a pound of chicken, so I gave the breast a proper surgical reduction. Then I flattened it vigorously with my meat hammer per the recipe’s instructions. Congrats to me, apparently I’ve turned Food is Stupid into a cheap romance novel. Just wait till you see it in book form at Target.

I placed the breasts on the bottom of my casserole dish and commenced with the curious step of “smearing half the can of soup on the breasts.”

Man, I’m going to be a bestseller, aren’t I?

I briefly set the smeared breasts aside and built the rest of the sauce as instructed, by blending together the remaining soup, a quarter cup of blue cheese, a quarter cup of sour cream, and two cloves of garlic.

Despite all being relatively thick ingredients, the sauce came out in a surprisingly pourable texture, which then went right on top of the chicken.

I didn’t quite understand the order of operations, however.

Like, wouldn’t I have been fine just mixing half a can of plain mushroom soup with this blue cheese and mushroom soup blend, then pouring the whole thing or smearing it kinkily on the chicken?

It doesn’t matter, because the most important part came next: I then unwrapped the master ingredient, the Combination Totino’s Party Pizza.

Man, I haven’t had one of these things in years, mostly because they’re terrible. I’m not even trying to be a dickhole. Totino’s Party Pizzas routinely end up dead last in frozen pizza rankings. But that’s why they’re also the best. Might as well proudly cling to that bottom spot, you know?

Inverting the pizza on top of the chicken achieves a few things. One, this conceals the fact that it’s a pizza, and two, as the SLOB Sisters mention, the ass end of this frozen delicacy creates a sort of pastry lid on top, turning this into a kind of pot pie. C’est magnifique.

But there is a third hidden culinary goal it achieves as well. Imagine inviting some friends over for a home-cooked dinner and you all collectively stand around the kitchen island, sipping on wine. Then you casually start smashing an upside-down pizza onto a chicken casserole while everyone observes in horror. Every time they visit you from now on, they’ll insist on bringing takeout. Free food for life, baby!

So, in terms of execution, I had a bit of a geometric problem.

The original recipe, if you look carefully, says to use a round pie pan — suggesting that the Totino’s Party Pizza that it had in mind for this was circular. I haven’t seen a round Totino’s Party Pizza in a very long time. And in fact, the only shape my grocery store carries is rectangular. So that’s the kind I ended up getting.

But the thing is, my glass casserole pan is square. From my extensive preschool education, I have previously learned that a rectangle does not fit in a square. But an interesting fact I learned about these pizzas (aside from the fact that they feature nothing but imitation mozzarella cheese), is that for some reason, they’re pliable straight from the freezer.

That meant I could put my masculine strength to work for once, and I pushed down on the Party Pizza and made it fit. You can now call me “Dannis ‘Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’ Ree.”

Then I wrapped the pan up in foil and put it in my countertop oven for the prescribed 45 minutes.

During this time, the kitchen filled up with a very unusual smell. Maybe it’s because I’ve recently been suffering from mild norovirus symptoms (just nausea, no projectile diarrhea, which is a bummer), but the baked ranch dressing-like aroma it put off really bothered me. Davida agreed that it did smell like ranch dressing, but for some reason she enjoyed this smell while I found it repulsive. Differing opinions make for a healthy marriage, I think.

(But she’s still wrong. It smelled fucking horrible.)

Once the 45 minutes was up, I followed the instructions and sprinkled the top of the casserole with cheese.

This further obfuscated the Totino’s Party Pizza, adding a distracting layer of real mozzarella while the imitation stuff lurked just beneath its surface. Then I blasted it in the oven without the foil on top, at 400 degrees, for another 10 minutes. This would melt the cheese and give the whole thing some color.

Or, mildly blacken it, in my case.

The end product looked sort of like a white lasagna of sorts, but I could already tell that it was going to be really watery. Every time I disturbed the pan, I could see the liquid sloshing around quite a bit behind that glass.

Once I cut out a square piece of it, all that watery stuff was now exposed, which ended up looking more like a surprise soup rather than a thick sauce.

The color of the liquid had also transformed from a distinct gray to sort of a light orange, thanks to the concealed pizza toppings co-mingling with the Campbell's.

I cannot believe I’m saying this, but the Blue Cheese Chicken Italiano was actually kind of decent.

This fact immediately frustrated me in a player-hating sort of way. So what’s pretty remarkable about this stuff is that the pizza lid had transformed from that weird Totino’s concoction to a much more pliant, and yes, “pastry-like” crust, though it was admittedly a little on the tough side. Most of the toppings were still stuck to the pizza, which was kind of amazing, and those little bits of filler-laden meat made the otherwise boring chicken seem a little more interesting.

The sauce was actually okay, other than being watery. I thought I’d be able to taste the blue cheese, but it didn’t really come through. All I got was a big hit of umami to the ass, with a bunch of garlic.

Davida straight up loved this thing, though she thought it could have used a little bit of salt, which was something I’d omitted on purpose. I figured all the prepackaged shit had plenty of sodium in it already, but it hadn’t leached into the core of the chicken. I guess the SLOB Sisters didn’t quite get into leaching during the culinary phase of their careers, but they were probably too busy helping people tidy up their shit at the time. I get it.

In conclusion, The Phony Gourmet is the best cookbook I have ever read. Next week’s edition, which is for paid subscribers, will be the execution of another recipe from the book. I won’t say what it is just yet, but it does feature another unconventional ingredient that I think might be an actual disaster. (Here’s a hint.)

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Well, this one was a lot of fun. This part’s important: If you enjoyed today’s edition of Food is Stupid at all, don’t hesitate and share today’s edition anywhere you like, Discord, Reddit, work Slack, sow chaos wherever you step:

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Every other edition’s behind the paywall, but that means you get double the newsletter, and really, supporting this thing at just over a buck per drop doesn’t sound too bad to me. Your support is what keeps this thing running — “Dannis ‘Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’ Ree” can’t chug along without you. Unless I get some real weird sponsorship from Totino’s. Do you hear me, Totino’s?!

Anyway, it’s great to be back in your inboxes, and don’t forget to say hi and leave a comment while you’re at it! As always, I love you all, and I’ll pop my head into some of your feeds next week. And Angelenos, we hope you’re okay. Let us know how we can help.