October 8, 2008
The art of actually preparing a meal has become a thing of the past. Who among us (who is not collecting on a bogus personal injury claim) has the time to seek out the various ingredients needed to prepare a proper meal, not to mention all of the digit-endangering chopping and preparation, setting and watching of timers and fine-tuning the olfactory senses to the smell of something smoking in the kitchen?
Most of us are happy enough to sit with a heaping bowl of something microwaved back to life and watch shows like Iron Chef, America’s Next Food Network Star, and Top Chef. There’s something inspiring about seeing a chef make a gourmet Bouillabaisse out of shoe leather and good intentions. If you think hard enough about what’s on the television screen, your extra helping of Stouffers’ Artery Attacker will actually taste better. It’ll kill you just the same, but your remaining dinner time will be enjoyable before your calorie-hastened send-off to that big day-old sandwich cart in the sky.
But there are those, however rare, who go beyond scouring grocery store aisles for the boxed item with the fewest preparation directions. For these people, and allegedly for Jerry Seinfeld’s wife when she was thinking of what kind of book she should choose for her debut as a plagiarist (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!), there are cookbooks.
Through cookbooks you can learn the secrets of the world’s top chefs, without actually having to work in a kitchen. This is a bonus if you don’t like criminals, as the restaurant profession is second only to roofing when it comes to employing them.
Cookbook authorship, however, is not the sole domain of the likes of Gordon Ramsay, and that excitable fat guy with a head on him that looks like a 14-pound squash. Much like Top-10 lists, anybody can write a cookbook. Here are 10 that we’ve found that show how painfully true a statement that is. These are books — all currently being sold on Amazon — that are enough to cause even your most indiscriminate eater to pause mid-gorge and go on a monk-like regimen of fasting and coffee enemas. These are, in other words, the Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks That Money Can Buy!
10) The Testicle Cookbook: Cooking with Balls: The first book on our list is a complete balls-up – hardy-har-har. Actually, we would have just spun out one cheap pun like that after another for this entry had the copy-editors of the world not beat us to it when the story of this book’s release made headlines around the world including: “Men may get testy at Cooking with Balls book” “On The Ball”, “Testicle recipe book is a load of b*llocks,” and, our favorite, from The UK’s Sun newspaper of course, “This dish may contain nuts”.
All of the fuss surrounds a Serbian chef who has just published an e-book documenting his favorite recipes for cooking up the family pride of all manner of species; stallions, ostriches, bulls, and possibly even tree squirrels (a delightful appetizer from what we hear) are all subjected to the unkindest cut of all. The 45-year-old author, who is the male animals’ least favorite visitor at the local zoo, says that all “All testicles can be eaten,” while being generous enough to add, “Except human, of course.”
The e-book format allows the author to be more successful in his attempts to get his male readers to squirm, allowing as it does for downloadable videos showing the cook peeling off skin, uggh, slicing, (shrill scream) and… Alright, that’s enough of that.
9) “Classic Cooking With Coca-Cola”: Hate your teeth? Well, have we got the cookbook for you. Remember that childhood friend of yours who was always jealous of you for being able to guzzle Coke while he was sipping potato water and eating Melba toast? Well apparently his mother was wrong about Coke being able to dissolve a nail or a T-bone steak overnight. That’s an urban legend, but that a nail won’t disappear overnight in a glass of it is about the only positive thing that can be said of the effects of Coca-Cola.
But for those who spit in the eye of such things as keeping calories out of the stratosphere and also for those with excellent dental plans, this tome offers recipes such as Chocolate Coke Cake and microwave French Onion Soup (presumably with Coke). An alternative would be to stick your face in the sugar jar and lick away until you pass out or somebody pulls you away.
Just missed the Cut: The Wonder Bread Cookbook: Unless you’ve crashed in the mountains and your only alternative is a fleshy seatmate, or you’ve been lost at sea and a loaf of the stuff happens to float by, under no other circumstances should the human body ever ingest Wonder Bread.
The stuff is so devoid of fiber that it can be squeezed in half like an accordion and with whole grains completely purged from it (and Vitamin E, folate, phosphorus, thiamine, and a slew of nutrients usually found in bread missing as well) it’s the nutritional equivalent of taking gulps of air. Somehow the folks at Wonderbread, much like their Coca-Cola cousins have managed to fill a cookbook full of ideas of how you can stuff yourself with something completely devoid of anything nutritionally redeeming. It’s a Wonder that they managed to churn out 50 recipes for the stuff that aren’t 42 variations of PB & J.
8) “Microwave Cooking Made Easy”: The narrowest possible market we’ve come across yet, mainly those whose cooking skills extend to making popcorn while high and listening to The Great Gig in the Sky on repeat (or another, less well-known usage: drying out a bag of weed, making sure it doesn’t catch fire while nodding off). If you hosted a dinner party, casually leaving out an autographed copy of a Larry Flynt biography on the coffee table would be less damning to your character. Bouncing electromagnetic waves off food has been abandoned by every chef not currently serving 7-10 for manslaughter and requesting kitchen detail solely to get knife access. Because flavor reactions of the type normally required to not jeopardize friendships typically occur at temperatures outside of its range, microwaves are no longer in use as a serious cooking aid except by people who are confused by what it means to ‘broil’. As it says in the Amazon write-up, the author’s name is ’synononymous (sic) with Indian Cooking’. We couldn’t agree more.
7) Dining by the Stars: An Astrology Cookbook: While the title might suggest rubbing elbows with cast members of ER before you’re asked to settle your tab by some A-lister’s security staff, Dining by the Stars is actually about astrology, that ancient superstition adopted by people who insist sharing a birthday with someone means sharing their personality traits as well (a dreadful suggestion for one of us, who shares a birthday with Dane Cook — that’s definitely some bad celestial mojo).
While the only time we see stars is the result of one too many push-ups, or getting up off the couch too fast when the smoke alarm goes off, this tome offers a gastronomical guide for those who inexplicably look to the heavens for extraterrestrial lifestyle how-tos (100 million year old light emanating from balls of plasma–we checked and Chinese Plasma Balls are not among the choice recipes listed here)
Dining by the Stars classifies each sign of the zodiac, and listed for the reader are “dominant foods and condiments with which each is associated,” so that when your moon is in Uranus, a delightful basil pesto mustard can spice up that cosmic space chicken.
Given the glut of similarly themed books dotting store shelves, the author apparently did not have the prescience to realize that the market for such reserves, unlike the expanding universe, is a finite one (indicated by its dismal 2.5 million sales ranking on Amazon, or roughly in light years, the distance between our solar system and The Andromeda Galaxy or between astrologers and rational thinking).
6) All Elvis Cookbooks: The 1996 BBC documentary “The Burger & the King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley” grossed out its viewers with tales (taken from the King’s kitchen staff and friends) of the up to 100,000 calories that he consumed daily in the period leading up to his death, a figure the British Nutrition Foundation described in the film as “impossibly appalling” (an Asian elephant gets around on less). Much of this came in the form of “Fool’s Gold” sandwiches, an – to borrow a phrase – “impossibly appalling” concoction containing a jar of strawberry jam, a jar of peanut butter, and a pound of fried bacon. (Editor’s Note: Merely reading that last sentence means you have just ingested 10,000 calories.)
So when a human grease conduit such as the King of Rock and Roll passes away due to what the coroner described in that BBC documentary as “a terminal event on the commode”, what would make more sense than releasing a series of books celebrating a lifestyle that Brando or Orson Welles would have lost their own gigantic appetites just thinking about? Elvis’s mug — though rarely that of the “elephant in lingerie” years — has appeared on the covers of numerous cookbooks. Such titles include: “Are You Hungry Tonight,” “Fit For a King: The Elvis Presley Cookbook”,” “All Cooked Up: Recipes and Memories from Elvis’ Friends and Family,” and “You Did Not Want to Do Elvis’ Laundry after He Started Eating Fool’s Gold Sandwiches: A Maid’s Tale” (the last one is merely rumored).
CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP FIVE LEAST APPETIZING COOKBOOKS MONEY CAN BUY!
October 8th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
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October 10th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Stupid fucking list. Complete and utter bull shit.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Incredible! I have to get my idea published! It’s way better than these. ;-)
October 11th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Wonder Bread?! Geez… perhaps i ought to out put together a recipe book on 100 things to do with a Indian Chapati. The again, i guess some wacko has already done it. Unbelievable some of the crap, people will fork out for.
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:39 am
[...] Plans For Orson The Shark Guys The Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money Can Buy Part I I found some cool stuff here: The Shark Guys The Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
[...] Jamie’s Ministry of Food: Anyone Can Learn to Cook in 24 Hours by Jamie Oliver (Author) Average Customer Review: Buy new: £25.00 £10.00 28 used & new from £8.99 (Ranking is updated hourly. Visit the Bestsellers in Books list for authoritative information on this product’s current rank.) The Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money Can Buy, Part I [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
[...] … the same thing day after day but Kari not so much. And anymore, it IS cheaper to go to McDonalds and get some 1.00 double cheeseburgers! So we watch Alton Brown but don’t always use it. Although Geoff and I did make some AWESOME french onion soup. We also talked more on Palin and the VP debates … The Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money Can Buy, Part I [...]