JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Back for a final go-round after a summer hiatus... For a page featuring two recipes beginning with the letter S and a baseball player adorned in S emblems, you'd think the illustrator would have included foods that started with S. Unless the that apple in his glove is a spartan, or the cupcake/muffin on the table is strawberry-chocolate flavoured, there is a distinct lack of S-foods. There is the possibility the connection lies in a theme of sweetly-flavoured items men can enjoy. "Sweet" begins with "S"!

New England Clam Chowder: once upon a time I liked ready-to-serve canned versions whose texture was similar to wallpaper paste. Along with my taste for most tinned soups, this liking went by the wayside (Manhattan-style seems better suited for long-term preservation in the cupboard). Condensed versions were usually suspect thanks to the transparent gelatinous blobs that never mixed well with milk. These days I make my own with a little help from Better than Bouillon's clam base . Noodles Romanoff: synonymous with Noodle Roni in my mind. Fancy mac n' cheese-ish side dish. Haven't eaten Noodle Roni or its relatives Lipton Noodles & Sauce/Knorr Sidekicks in years - either my tastebuds changed, the recipes changed, or my organs finally recognized there was nothing remotely natural in these products. Onion Rings: for sheer size, unless a restaurant is gunning for a spot in the Guinness book, no onion rings will ever top those Dad and I shared at the Holiday Inn French...

Note that the meal pictured, a footlong sub loaded with lettuce, tomato and cheese, is not accompanied by a recipes on these pages. Perhaps a hearty sub was considered a manlier dish in 1970 than a cold vegetable soup favoured by the likes of Lisa Simpson ? Also impressive: that the sub does not appear to have been crushed while stuffed in the businessman's suitcase. Maybe subs were all he carried in that particular suitcase (the papers on the side were coupons for his favourite sub shops)...which reminds me of a story I read the other night. During the first decades of the 20th Century, the president of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team was a colourful local politician named August "Garry" Herrmann . According to Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella's book The Ball Clubs : Even for a business renowned for its outsized personages, the new Cincinnati boss seemed like a character out of Dick Tracy . Called a "walking delicatessen" by some, he seldom ventur...

No illustrations to accompany today's first batch of recipes. Though stroganoff has many elements I like in a dish (saucy beef, mushrooms, a bed of egg noodles), it's never been a dish that's tempted me to order it in a restaurant or make it on my own. Possible reasons: 1) One of my favourite dishes as a kind was Mom's sauerbraten (aka "steak and noodles"), which is a distant cousin. Main differences: instead of mushrooms and sour cream, brown sugar and worcestershire sauce were key ingredients. 2) Any Noodle Roni/ Lipton Noodles & Sauce sidedish marketed as stroganoff tended to be crappy (Romanoff noodles on the other hand...). 3) Seeing students down mass quantities of stroganoff at Creelman Hall during my university daze. Blue cheese dressing? Back in the early 1980s, Malibu's Le Grand Cochon restaurant served up a tasty, extra-creamy version...and plenty of it! Sample some chocolate cake prepared by the chefs of Crowded House. ...

One of the highlights of going to the Elora Festival's book sale every spring is surfing through the tables of formerly-loved (or never-used-despite-all-good-intentions) cookbooks. For as little as a quarter, dedicated browsers will find flip past every Better Homes & Gardens cooking guide ever published to find recipe books ranging from local women's institutes to collections of Len Deighton's swingin' Sixties cookstrips . It was at one Elora sale that I discovered Betty Crocker's vision of the diet a North American male should enjoy, complete with the cutesy illustration style beloved of book designers and board game makers circa 1970. It's interesting to contrast the cartoony style used by artist Murray Tinkelman in this book and the work he has done for clients like the New York Times . We'll keep the table of contents under wraps, so that every dish comes as a surprise (this series needs an element of suspense to keep readers coming ba...