Hello Dear Readers! It’s Monday morning again! Which means we’ve all got some pushy little To-do Lists yapping at our heels. 

Well, what better way to ignore such things than by taking time out to relive the tedious days of 1970’s, a decade when time oozed by slower than a drug-free Tour de France.

And to that end, let us open this 1976 McCall’s Cooking School magazine and see how people killed time by cooking disgusting-looking dishes back in, what I like to call, 197-icks:

Now having lived through the 1970’s,  I can vouch for the fact that life in the 70’s was extremely boring and tedious.

On any given day your choices to kill time boiled down to 1) watching a rerun of Maude 2) macrameing a hanging plant holder or 3) whipping up something god-awful like this:

This 197-icks take on Chicken and Dumplings killed two chickens with one stone.  The placement of the chives alone served to distract one from the 70’s monotony for several hours, but what killed a far bigger chunk of time was trying to find someone who would actually eat it.

Here’s a time-consuming dish that McCall’s Cooking School called French.

In the description, McCall’s is bandying around the word melange. Naturally this word melange was a big plus to 70s cooks, as it would have required a time-consuming trip downtown to the main library (the one with the really big dictionary) to look up the word melange — taking up an entire day and bringing them just that much closer to the end of the decade!

In the 70’s there were so many people dying to kill time that McCall’s Cooking School  magazine was thoughtful enough to include this “Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen Pie”

If you look at this mincemeat pie (not too closely though unless you have your Tums nearby), you can see that the preparation required:

 A Melissa to not only prepare the dough from scratch, but also, to perform the lengthy process of braiding it as well (killing 17 hours)

A Kimberly to slowly transfer the hand-whipped, whipped cream  into a cake-decorating funnel so that each and every squiggle could be thoroughly obsessed over (killing 22 hours)

A  Jessica to mince the meat over and over and over and over until 7 hours was up (killing 7 hours)

A Stephanie to eat the grape bunch down to a suitable size that would fit picturesquely upon the pie —  choking on several for ten minutes at a time (killing 45 minutes)

And, finally, a Heather to garnish the grapes with the leaves she found after scavenging the neighborhood all night long (killing 12 hours).

Rest assured, Dear Readers that even though the decade of the 70’s was one of the most boring decades to ever grace the pages of a calendar, The McCall’s Cooking School magazine did it’s level best to help us kill the time ad nauseam. 

And for that we shall  be forever sort of grateful.

Until next time . . . I love you