Here in Toronto, we don’t often have a lot of events akin to the car boot sale or flea market. (We have flea markets but they’re posher things with a mix of antique dealers, local artisans and food trucks.) People wanting to get rid of stuff, especially if they live in flats, tend to either have a yard sale or, during the warmer months, just leave their unwanted stuff out at the curb with a big “free” sign on it.
A few weeks back, Greg was walking home from somewhere and came across a collection of cookbooks on the edge of someone’s lawn. They were old and dusty, but he grabbed a vegetarian gourmet cookbook from the early 80s that he thought I might like, or would at least get a laugh out of. When we dusted it off and opened it, this handwritten recipe for Cocktail Cheese Crisps fell out.
Obviously much-loved and regularly used, the recipe calls for butter, a type of processed cheese, flour, cayenne pepper, worchestershire sauce, tabasco and… rice krispies. And once the brain gets past the pseudo-weirdness of this combination, it starts to sound really good. I mean, look at that piece of paper… somebody really, really loved these cheese crisps. So much so that we worried that the owner of the cookbook this recipe had been slipped into might be missing it. We actually discussed taking this stained, crumpled, torn bit of paper back to where Greg had found the book and sticking it in the mail slot.
If I can track down the Imperial cheese (one I hadn’t ever heard of, but Greg knew of it), I am more than a little bit inclined to make these just to see what all the fuss is about. But if your name is Michelle and you recently put out a stack of cookbooks in the College & Dovercourt area and you want your recipe back, give me a shout.