Jill Conner Browne - The Sweet Potato Queens Big-Ass Cookbook (and Financial Planner)

CONTENTS

QUEENLY CONSIDERATIONS FOR BIG-ASS EATIN

FAMBLY STUFF

FOOD FOR BIG-ASS OCCASIONS

FINE FOOD FROM MY BIG-ASS BUDDIES

THE QUEENS CLASSICS Favorite Recipes from The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love and God Save the Sweet Potato Queens

To the most fabulous women in the world
Vivian Neill, Cheri Anglin, Mona Shumake, Cynthia Speetjens, Lyla Elliot, Marsha McInturff, Carol Daily, Annie Laurie McRee, Annelle Barnett, Pippa Jackson, Donna Sones, Sylvia Stewart, and Melanie Clement
the Once and Future Sweet Potato Queens, who have dedicated themselves to living the Queenly Life and who allow me to document it in these pages, To Malcolm White, who is our Reason for Being, And to Kyle Jennings, who is teaching me its never too late to find what you always dreamed of.

PREFACE

Dont be misled by the title of this book. Its not your typical Betty Crockertype cookbook, and most certainly not your Suze Ormantype financial planner. This would be on account of I aint Betty Crocker and I sure as hell aint Suze Ormanask anybody.

Oh, there are recipes in herebunches of themand they are all quite tasty. (You can look at us and tell.) They are not what you would call your haute cuisine. Our experience with cuisine of the haute variety is that its way too much trouble to do ourselves and costs way too much to have others do for us, and when they do, it looks weird. Theyre not happy just to plunk it on a plate and let you eat in peace; it has to be visual. And if it tastes good, theres only enough of it to piss us off.

We like to cookand eatby the vat-full. Leftovers are some of our favorite food, because then its like somebody else cooked itwhich is our favorite food. We dearly love Other Peoples Cooking. We also love Other Peoples Recipes, and quite a few of the recipes featured in this book were contributed by members of Sweet Potato Queen chapters, worldwide (at press time: 1,725 chapters).

The financial-planning parts of this book will no doubt be of as much value to you as they have been to us. In other words, for Gods sake, get help from a qualified professional. This is a how-not-to book. As soon as we learn how to, well let you in on it.

Included in the Postscript, for your edification and entertainment, are the Official Rules and Regulations of the Sweet Potato Queens Readin and Eatin Book Club. See our Web site (www.sweetpotatoqueens.com) for a continually unfolding panoply of news about SPQ books, events, products, and food, and for scintillating cyber-conversation.

As with the tales in my other books, everything in this one, to the best of my knowledge and recollection, is truemuch to the chagrin of our Collective Mothers.

PART I

Queenly Considerations for Big-Ass Eatin

1

About Betty Crocker

Merciful heavens, where do we even start talking about Miss B? Is it any wonder that over 50 percent of baby boomers are on Prozac? Kelly Goley, one of our favorite SPQ Wannabes (who sent us the recipe for Love Lard featured elsewhere in this book), went to Restoration Hardware (boomers love this storeit is our childhood) and found the same Betty Crocker cookbook that her very own mom had received for a wedding present and which little Kelly had spent many happy days in her youth poring over. (The Love Lard recipe is clearly a backlash reaction to the early-childhood trauma of being exposed to the Betty Crocker Philosophy of Feminism.)

Kelly bought the book immediately because it gave her that warm, familiar feeling of revisiting her childhood. Only when she opened the pages did she realize the havoc Mrs. Crocker had wrought on Female America, right under our noses. If you are still wondering where we as women got some of the insane ideas we have struggled with and against for the last fifty yearsthe addle-brained expectations that have been leveled against women from inside our ranks and outlook no further than Betty Crocker. I compared Bettys words with those of the anonymous husband who wrote The Good Wifes Guide, also available in the fifties. (Youll have no trouble seeing why he wouldnt put his own name on the book!)

Witness the Helpful Hints Mrs. Crocker offers us, while posing sweetly in a dress with an apron. She exhorts us to perfect our homemaking skills by practicing each task until it goes smoothly, thereby developing techniques for meal planning, cooking, marketing, sewing, dishwashing, home beautifying, nursing, bed-making, cleaning, and laundering. She left out yard work, auto repair and maintenance, and carpooling. Of course she did; women didnt drive much then and kids walked everywhere. And she also left out supporting the family while doing all of the above.

The Good Wifes Guide tells us that our goal is making our home a place of peace, order, and tranquillity, where our husbands can renew themselves in body and spirit. We should, therefore, touch up our makeup right before he comes home from work, we should not greet him with complaints or problems, we should make sure the kids are clean and quiet when he comes in. (Hell want to look at them but thats about all. Dont you know hes tired?) We should not complain if hes late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. We should count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.

Well, all I have to say about that eventuality is that, unless there was an earthquake in which he was personally swallowed up and trapped for fourteen hours without food and water and with the sound of fingernails on a blackboard echoing in his ears the whole time and ants crawling all over him and he couldnt even move his hands to get them out of his nose, then he did not have a bad enough day to warrant him not coming home all night and me not making a peep about it, and whatever it was that did happen during his arduous day is nothing compared to what will happen when he finally does drag his sorry ass home. But thats just me. Maybe we should speak in a low, soothing voice and make him comfortablepossibly have him lie down in a darkened room for a spell (they have a nice one at our funeral home).

Miss Betty helpfully suggests that we develop good work habits. This includes preparing food for tomorrow while cooking for today. Now, I do cook in vats so we can have my favorite food, leftovers, tomorrow, but Betty was suggesting that we make different dishes all at the same time or, at the very least, make different sauces to go on the same food on different days. (I cant even comment on sauces.) She also decrees that we must never run out of anything we might need in the kitchen. (We do not see her running across three neighbors lawns with a teaspoon of vanilla and two eggs.)

Betty thought we should wear comfortable clothes (dressesand not muumuus, either) and properly fitted shoes for doing housework. I get a picture of Betty and her contemporaries being fitted for their housework shoes. You know the shoe salesman would be vitally interested in all the housewives having comfy shoesthe better to wait on his sorry ass in. Indeed, Mr. Crocker probably personally oversaw Bettys shoe situationfor just the reason he had the oil changed in the car in a timely fashionto save on costly repair work down the road, not to mention to prevent lost workdays should she, God forbid, get a bunion.