cover image Joey Green's Mealtime Magic: More Than 250 Offbeat Recipes Using Beloved Brand-Name Products

Joey Green's Mealtime Magic: More Than 250 Offbeat Recipes Using Beloved Brand-Name Products

Joey Green. Rodale Press, $22.95 (292pp) ISBN 978-1-59486-581-7

The dinner table serves as the latest front in Green's seemingly inexhaustible mission to repurpose common household products (Joey Green's Rainy Day Magic, Incredible Country Store, Gardening Magic, etc.) in this hefty collection of uses for American cupboard staples like Tabasco sauce, 7UP, Cheez Whiz and Cheerios; the results alternate between ingenious and ghastly. Some recipes, such as Pineapple Glazed Pork Chops, which uses a glaze made from Dole crushed pineapple, ginger, cinnamon and apple jelly, are innovative and tasty. Other dishes aren't fit for prisoners: Heinz Ketchup's Love Apple Pie is a stomach-churning melange of granny smith apples, lemon juice, spices and, yes, a third cup of ketchup; cloying Orangey Rice is flavored with a packet of Tang breakfast drink. Peppered with product trivia, readers will be happy to learn they can use vinegar to clean tarnished pans, but perhaps less thrilled to learn how they can cook shrimp in the dryer. Novelty aside, those looking for reliable ways to use their brand-name products would be better served by traditional recipes.