The All-american Truck Stop Cookbook

Rating:
Summary: Now I'm hungry!
Review: I really like this book which lists recipes gathered over the years from various American truck stops. Enough to make your mouth water and your nostrils flare! From the basic to the elaborate, old home style to modern. This book will ensure that some recipes are not lost forever in these days of rapid change.

Rating:
Summary: Turn Your Double Wide in to a Greasy Spoon
Review: Now if you ask me, and plenty of hungry folk do now and again (especially when they are hungry) this here book is about the best thing that has come along in a coon's age. If you are looking for a snack and you don't feel like actually getting in your vehicle and driving down to the interstate and sliding in to a booth (or straddling a stool at the counter) then what you need to do is heat up the hog lard and get ready to fry you up some delectables. This book is filled with delectables! And when I types the word "delectables" I don't mean just any ole' food, I mean genuine, lard-soaked, poly-saturated, gravy-covered, All-American truck stop fare.

There is a distinct difference betwixt the items one finds in truck stops and other random items often associated with truck stop patrons. For example, the infamous deep-fried Twinkie® on a stick that made the headlines here a while back and got the entire North American continent poking fun at the folks at the Arkansas State Fair. A deep-fried Twinkie® might be something one could possibly associate with truck stop folks, but it ain't really truck stop fare. No, truck stop patrons don't normally go in for novelty foods from the state fair. Truck stop food is more refined and elegant and almost never comes served on a stick. Sometimes it might, but most of the time it don't.

Truck stop fare is wholesome and filling, contains all the basic food groups right inside the gravy, and tends to be displayed in such a way as to cover all the empty space on the surface of the plate. In fact, the healthy amount of gravy is often the thing that covers all that empty space... that and the parsley garnish, but the parsley garnish don't offer quite the nutritional value of the gravy because, as we all know, truck stop gravy is scientifically designed to include all the basic food groups right inside the gravy. If you were to order up a jug of nothing but gravy and commence to spoon that up and make a meal out of it, then pardner, you'd be eating a balanced diet that even the Surgeon General couldn't criticize.

Another fallacy about truck stops is that they have road kill on the menu. This is simply an urban legend created by folk who reside in urban centers and don't venture out beyond the shopping malls on the edge of their metropolis. Anyone who comes from a locale featuring easy access to a real truck stop knows that this is just a fib propagated by the urban elite. The kitchens of most trucks stops are capable of passing any health inspector's critical scrutiny (mostly) and the fact that they usually remain open for business after the health inspector has come and gone is testimony to the fact that what they serve meets local regulations (mostly). A couple times I even saw a health inspector wrap up the inspection, then slide in to a booth and order up some grub before venturing on to the next inspection... which, if you stop and think about it, is a pretty sound endorsement of the establishment.

But that ain't the point of this here book. The point of this here book is to allow you to recreate the epicurean experience of a road-side eatery right there in your own double wide trailer. The first step is to put on a pot of coffee and allow it to sit and fester for a good long while as you prepare the food, and then when you are done with the food preparation, to have some of that aged coffee just like they serve in truck stops. You can also enhance the mood by asking your friends and relations to come around and scribble things on the walls of your bathroom. The Huckabees also like to get just a little bit of gasoline in an old milk carton and bring it inside and let the fumes kind of permeate the double wide trailer so we can set the mood and feel like we have actually gone to a truck stop to enjoy the food. I reckon you will find the recipes on pages 13, 28, and 31 to be exciting and eventful. They are sure to please even the most finicky eater among your kin. I therefore wholeheartedly recommend this book and provide it with the Huckabee stamp of approval (I don't actually stamp each book seeing as how I ain't actually in a position to have access to them before you order it, so consider that statement as figurative and not literal.)