Serving suggestion

I used to have a scrapbook (actually, I probably still have it somewhere) that I filled with page after page of serving suggestions that I had cut from the side of food boxes. You know, you buy your smoked salmon slices, or whatever, and the box shows a photo of a couple of slices of smoked salmon next to half a tomato and a lettuce leaf, accompanied in tiny letters by the words "serving suggestion". There's probably a legal reason for it, I should imagine; or companies don't want to be phoned up by irate idiots complaining that there was no salad in their pack of smoked salmon. Either way, the suggestions are uniformly hilarious.

Some of them are funny in their blinding obviousness; a few scoops of ice-cream in a bowl, ooh, what a great idea! I'd never have thought of it myself! Others are funny for their bizarreness, and that's where we come in today.

Living on the edge - as I do - I recently bought a different type of breakfast cereal; Kellogg's Guardian, to be precise. I opened it this morning, and perused the box while I ate. The serving suggestions on the front and back are pretty standard: cereal in a bowl, topped with fruit and milk. (And that's exactly how I had it, so thanks for that, Kelloggs.) On the side of the box, however, is a recipe... for Salad Niçoise [sic] bulked up with Guardian cereal. Delicious!

I dream of opening a restaurant - or at the very least, throwing a dinner party - featuring nothing but product placement dishes like that.