This is a trope that’s been picked up by Tamar Myers in her Pennsylvania Dutch stories, which feature all sorts of recipes, not just Amish specialities, as well as the Hannah Swenson mysteries by Joanne Fluke. I’ve never tried any of Myers’s recipes, but I’ve made several of the cookies from Fluke’s books, and they’ve all been winners, especially the Cherry Winks.
Looks like it was called “Our Lady of Sorrow Cake,” but my wife doesn’t know what book it was from and the goog isn’t helping.
I really want a Krabby Patty.
I was reading an Ellery Queen mystery once where Queen described how tuna salad was made. I tried the recipe and it became my favorite.
Though I did change it slightly – I left out the poison.
Oh hell yeah.
And I just remembered another . . .
In The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, there’s a recipe for spaghetti that is basically just noodles, a raw egg, salt, pepper, and butter, IIRC. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds good.
Rex Stout described a lot of great food in the Nero Wolfe books.
Sometimes Wolfe would eagerly wait for something to come into season. Archie would pick it up, and Wolfe and Fritz would spend the whole day cooking.
I tried a few of the dishes at fancy restaurants. Found out gourmet food isn’t my thing.
My daughter bugged me to make her spaghetti tacos (basically, spaghetti put in a taco shell) after seeing them on an episode of iCarly. I finally made them for her a couple of weeks ago. They were OK.
When my niece was a baby, I took care of her a couple of days a week after my sis went back to work. We watched Teletubbies, and she started asking for Tubby Custard as soon as she could talk. I made vanilla pudding with a couple drops of red food coloring to color it pink, and she was satisfied with it. She’s 12 now and still remembers it.
Just once I would like to sample a Durpee Dooner Honey Onion, as described in McCloskey’s Centerburg Tales.
My mother rarely cooked Italian food, so the first time I ever heard of lasagna was in the Garfield comic strip.
Oscar the Grouch, on Sesame Street, introduced me to the peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich. (If you use sweet pickles, it’s actually pretty good.)
Food got mentioned on Babylon 5 a lot, and I once hosted a dinner party based on food mentioned on the show. I made breen(aka Swedish meatballs), bagna cauda, fruit(oranges, plums and grapes), fried tubeworns(mini doughnuts), and so on. I became very fond of the bagna cauda, and could see why Garibaldi liked it so much, but the flavor of the garlic and the anchovies is so strong that it could be an acquired taste.
The dish they make at the end of “Big Night.” It’s apparently fictional in that there’s no real recipe for it but you can certainly do what they did (egg and pasta quiche kind of thing baked in a dome dish.) but you’d be making up the ingredients and the hows on your own. It loosk declious and is known to haunt foodies’ dreams.
During outdoor activities like hiking and camping, my snack of choice is the Honey and Oats Granola Bar. To make it even sweeter, I pretend it’s Lembas bread. 
I know the two are nothing alike but it’s all I have to work with.
Actually, there’s recipes for the bread online. I wonder if I should actually try to make it.
Then you cooked them wrong. They smell like death. Bad death.
Does drinking milk and Pepsi from Laverne & Shirley count?
I was on a Boy Scout canoeing-camping trip once, where our lunch was always some sort of canned meat spread on pilot biscuits. Except that we all referred to it as “Cram and cat food”, which really was a pretty close approximation.
Ever since I saw Tampopo, I’ve been in search of the perfect bowl of noodles. I’ve probably been to 15 different places in NYC, but only about 4 in Japan. I’m tempted to try to make hand made noodles, but it looks like a pain in the ass.
“Fruity Oaty Bars
Make a man out of a mouse
Fruity Oaty Bars
Make you bust out of your blouse
Eat them all the time
They will blow your mind
Blow your little mind…”
I’ve never heard of the Sten Chronicles before reading this thread, but Angelo stew sounds tasty to me. (If i’m not mistaken, it’s basically a hybrid of beef bourguignon and Texas-style chili.) I’m going to have to try and make a batch.
I once attempted to make a batch of khlav kalash based on a recipe I found online. It came out… tasting better than Homer Simpson described it.
I bought a Fruity Oaty Bar from a bake sale at an SF con once (Boskone, I think). It was a bit gooey for my taste.
I used to put ketchup on my chips (french fries). After seeing Pulp Fiction, I now use mayonnaise.
Ian Flemming’s book Chitty Chitty Bang Band contains a recipe for fudge. I made some once when I was a kid. It was good.