In a culture that fetishsizes celebrity, are all meatballs the same? 

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I have dreams about celebrities with great regularity.  But my unconscious predilection got out of hand last Spring, when I had a dream about an actual celebrity recipe I clipped from the National Enquirer back in ’85 and pasted in my journal.  Here’s the best part: the celebrity was LaToya Jackson and the recipe was for microwave meatballs!  The mere thought of LaToya’s meatballs is oh-so-much-better than any real meatball by any non-celebrity that I never felt compelled to cook them, for it was enough to know that the option was always available.

Though I don’t believe she ever actually cooked much herself, I like using my imagination to picture LaToya in her Barbie-pink, Encino kitchen with hunks of chop meat, eggs and breadcrumbs under her acrylic talons.  In fact I’ve used this image periodically as a self-soothing tool in times of stress and have found that the image does indeed induce a warm, hypnotic feeling.  I have also enjoy the theory that there never even was a LaToya Jackson microwave meatball in the first place and this was, instead, the act of a desperate publicist who thought it might be more credible and less of a liability to release a recipe rather than another single like Hot Potato, which had peaked at number 100 on the Billboard chart less than a year before the release of LaToya’s meatball.

When I initially looked back in my LaJournal to reference the actual recipe, I was crestfallen to see that it was not an actual clipping but a xerox of the recipe and it had faded away to nothing, much the same way numbers on taxi receipts vanish when you are trying to add them up during tax season (how does that happen in just a few months?).   After so many years, all that I could read on the xerox, was “La…chopmeat,” meaning that LaToya’s meatballs were lost forever—as unfathomable as the chorus of Hot Potato.  Time went by and I cursed my rotten LaLuck before providence struck: my dear friend Elisa found an second xerox of the original recipe when she was cleaning out a closet!  Hip, hip, hooray!  This second copy, which I had utilized in the construction of a Zsa Zsa Gabor-themed birthday card was still legible—which really saved the day!  The second bit of good news is that while I was fact checking my LaHistory on LaToya’s impressive Wiki discography (ten studio albums!), I learned for the first time about the existence of 1993’s LaToya Jackson: Live In Poland DVD!  How the fuck did I miss that?

This long LaGression is just a way to explain to you how the dream and missing meatball recipe got me to thinking that there should be a more mindful attitude toward celebrity recipe preservation. Toward that end, I have created Eating With The Stars, a blog that will allow me to help ensure that future generations will know what celebrities ate (allegedly) and give each and every star gay-zer the tools to recreate these recipes for perpetuity!