Liberace was born on this day one hundred years ago. Happy birthday Lee!
Recently I got an email from my chum, food writer Orlando Murrin, asking me if I’d ever seen The Loved One which features Liberace playing an undertaker.
Well yes, I had, but not for a donkey’s age so I skipped over to eBay and got myself a copy of it on DVD.
By coincidence, a few days later, my chum Heather emailed me to ask if I’d seen Liberace making lasagna on YouTube? Well no I hadn’t but what a JOY to behold!
MACADAMIA NUTS?!
The main reason Heather sent a link to this clip was that Lee uses a chopper. We have in-joke about the time I visited her when she lived in Italy and she bought a chopper
I knew that Liberace’s birthday was on the horizon so what do you think I did? Got hold of his cookbook of course, and rustled up the lasagna in his
The lasagna was utterly DELICIOUS! Sooooo tasty. But it’s not the same recipe as the one Lee demonstrated on his TV show. No macadamia nuts in this one baby!
The Loved One was utterly bonkers. What a crazy movie. But so good in so many ways. A real treat of an evening combined with the lasagna.
Liberace Cooks was ridiculously expensive, as was The Loved One DVD. Add in the lasagna ingredients and this dinner and a movie probably cost me about £60 – haha! Well, as my friend Sanja would say, who bloody cares? Let’s just live like we were Liberace!
I can’t find it online, but Liberace always makes me think of the Two Ronnies sketch where Ronnie Barker (in a balaclava, I think!) says if he was as rich as Liberace he’d be richer than Liberace because he’d have a window cleaning round on the side :-))
Haha – I can just picture Ronnie Barker saying that, brilliant!
Well there was never anything cheap about Liberace so I think he would approve your ‘extravagance’ . ‘The Loved One’ was indeed bonkers and I could never get it out of my mind when watching Robert Morse’s great performance in ‘Mad Men’ . Sounds like a great Lasagne though . Think I’d omit the the ricotta/cottage cheese . Mozzarell and parmesan enough for me . But then I’m not Liberace !
Oh no Mark! This makes me want to watch the entire series of Mad Man again. I just LOVED that series. But have to admit that I don’t remember Robert Morse in it… OMG OMG OMG – just googled and now I realise – the beard! I hadn’t recognised him. Oh wow! Thanks for pointing this out. He’s in a Murder, She Wrote too…
I wasn’t really aware of the cottage cheese as I was eating the lasagna. Not even when I was standing up at the kitchen counter with my elbows on the table eating big forkfuls out of the cooking pan when a bit smashed the other night. Haha – just remembered, I still have half of it in the fridge – YUM!
Ha ha ! We’ve all been there when ‘a bit smashed’ .. Yes, Morse is a slow burn in Mad Men because he’s also substantially older and I’m really only used to seeing him in stuff from 60’s .
I would never have recognised him, but I loved that character!