Recipes Removed From Mccain Campaign Website

According to his website there is nothing John McCain likes more than to sit down to a home cooked dinner, lovingly prepared by his wife Cindy, of ahi tuna or pasta with turkey sausage finished up with a passion fruit mousse.

A selection of the healthy offerings were helpfully listed under the title "Cindy's recipes" for anybody wanting to eat in the style of the presumptive Republican nominee.

Until today that is, when the recipes section of the website was swiftly removed after it emerged they were not McCain family favorites at all, but had been lifted verbatim from the Food Network and television chef, Rachael Ray.

A spokesman for McCain admitted today that seven recipes posted on the official campaign site were not McCain originals.

The deception was first spotted by an environmental lawyer in New York who enjoys cooking, and was reported on the Huffington Post.

Tucker Bounds, the McCain spokesman, said the recipes had been posted to the site by an intern. "The intern was dealt with swiftly, and the site is down for revision," Bounds told reporters.

As for the senator's dinner favorites, Bounds said Cindy McCain liked to cook lemon chicken and beef stew.

Cindy, 53, McCain's second wife, has been central to her husband's campaign, standing by his side after he was forced to deny allegations of an affair in the New York Times.

In 1994 she admitted a three-year addiction to painkillers, which she blamed on two back operations. It also emerged that she had stolen pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a third world relief charity she had founded.

She entered a rehab program rather than face criminal charges.

Recipes spiced up the campaign of a former Republican rival, Mitt Romney, whose wife Ann contributed meatloaf cakes and Welsh skillet cakes to Romney's website.

There are no recipes yet on the websites of Democratic nominees Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.