The I Hate to Cook Book (12 page)
(This is so simple it’s embarrassing; but everyone likes it, including little children, which is a big point.)
You cut the leftover pork into strips, removing as much fat as you can. If you saved some of the good brown pan drippings, add a little water—say a third of a cup—stir it up and heat, then add enough chicken broth to make a reasonable amount of sauce. (If you didn’t save any drippings, the broth alone is all right.) You now add the pork strips to this and heat them in it, then pour it all over cooked, hot, drained Chinese noodles. Top with chopped green onions and pass the soy sauce.
SUB GUM YUK 
3–4 servings
First you take a can of chow mein noodles and put three quarters of it in a bowl. Set the rest aside for topping later.
Now mix up with the noodles you put in the bowl
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
¼ cup water
1 cup diced leftover pork
1 cup sliced celery
¼ cup chopped onion
½ teaspoon salt, pepper
2 teaspoons soy sauce or sherry
¼ cup chopped cashews or walnuts
Put this into a buttered casserole dish, top with the rest of the noodles, and if you have any more nuts around, in addition to that quarter-cupful, put them on top of the noodles. Bake, uncovered, at 350˚ for thirty minutes. (This is very good, incidentally, made with a 7-ounce can of chunk tuna instead of the leftover pork.)
L
EFTOVER CHICKEN
: Who ever has any leftover chicken? I never have any to speak of, and neither does anyone else I know—just a leftover drumstick once in a while, and what you do with that is eat it.
L
EFTOVER TURKEY
is, of course, a bird of a different feather. The following two recipes are good because they don’t make the starry-eyed assumption that you have a lot of gravy and dressing left over.
TURKEY DIVAN
5–6 servings
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup (thinned slightly with 2 tablespoons sherry and a little heavy cream)
1 package frozen broccoli, cooked (or thawed and drained)
6 good-sized slices of turkey
grated Parmesan cheese
Put about one-fourth of the soup mixture in a buttered casserole. Put the broccoli in, cover it with slices of turkey meat, and pour on the rest of the sauce. Sprinkle the Parmesan generously on top and bake at 350˚, uncovered, for about twenty minutes.
TURKEY TETRAZZINI
5–6 servings
(This isn’t exactly a lead-pipe cinch, because you have to make cream sauce; but if you ever have to have company the day after Thanksgiving, you’ll thank me for it.)
½ pound uncooked spaghetti
¼ pound fresh mushrooms
5 tablespoons butter
cup flour
2 cups turkey or chicken broth
1 cup light cream
salt, pepper
2 tablespoons sherry
2 cups diced turkey
½ cup grated Parmesan
First you cook the spaghetti the way the package tells you to. Now slice the mushrooms and sauté them in a tablespoon of the butter till they’re light brown.
Then you make the cream sauce: Blend four tablespoons of butter with the flour in the top of a double boiler, add the turkey or chicken broth, and cook it, stirring, till it’s smooth and thick. Add the cream, salt, pepper, and sherry.
Now divide the sauce in half. In one half put the turkey meat, and in the other half put the mushrooms and cooked spaghetti. (At this point you may wonder why you ever started this, but actually you’re nearly out of the woods.)
Put the spaghetti-mushroom half in a greased casserole and make a hole in it. Into the hole pour the turkey half. Top it with the Parmesan and bake, uncovered, at 400˚ for twenty minutes.
And next time, for heaven’s sake, get a
little
turkey!
Vegetables, Salads, Salad Dressings
O
nce I knew a girl who just loved vegetables. You didn’t dare leave this little bunny alone with a relish tray or it would be instantly deflowered of its cauliflower florets and stripped clean of its carrot strips.
But this girl is in the minority. For cold scientific proof, do this: On one side of a plate, put a stack of marinated string beans; on the other side, put a heap of smoked oysters. Then observe carefully which gets left. You needn’t even be that fancy. A can
of salted peanuts will win over the string beans, hands down, every time.
Facts must be faced. Vegetables simply don’t taste as good as most other things do. And there isn’t a single vegetable, hot or cold, that stands on its own two feet the way a ripe peach does, or a strawberry. Even sweet corn needs butter and salt. (It is interesting to note that vegetables beginning with A are the most self-sufficient: artichokes, asparagus, avocados, which have really slithered out of the fruit kingdom by this time into the vegetable kingdom, no matter what the botanists say. But the farther down the alphabet you go, through rutabagas, spinach, and turnips, the more hopeless they become, given all the butter and salt you’ve got.)
Actually, the food experts know this, too, way down deep. You can tell they do, from the reliance they put on adjectives whenever they bump into a vegetable. “And with it serve a big bowl of tiny, buttery, fresh-from-the-garden beets!” they’ll cry. But they’re still only beets, and there’s no need to get so excited about it.
Never make the mistake of combining two rather repulsive vegetables in the hope that any good will come of it.
Two wrongs never make a right
. Once I knew a lady who cooked big carrots and hollowed out their middles and filled the resultant canoes with canned peas.
In order to make most vegetables fit to eat, you must cover up the basic taste of the vitamins with calories. You use butter, oil, sour cream, nuts, chopped bacon, mushrooms, and cheese, as well as lemon juice, vinegar, herbs, and a lot of other things that we shall come to presently.
This is not only fattening, for the most part, but it is also a lot of trouble. You’re certainly not going to do it very often. There is no reason you should, either. The children must learn sooner or later that life isn’t all beer and skittles, and your husband knows it anyhow. It won’t hurt them a bit to eat their plain buttered vegeta
bles at gunpoint, with a running commentary by you on what will happen to their teeth and complexions and bottoms if they don’t.