The I Hate to Cook Book (15 page)
First, buy a pound can of little tiny ones. Drain them. Then slice three green onions and sizzle them a minute in one tablespoon of olive oil. Add the peas, and
¼ teaspoon thyme
dash of salt, pepper
¼ head lettuce, chopped
and stir it once in a while as it sits on a low burner and heats through.
BROILED ONIONS 
1-pound can small cooked onions (or frozen pearl onions, thawed and drained)
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup bread crumbs
¼ cup grated Parmesan
salt, pepper
You drain the onions first, then rinse them with cold water. Melt the butter in a pie tin and roll the onions in it. Now mix the bread crumbs, Parmesan, salt, and pepper together and sprinkle the mixture all over the little fellows, before setting them four inches beneath a hot broiler for seven minutes.
IDIOT ONIONS
3 servings
Combine a can of drained small onions with a can of cream sauce (or make two cups of your own and add a dash of Worcestershire to it). Put the mixture in a flat pan, sprinkle Parmesan heavily on top, and bake at 325˚ for twenty-five minutes.
CRISP TOMATOES
Cut some firm tomatoes into thick slices, salt and pepper them, dip them in cornmeal, and pan fry them in bacon fat, olive oil, or butter until they’re light brown.
PAINLESS SPINACH
4 servings
1 package frozen spinach
1 cut garlic clove
1 tablespoon butter
salt
pepper
half a lemon
First, cook the spinach and drain it. Then sizzle the garlic clove in the butter, remove the clove, and put the spinach in. Let it simmer for five minutes. Just before you serve it, salt and pepper it lightly and add a good squeeze of lemon juice.
SPINACH SURPRISE
4 servings
(The surprise is that there’s usually none left, even with dedicated antispinach people.)
1 package frozen chopped spinach
¼ cup chopped onion
¼ cup butter (½ stick)
pinch of salt
½ cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vinegar
Cook the spinach with the onion. Melt the butter, add the spinach, well drained, and stir it about. Then add the salt and sour cream, and blend it together. Finally, stir in the vinegar and serve.
And so to the
SALAD
department.
Many dishes have been called salad, including canned peach slices in lime Jell-O, bananas, walnuts, and whipped cream; and cottage cheese. Once, I knew a lady who pitted cooked prunes and stuffed them with peanut butter.
But when you hate to cook, you need concern yourself mainly with only two kinds: vegetable salads and fruit salads. Of the two, the vegetable salad is the more important because you don’t have to cut up all that fruit; and first and foremost among the vegetable salads is the
GREEN SALAD
.
It is important to fix firmly in your mind the proper proportions of the classic vinegar-and-oil dressing for the green salad. These are, roughly speaking,
1 part wine vinegar
and
2 parts olive oil
or, to put it another way,
2 parts olive oil
and
1 part wine vinegar.
(These proportions are stressed here because, when you hate to cook, it is easy to reverse them, and the result would pickle herring.)
Also, if you are serving wine with dinner, you should use lemon juice instead of the wine vinegar, although, if your friends are like my friends, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and they wouldn’t tell on you if they could.
Of course, you need a little salt and coarse-ground pepper, and you can rub the bowl with garlic if you like it, or crush half a garlic clove with the salt if you like it a lot. And that’s
it:
a nice, easy, understated dressing to use on romaine, endive, iceberg lettuce, limestone lettuce, fresh raw spinach leaves, or whatever you have around.
You may also add, if you like, anchovies and thin-sliced unpeeled cucumbers or artichoke hearts, sliced or unsliced, or chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and green onions or, improbably enough, canned mandarin orange segments, which are quite good with the vinegar-oil dressing, and pretty against the greenery.
And of course you may add croutons. On the off chance that you’d ever care to make them instead of buy them—they’re better when you make them, but they’re certainly more trouble—you can do it like this: