The I Hate to Cook Book (17 page)

6 servings

½ head cauliflower

½ large mild onion

cup sliced stuffed olives

½ cup oil-vinegar dressing

black pepper

small head of lettuce

2 to 3 ounces Roquefort cheese

Separate those little cauliflower florets and slice them thin. Slice the onion now, separate the slices into rings, and add them to the cauliflower slices along with the sliced olives. Now marinate it all in the dressing, with a good sprinkling of pepper, for anywhere from half an hour to overnight.

When you serve the salad, cut or tear the lettuce into small chunks, put it in a bowl, pour the marinated mix over it, and crumble the Roquefort on top.

     TOMARTICHOKES     

6 servings

6 big red tomatoes

salt, pepper

powdered dill

6 canned, well-drained artichoke hearts

mayonnaise

sour cream

lemon juice

curry powder

Drop the tomatoes into boiling water for a minute, so the skins will slip off easily. Then cut off the tops, scoop out the seeds and juice, and season them inside and out with salt, pepper, and the powdered dill if you have it. Don’t fret about it if you don’t. Into each and every tomato put a canned artichoke heart. (You could use frozen ones, too, but then you’d have to cook them first.) Then put them in the refrigerator and make a dressing from equal parts of mayonnaise and sour cream, with a bit of lemon juice and half a teaspoon of curry powder. Put this in the refrigerator, too. Just before you serve the tomatoes, spoon some of the dressing over each.

And so, finally, to the
FRUIT SALAD
, which is played mainly by ear. You peel and cut up some of whatever is available.

In summer: peaches, halved pitted plums, pitted black cherries, fresh pineapple chunks, avocados, red raspberries, honey-dew melon balls, cantaloupe balls, ripe whole strawberries, or any pretty combinations thereof. Don’t think you need to have a dozen different kinds in one salad, either. This isn’t the Waldorf-Astoria. Three is
quite
all right.

And in winter: canned mandarin orange segments, pineapple
chunks, fresh bananas, diced red apples (rind on), winter pears, grapefruit sections, green seedless grapes. Those frozen grapefruit sections are handy, incidentally, winter
or
summer. You’d hardly know the difference from fresh, and they save a lot of trouble.

Then you serve this on dark green romaine, preferably, or in hollowed-out melon halves. If you’re having people help themselves, you can serve it in a big hollowed-out watermelon. Or you can be absolutely revolutionary and serve it out of a bowl.

And you pass one of these three easy dressings:

     HONEY-LIME DRESSING     

Thin honey, to taste, with lime juice. (Bottled lime juice is very handy and lasts forever.)

     ORANGE MAYONNAISE     

Thin mayonnaise, to taste, with fresh or frozen orange juice.

     CHUTNEY CREAM     

1 cup sour cream

½ cup chopped chutney

juice of ½ lemon or lime

There.

OR BALLAST IS A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND

J
ust say
POTATO
to the lady who hates to cook, and ten to one she’ll think
BAKED
.

No wonder. The honest baked potato is a noble thing. And like your Little Basic Black Dress, nobody notices it especially but nobody objects to it either, and you can dress it up or down.

Also, it is easy to bake a potato, because you just scrub it and butter it and put it in the oven, where it will bake from 350˚ to 475˚, depending on what else is in there. And it doesn’t dirty up a single pan!

Now, it often happens, while you’re preparing dinner, that
your mind is on higher things, or lower, as the case may be, and presently you notice that you
forgot to put the potatoes in.
When this happens, you can parboil them for five minutes before putting them in to bake, or you can stick an aluminum skewer or an aluminum nail into each potato. Either of these maneuvers speeds up the baking process a good fifteen to twenty minutes.

Or, in the case of potatoes that you forgot to put around a roast in a 300˚ oven, you can parboil them
fifteen
minutes and then put them around the roast, and they’ll be done in about forty-five minutes.