The I Hate to Cook Book (19 page)

(Easy, fast, and good with fish or anything else with which you like French fries.)

Cut middle-sized baking potatoes in half, the long way. With a knife, score the cut sides crisscross fashion, about a quarter of an inch deep. Mix a little salt and dry mustard with butter—allowing a scant tablespoon of butter for each potato half—and spread this
on the potatoes. Bake them as usual, anywhere from 350˚ to 475˚ for an hour.

     FAST CHEESE SCALLOP     

3–4 servings

You make about one and a half cups of cream sauce (see recipe on
here
) seasoned with dry mustard and a bit of Worcestershire (or use somewhat thinned celery soup) and pour it over canned white potatoes—about two cups, or a one-pound can—in a casserole dish. Put plenty of grated cheese on top, and bake, uncovered, at 350˚ for twenty-five minutes.

     PARMESAN POTATOES     

6–8 servings

(Lovely and creamy and fattening, and good in the summertime with a barbecued steak)

4 large peeled potatoes, sliced thin

2 cups milk

1 teaspoon salt

dash of pepper

½ cup heavy cream

cup grated Parmesan

Put the potatoes, milk, salt, and pepper in the top of your double boiler over boiling water, and cook for thirty minutes. Now pour this into a baking dish, pour on the cream, and top it with the Parmesan. Bake at 350˚ for twenty minutes.

     SOMETHING ELSE TO DO WITH NEW POTATOES BESIDES BOILING THEM AND ROLLING THEM IN MELTED BUTTER AND PARSLEY     

Boil them, unpeeled. After they’re tender, slice them, still unpeeled, into a skillet that contains a lump of butter, melted, and some chopped green onions. Fry them gently, stirring once in a while, and chop some parsley into them, just before serving.

Then there are
SWEET POTATOES
. It’s nice to know that they’ve recently repealed the law that made marshmallows mandatory in every dish of baked sweet potatoes. You are now perfectly within your rights to mash canned sweet potatoes with a little orange juice, butter, and brown sugar to taste, then pile them into a buttered baking dish with a little more brown sugar on top. You bake these, covered, for thirty minutes at 350˚, then uncovered until they brown.

Or you can make

     SOLLY’S SWEET POTATOES     

4–6 servings

(A handy item, incidentally, when you have foolishly volunteered to bring something.)

5 canned sweet potatoes

2 unpeeled oranges

salt, pepper

butter

brown sugar

½ cup honey

Cut the potatoes deftly into inch-thick slices. Slice the unpeeled oranges
very
thin. Then alternate thin layers in a casserole dish like this: potatoes, orange slices, salt, pepper, dots of butter, two tablespoons of brown sugar. Pour the honey over the top now, and bake, uncovered, at 350˚ for forty-five minutes.

Don’t fret too much about
NOODLES
. Whatever you do to them, they remain noodle-like, which Providence probably intended. For a slight change of pace, you can put a good teaspoonful of instant bouillon into the noodle water, and serve them with lots of butter and lots of paprika. Or you can skip the paprika in favor of poppy seeds, enough to speckle them thoroughly. But don’t expect too much.

As for
MACARONI
, the following recipe is handy, because it will stretch a meal when the pork chops turn out to be smaller than you thought they were. It’s a good main dish, too.

     MAMA’S MACARONI