The I Hate to Cook Book (24 page)

Company Menu No. 2

Vichyssoise
(cold, canned, topped with chopped green onions)

Veal Cutlets Victoria

Fresh Fruit Salad with Honey-Lime Dressing (
here
)

Hot Rolls

Irish Coffee

     VEAL CUTLETS VICTORIA     

for 6

6 veal cutlets

½ cup olive oil

salt, pepper

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 large onions, sliced thin

6 peeled tomatoes, sliced thin

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon pepper

First, sauté the cutlets in the olive oil until they’re light brown, salt and pepper them, and put them in a casserole. Then sauté the garlic and onions in the same oil until they’re light brown, too. Now add the tomatoes to this and brutally crush it all to a pulp with a potato masher or a wooden spoon. Add the seasonings (and don’t omit the cloves for fear the whole thing will taste like a
spice cooky, because it won’t; it will just taste interesting and very good). Simmer the sauce for five minutes, pour it over the cutlets, cover, and bake at 350˚ for forty minutes.

Put the rolls in a dampened paper bag in the oven for the last ten minutes.

Your fruit for the salad is presumably cut up, sprinkled with lemon juice so it won’t get brown, in a bowl in the refrigerator, waiting to be spooned into melon halves or onto lettuce leaves.

A note about rolls and bread. When you hate to cook, you certainly don’t ever make your own. If, somewhere in town, you can get the honest, true, genuine, tough-crusted, sour-dough French bread, your troubles are over. You needn’t do a thing to it except set it on the table with a bread knife.

Good bakery rolls are next best, heated in that dampened paper bag for a few minutes, along with whatever else is in the oven. If you use frozen rolls, it’s handiest to thaw and bake them first, early in the day, because they usually demand a hot oven. Then reheat them briefly—the same dampened-paper-bag bit—in the oven that’s cooking the dinner.

Company Menu No. 3

Wild Rice and Chicken Livers

Green Salad with Anchovies and Cucumbers

Hot Rolls

Irish Coffee

     WILD RICE AND CHICKEN LIVERS     

for 4–5

(Note: You blanch at the price of a box of wild rice, but as part of a main dish, it doesn’t cost as much as steaks or a roast.)

1 cup uncooked wild rice, washed and drained

3 cups boiling water

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon all-purpose seasoning

tiny pinch of thyme

6 sprigs parsley, chopped

2 sprigs celery leaves, chopped

½ bay leaf

1 medium onion, chopped

½ cup butter

1 pound chicken livers

grated Parmesan

Put the rice and all the seasonings except the onion into the boiling water, then cover and simmer it fifty minutes. Stir it occasionally, and add a little more water if you need to. While this is going on, sauté the onion in half the butter till it’s very light brown, then add the chicken livers and cook five minutes. Now mix the chicken livers, onion, and rice together, pour it into a buttered casserole, and dot it with the rest of the butter. Sprinkle a little Parmesan on top and bake it, uncovered, at 375˚ for fifteen minutes.

Next we come to the honest roast-beef dinner.

Never scorn the noble prime rib or the rolled sirloin tip. Remember, most men like plain meat better than a casserole, because
most men like a tune they can whistle. Show me the man who doesn’t like a juicy pink slab of good roast beef (followed by an Irish Coffee) and I’ll show you a vegetarian who’s on the wagon.

Company Menu No. 4

Roast of Beef

Oven-roasted Potatoes

Horse-radish Cream Dressing

Spiced Crab Apples (from the grocer)

Very Edible String Beans (
here
)

Irish Coffee

     ROAST BEEF     

Roast the meat, with the potatoes around it, as your big fat cookbook tells you to—probably twenty-two minutes per pound in a 300˚ oven. Be sure the meat is at room temperature, too, when you put it into the oven.

     HORSE-RADISH CREAM DRESSING