The I Hate to Cook Book (3 page)

2 chopped onions

1 teaspoon salt, dash of pepper

1 can cream of tomato soup thinned with ½ can water (or celery or mushroom soup thinned likewise)

1 big raw potato, sliced

piece of bay leaf
*

Put the lid on and put the casserole in a 275˚ oven. Now go back to bed. It will cook happily all by itself and be done in five hours.

Incidentally, a word here about herbs and seasonings. These recipes don’t call for anything exotic that you buy a box of, use once, and never again. Curry powder, chili powder, oregano, basil, thyme, marjoram, and bay leaf are about as far out as we get. And if your family says, “What makes it taste so funny, Mommie?” whenever you use any herbs at all, you can omit them (although if you omit chili from chili or curry from curry, you don’t have much left, and you’d really do better to skip the whole thing).

But as a rule, don’t hesitate to cut the amount of a seasoning way down, or leave it out, when it’s one you know you don’t like. This goes for green pepper, pimento, and all that sort of thing, too. (I mention this only because we ladies who hate to cook are easily intimidated by recipes and recipe books, and we wouldn’t dream of substituting or omitting; we just walk past that particular recipe and never go back again.)

We must assess ourselves. I, by way of example, think rosemary is for remembrance, not for cooking, and the amount of
rosemary I have omitted from various recipes would make your head swim. The dishes turned out quite all right, too.

     PEDRO’S SPECIAL     

3 ample servings

(Very easy; very good with beer; good even without it.)

1 pound ground round steak

1 chopped onion

1 garlic clove, minced

1 8-ounce can tomato sauce plus
can tomato juice, beef broth, or water

¼ teaspoon oregano

2 tablespoons chili powder

1 16-ounce can kidney or pinto beans with liquid

1 medium-sized bag corn chips

a bit of lettuce

more chopped onion

Brown together, in a little oil, the ground meat, onions, and garlic. Stir in the tomato sauce, oregano, and chili powder. Now dust off a good-sized casserole, grease it, and alternate layers of this mixture with layers of beans and corn chips, ending with corn chips. Bake it, covered, at 350˚ for forty-five minutes, and uncover it for the last ten. Before you serve it, strew some shredded lettuce and chopped raw onion on top, for that Olde-Tyme Mexicali look.

     BEEF À LA KING     

4 servings

(Don’t recoil from the odd-sounding combination of ingredients here, because it’s actually very good. Just shut your eyes and go on opening those cans.)

All you do is mix up these things in the top of your double boiler

1 can condensed chicken noodle soup, undiluted

1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup, undiluted

2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced

¼ pound chipped beef (you can parboil
*
it first to make it a little less salty, but you don’t have to)

½ green pepper, chopped

3 tablespoons chopped pimento

1 teaspoon minced fresh onion (or ½ teaspoon onion flakes)

cup grated cheese (whatever kind you have in the fridge, or Parmesan if you have it)

1 small can mushrooms (if you have one)

Heat it all over hot water and serve it on practically anything—toast, English muffins, rice, or in patty shells.

     SKID ROAD STROGANOFF     

4 servings

8 ounces uncooked noodles

1 beef bouillon cube

1 garlic clove, minced

cup chopped onion

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 pound ground beef

2 tablespoons flour

2 teaspoons salt

½ teaspoon paprika

1 6.5-ounce can mushrooms

1 can condensed cream of chicken soup, undiluted

1 cup sour cream

chopped parsley

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion, and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink. Then add the soup and simmer it—in other words, cook on low flame under boiling point—ten minutes. Now stir in the sour cream—keeping the heat low, so it won’t curdle—and let it all heat through. To serve it, pile the noodles on a platter, pile the stroganoff mix on top of the noodles, and sprinkle chopped parsley around with a lavish hand.

Now, you noticed that chopped parsley in the Stroganoff we just passed? This is very important. You will notice a certain dependence, in this book, on
PARSLEY
(which you buy a bunch of, wash, shake, and stuff wet into a covered Mason jar, and store in the re
frigerator, where it will keep nicely practically forever), and
PARMESAN
(which, if you were a purist, you’d buy a rocklike chunk of, and grate it as you need it. Inasmuch as you’re not, you buy it in bulk at an Italian delicatessen or in a box with holes in the top, at the grocer’s), and
PAPRIKA
(which you buy an ordinary spice box of and keep handy on the kitchen stove).

The reason for these little garnishes is that even though you hate to cook, you don’t always want this fact to show, as it so often does with a plateful of nude food. So you put light things on dark things (like Parmesan on spinach) and dark things on light things (like parsley on sole) and sprinkle paprika on practically everything within reach. Sometimes you end up with a dinner in which everything seems to be sprinkled with something, which gives a certain earnest look to the whole performance, but it still shows you’re trying.