The I Hate to Cook Book (32 page)

4 slices bacon

4 slices sharp cheese

4 slices onion

4 eggs

toast or French bread

Chop the bacon and fry it until it’s crisp. (Scissors are handier than a knife for this.) Now drain off most of the fat and spread the bacon evenly around in the skillet. Then break the four eggs—individually—into the pan so they stay individual. Break the yolks with a fork. Put a big slice of cheese on each egg, and a slice of onion on top of that, and cover the skillet. When the onion slice is transparent and the cheese is melted, cut the whole works into four sections and serve it open-faced on toast or a slab of French bread.

Now, once in a while you may need a supper-type dish which you can prepare entirely in advance… for a poker party, for instance. Men usually seem to feel that after all the strenuous wrist exercise involved in an evening of stud, they need hearty nourishment. In this case, try:

     OLÉ     

6–8 servings

(Good with beer and French bread.)

8 ounces uncooked noodles

1 pound ground beef

1 large onion, grated

1 16-ounce can corn

1 can condensed cream of tomato soup

1 small can tomato sauce

1 teaspoon chili powder

½ teaspoon salt, or to taste

pepper

¼ cup grated sharp cheese

First, cook the noodles. While they cook, fry the meat and onion in a skillet until the meat browns, then add everything else except the cheese, and simmer till it’s well acquainted. In a big casserole dish, alternate layers of noodles and meat mix, then top it with the cheese. When you’re ready, or your husband is, bake it at 350˚ for thirty minutes.

     SYMPHONY BEEF     

(This is good for after the theater, should you want to slip into something filmy and cook a dish that makes people think you’re a better cook than you are.)

2 tablespoons butter

1 pint sour cream

1 16-ounce can artichoke hearts

½ cup dry white wine or dry vermouth

1 heaping tablespoon grated Parmesan

½ pound chipped beef

English muffins or buttered toast

Melt the butter in a skillet over low heat (or about 180˚ on the electric skillet) and then add the sour cream. Stir it thoroughly, and don’t panic if it is grainy and slightly lumpy at first—stirring smooths it. Slice the artichoke hearts quite thin, and add them to the sour cream, along with the wine, Parmesan, and beef. Stir all this, then keep it hot in the same low-temperature skillet till you need it. Serve it over hot buttered toast or English muffins, with more Parmesan on top.

And then, of course, there’s always shcrambled eggsh.

OR PEOPLE ARE TOO FAT ANYWAY

I
t is truly an awe-inspiring experience to gaze down the opulent ready-mix aisle of the supermarket, its shelves brilliant and bulging with nearly everything you ever heard of, from Lady Baltimore Cake to Hush Puppies, all ready for you to add water to, mix, and bake.

At moments like this, you see clearly how far science has come. Now if they will only hustle along with a cure for the common cold and the cobalt bomb, we may yet have our season in the sun.

I understand that the ready-mix people, through exhaustive surveys, learned that most women prefer not to have the en
tire job done for them. The theory is that if women realize they haven’t done a thing besides add water, mix, and set the pan in the oven, they miss the creative kick they would otherwise get from baking that cake or pan of muffins. The ready-mix people accordingly revised many of their recipes, and now you often add an egg, too.

But so far as we are concerned—we ladies who hate to cook—they needn’t have bothered. We don’t get our creative kicks from adding an egg, we get them from painting pictures or bathrooms, or potting geraniums or babies, or writing stories or amendments, or, possibly, engaging in some interesting type of psycho-neuro-chemical research like seeing if, perhaps, we can replace colloids with sulphates. And we simply love ready-mixes.

Indeed, in the ordinary course of human events, there is no reason why you should ever have to cook a dessert. With ready-mixes, fresh fruit, frozen fruit, canned fruit, and ice cream in thirty-seven fascinating flavors, your family should certainly be able to make out.

This chapter, therefore, contains no pastries, no soufflés, no fabulous meringue-chocolate-chip-cashew-nut tortes. Should you ever want to make one, your big fat overweight cookbook contains all kinds. But don’t ever feel guilty about
not
wanting to make one. As the sage has said, these things remain for a moment or two in your mouth and for the rest of your life on your hips. And you know what the doctors say.

Nor does this chapter contain any cozy desserts, like Aunt Hattie’s Rice Pudding or Emma’s Apple Crunch. These things are seldom good enough to be worth the trouble, when you hate to cook. Moreover, the ready-mix people, with their instant puddings and cake-top puddings, et cetera, et cetera, have taken care of this department with admirable thoroughness.

What this chapter does contain is one cockeyed cake recipe, a few frosting recipes, and a few cooky recipes—for those occa
sions when your ready-mix shelf is bare—plus some uncomplicated but rather festive things to do with fruit, ice cream, and odds and ends.

     COCKEYED CAKE     

(This is a famous recipe, I believe, but I haven’t the faintest idea who invented it. I saw it in a newspaper years ago, meant to clip it, didn’t, and finally bumped into the cake itself in the apartment of a friend of mine. It was dark, rich, moist, and chocolatey, and she said it took no more than five minutes to mix it up. So I tried it, and, oddly enough, mine, too, was dark, rich, moist, and chocolatey. My own timing was five and a half minutes, but that includes hunting for the vinegar.)

1½ cups sifted flour

3 tablespoons cocoa

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup sugar

½ teaspoon salt

5 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 tablespoon vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup cold water

Put your sifted flour back in the sifter, add to it the cocoa, baking soda, sugar, and salt, and sift this right into a greased square cake pan, about 9 x 9 x 2 inches. Now you make three grooves, or holes, in this dry mixture. Into one, pour the oil; into the next, the vinegar; into the next, the vanilla. Now pour the cold water over it all. You’ll feel like you’re making mud pies now, but beat it with a spoon until it’s nearly smooth and you can’t see the flour. Bake it at 350˚ for half an hour.

Then here are some easy
FROSTINGS
:

     GOOD OLD CONFECTIONERS’ SUGAR FROSTING