The I Hate to Cook Book (39 page)

• And speaking of lemonade, you can serve it in clear plastic glasses with a drop of different-colored food coloring in each, which looks mighty festive, and furthermore the little children can then tell whose is which.

• Little children will often arrive at a birthday party ahead of time. They just can’t wait, that’s all. So it’s a good idea to have a card table set up somewhere, with crayons and coloring books on it, to occupy them till the party starts. If you get desperate, you can also improvise a ring-toss game out of empty pop bottles and rubber jar rings.

• If you ever find yourself making popcorn balls, mold the candied popcorn around the candy end of a lollipop.

• You needn’t set a party table at all if you’ll round up a bunch of shoe boxes and do this: In each box put wrapped-up sandwiches, a paper cup of Orange-Carrot Salad (see Menu No. 4), cookies, a small carton of chocolate milk, a straw, a paper napkin, and a spoon. Then wrap each box like a present, in bright paper, with a name tag for each, and let the guests open and eat their lunch on the playroom floor.

• The little ones think it’s lots of fun to write secret messages with invisible ink; and on rainy afternoons, there are worse things they could be doing. So you give them a cup of milk and let them write with it, on plain white bond paper. (The brush from their set of paints works fine.) Then you stick around, for safety purposes, while they hold the paper close
to the fire, or over a hot stove burner, and see the message appear.

• Also, if they are out of modeling clay and need some desperately, you can mix

1 cup salt

1 cup flour

1 cup water

plus a drop of food coloring. Then cook it over low heat till it thickens, and let it cool.

• When little children are eating popsicles in the living room, it is a good idea to punch a hole in a small paper plate and slip it up the stick so it’s just under the popsicle proper, to catch the drips.

• Also, it is nice to know that you can keep the little ones out of your hair for a bit while you’re arranging a birthday party by having them stick balloons on wood or plaster surfaces, like walls and doors. They rub the blown-up balloon briskly on the wool carpet (or anything else that’s wool), and it will then stick to the wall, more or less, by static electricity.

You can turn it into a party game, too, by having a contest to see whose balloon sticks the longest, though I doubt that this will ever replace pro football.

OR THIS IS THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE

D
ishonesty never got anyone anywhere, or, at the very least, it’s apt to trip you up when the last trumpet sounds. So it is just as well to admit, straight out, that few last-minute suppers taste as good as the other kind.

The ones that do are the good broiled steak, the good broiled chop, the superb omelet tossed off by the superb omelet-maker who loves to cook, and a very few other things which I can’t think of just now.

The authorities all put immense faith in the Freezer and the Emergency Shelf, where the last-minute-supper problem is con
cerned. But actually, when you hate to cook, they don’t solve too much. All freezers belonging to women who hate to cook show a basic and rather touching similarity. They contain a firm, enduring foundation of soup bones, flanks, shanks, and briskets, which you certainly intend to do something about someday, topped with an extremely here-today-gone-tomorrow frosting of frozen chicken, soups, pies, TV dinners, and T-bones. As for a decent emergency shelf, it’s practically impossible to maintain one. When you have a few choice goodies around, like an all-prepared Whole Canned Pheasant or a complete Mexican Dinner from Old Cuernavaca, they burn a hole in your pantry shelf, and you declare an existing State of Emergency until the shelf is empty.

Thus, in one way or another, your goodies are gone where the woodbine twineth, and there you are again at quarter to six, with your hat still on, staring at a pound of hamburger or a can of tuna.

This chapter contains a number of ideas on what to do with them, and with other items of their ilk: chipped beef, corned beef, canned crabmeat, et cetera. (You can, you see, have
some
sort of an emergency shelf, after all; you must merely make sure that none of the items is so exciting in itself that you eat it up slam-bang, willy nilly. No one is going to go hog wild at the sight of a can of tuna or mushroom soup.)

Entrées only are included here, because the vegetables in a last-minute supper are, as we all know, strictly a catch-as-catch-can proposition.

Desserts are not included either, for the same reason. Your big fat cookbook will tell you to “combine two delectable canned fruits, such as Bing cherries and apricots, add a little sherry, with a puff of ready-whipped cream on top.” But when you hate to cook, you wouldn’t do that for a last-minute supper, because it’s too much work, and you wouldn’t have those things on hand anyway. Also, the family might get confused and think it was Sunday.

     SIMPLEBURGERS     

4 servings

Mix some chopped onion, salt, and pepper with your pound of hamburger and fry some patties. Keep them hot somewhere, and to the fat remaining in the pan add

½ cup heavy cream

3 tablespoons Worcestershire

Stir it up, simmer a minute, then put the patties on a platter and pour the sauce on top.

     FAST BALLS     

4–5 servings

Mix up

1 pound hamburger

½ cup bread crumbs, hard or soft

½ cup milk

Shape it into small balls and brown them in butter. Next, stir in

1 package onion-soup mix

1 cup water

and mix it around gently so you don’t break the meatballs. Then simmer it while you cook quick brown rice to serve it on.

     SKINNYBURGERS     

4 servings

Make eight
thin
patties of seasoned hamburger—it’s best to roll them between sheets of waxed paper. Between two patties place a piece of sharp cheese and a thin slice of onion. Pinch the edges together, then fry or broil as usual.

     SHERRYBURGERS