The I Hate to Cook Book (43 page)

3–4 servings

¼ pound chipped beef

1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup

1 cup beef broth

1 tablespoon sherry or white wine

You might parboil the chipped beef five minutes, so it won’t be too salty. Then add it to the soup which has been thinned with the broth and wine. (Better not use cooking sherry, because it contains salt.) Serve it on toast or anything handy.

     MUFFIN-TIN SUPPER     

3–4 servings

Grease two muffin tins that have good-sized cups. Fill one with corn-muffin mix, prepared as the package tells you to. Fill the other with corned-beef hash, indenting each mound of hash so that you can drop an egg into it. Bake at the temperature recommended for the muffins.

     BACK-COUNTRY HAM SLICE     

3 servings

1-pound ham slice, ¾ inch thick

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 tablespoons prepared mustard

¼ cup light brown sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon paprika

½ cup water

Fry the ham in the hot oil. Then remove it from the skillet and keep it hot—in a 200˚ oven. Pour all the other ingredients into the fat, cook five minutes, and put the ham back into it for another five minutes.

Now take your hat off.

OR WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR CHURN PADDLE STICKS

A
s a result of a combination of circumstances that could happen to anyone, I have been, for the last dozen years, rather intimately involved with household hints. During this period, more than ten thousand of them have sifted like counterfeit pennies through my fingers. I therefore feel that I speak with a certain modest authority when I say that most household hints are pretty terrible.

It isn’t that they don’t mean well, you understand; because they do. It’s just that they operate on the grim premise that
everything
is a problem. If you did everything they tell you to do, you’d never have time to make the beds.

“Do your ice-cube trays stick?” they ask, knowing full well they do. “Then put sheets of waxed paper underneath them, or oil their bottoms with cooking oil.” But everyone knows you either give them a good tug or a good kick, if you can kick that high, and that way you haven’t any soggy bits of waxed paper or oily old ice-cube trays to cope with. Sticking ice-cube trays are not, I repeat, a problem. They are merely a fact of life, like dilatory streetcars or hair-colored hair.

Then there is the Oops!-Don’t-throw-it-away! school. “Save that cup of leftover coffee to make delicious mocha pudding!” What nonsense! You’d be eating mocha pudding every night of your life. “Save those eggshells to put around the greenery in the yard!” Which is supposed to do something for it besides make it look like the city dump. Or, building to a truly frenetic climax, “Is that precious wool skirt riddled with moth holes? Don’t despair! Darn the holes, then get bright wool and embroider gay flowers over the darns. Very Tyrolean!” As I visualize that moth-eaten black-and-white-checked skirt of mine bedizened in this fashion, I can see that things are rough in the Tyrol.

Often, too, they want you to do things that wear a faintly unsavory aura. Cut up that old shower curtain and put the pieces under your table mats to protect the table. Use your old nylons to strain the jam.

And I haven’t even mentioned the abstruse-chemical type of household hint. For instance, they want you to buy two ounces of something like amyl acetate, which you’re not sure how to pronounce, let alone where to find. This is usually for the purpose of turning the spot on a stained garment into a ring, which can sometimes be removed later by a reputable dry cleaner. (Have you noticed that they always say
reputable
dry cleaner? Where would you go to find a nonreputable dry cleaner? All the dry cleaners I
have known have been honest and upright and hard-working and cheerful, their only grudge against life being that people keep trying to remove their own spots.)

This chapter contains seventy-five household hints, the most sensible of the previously mentioned ten thousand. You probably know a lot of them already. But I’ll say this for them: They all work, and not one of them can get you into any trouble. (Once, I tried to remove a small white heat mark from my grandmother’s walnut table with ammonia, as some household hint told me to do. The little heat mark turned into a big white cloudy smudge and remained that way until I finally called my reputable furniture refinisher.)

1. If you have a fireplace and occasionally need kindling, save your waxed cardboard milk and ice-cream cartons, and your candle stubs. They kindle quickly.

2. When you need ground nuts, it’s faster to crush them between sheets of waxed paper with your rolling pin.

3. When you burn yourself in the kitchen, vanilla will help ease the pain (apply it; don’t drink it). So will a paste of baking soda and water.

4. Cellophane-tape a paper sewing pattern to material instead of using pins. It lies flatter, and you can cut right through the tape.

5. If your daughter wears a pony-tail hairdo, give her a pipe cleaner to put it up with. It won’t pull, as a rubber band does.

6. Buttons stay on shirts longer if you coat the center of each with colorless nail polish. It seals the thread.

7. If you’re dieting to lose weight, use only one slice of bread for sandwiches. Cut it in half horizontally, so you have two slices an eighth of an inch thick. Makes a better-tasting sandwich, too.

8. When you sew, the thread won’t tangle so often if you knot the ends separately instead of together.

9. When you or the children must take a vile-tasting medicine, put an ice cube on the tongue for a moment beforehand. This temporarily paralyzes the taste buds.

10. Even very sound sleepers, who customarily sleep through the ring of an alarm clock, will wake up if you set the clock on a tin plate.

11. When you buy cellophane-wrapped cupcakes and notice that the cellophane is somewhat stuck to the frosting, hold the package under the cold-water tap for a moment before you unwrap it. The cellophane will then come off clean.

12. If you don’t own enough flower holders to take care of the summer crop of sweetpeas, you can make your own with a nail or an ice pick and half a potato (or apple). Put the latter, cut side down, in the bowl, and punch holes in it. You can also pour enough melted paraffin in the bowl to make a good-sized lump, then punch holes in that.

13. If you must remove a splinter from a child’s sensitive finger, you can partially anesthetize the skin with an ice cube before proceeding with the surgery.

14. If the clothes on your clothes-closet pole show an unhappy tendency to huddle together, it helps to notch the clothes pole, at about two-inch intervals. Hangers will then stay in the notches.

15. If you wrap a once-used but not-used-up steel-wool cleansing pad in aluminum foil so it’s airtight, it won’t rust away.

16. Paint your garden tools, or handles thereof, a lively lavender or a hot pink. Then your borrowing neighbors may remember to return them; and if they don’t, you can recognize them yourself, and retrieve them tactfully.

17. To make your sink whiter, put a layer of paper towels in it,
then pour household bleach until the towels are soaked. Leave them there half an hour or so, then remove the towels and scrub the sink with cleansing powder.

18. When your hands are badly stained from gardening, add a teaspoon of sugar to the soapy lather you wash them in.

19. When you’re doing any sort of baking, you get better results if you remember to preheat your cooky sheet, muffin tins, or cake pans.

20. If you apply a slice of onion to a bee sting, it will stop the pain and the swelling.

21. You can get more juice from a little dried-up lemon if you heat it for five minutes in boiling water before you squeeze it.

22. You can make a good emergency New Year–morning ice bag by putting cracked ice into a rubber glove and tying the wrist tightly.

23. To make chromium-ware absolutely brilliant, polish it with dry baking soda, using a dry cloth.

24. When a rubber shower mat gets that well-used and uninviting look, you can clean it easily with a small brush and a few drops of kerosene in warm water.

25. It is easy to remove the white membrane from oranges—for fancy salads or desserts—by soaking the oranges in boiling water for five minutes before you peel them.

26. If your butter is too hard to cream, it speeds things up to shred it into a warmed bowl.

27. You can get a small sick youngster to eat more food, more happily, if you serve him an eight-course meal in a muffin tin. Many little bits of things—a spoonful of applesauce, a few green beans, a few little candies, et cetera—are more appetizing than three items in quantity.

28. If you own a shaggy dog—or any sort of a dog who sheds—it’s a good idea to vacuum him frequently. Then
you won’t have to vacuum the floors and furniture so often. Dogs usually like it, and so do your dark-suited guests.

29. Tooth paste, or tooth powder, on an old toothbrush is excellent for polishing jewelry.

30. If you must drive a nail into a plaster wall, put a small bit of cellophane tape over the spot first. Then (usually) the plaster won’t crack.