The I Hate to Cook Book (23 page)

8–10 servings

½ cup oil

1 large chopped onion

1 garlic clove, minced

1 pound ground beef

2 teaspoons chili powder

2½ teaspoons salt

dash of Tabasco

1 28-ounce can tomatoes

1 cup yellow cornmeal

1 cup milk

2½ cups cream-style corn

1 cup pitted ripe olives

Sauté the onion and garlic in the oil for five minutes, then add your beef and brown it. Next, add the chili powder, salt, Tabasco and tomatoes, cover it, and cook fifteen minutes. Now stir in the cornmeal and milk and cook it another fifteen minutes, stirring frequently, then add the corn and the olives. Pack all this into two greased loaf pans, brush the tops with oil, and bake them at 325˚ for an hour.

You might suggest to the lady who’s bringing the salad that she put some avocados in it. Then make sure somebody brings some French bread, or something, and that’s all you need.

OR YOUR BACK’S TO THE WALL

W
hen you hate to cook, you should never accept an invitation to dinner. The reason is plain: Sooner or later, unless you have luckily disgraced yourself at their home, or unless they get transferred to Weehawken,
you will have to return the invitation.

You know this, of course. You keep reminding yourself. But it is like telling a small boy to turn down a free ticket to the circus. Too well you remember the golden tranquility that bathes you, all day, when you know that
somebody else
is going to be doing that fast samba from pantry to sink. In spite of yourself, and with the
full knowledge that you’re doing wrong, you accept. And there you are, in debt again, and sooner or later, you ask
them
over.

Now, at first it isn’t so bad. With the dinner two weeks away, you even feel a bit complacent, thinking of the obligation you’re about to clear up. But as the count-down continues, the complacency gives way to grim, clear-eyed appraisal. You realize that no one with even a rudimentary brain would expect anyone to eat what you’re going to be setting before them—if, indeed, you can think of anything to set before them. You can’t remember a single company dish you ever cooked, and as you look through your recipe books, all the recipes say to add fresh chervil or sauce Noisette or serve on toast points. Not just buttered toast, but
toast points
, mind you, and by now you’re hardly up to finding the breadbox.

This chapter should remedy the situation. You can look at the following eight company menus with the comforting awareness that they are stand-bys of other people who hate to cook. If one dish takes a little doing, the others don’t, or, at the very least, can be done so far ahead of time that you’ve forgotten the pain of it.

Actually, eight company menus are quite enough. If you find you are serving the same thing too often to the same people, then invite someone else instead. It is much easier to change your friends than your recipes.

You may note a certain sameness about the suggested dessert in these menus. There are two reasons. For one thing, desserts are something we don’t come to real grips with until Chapter 9. For another, I’ve often felt it’s pretty presumptuous of cookbooks to tell me to make Individual Baked Alaskas when I am already up to my hips in Chicken Pilaff and Brussels Sprouts Calypso. I am not about to do it, either, because I know something easier and just as good, like that lovely orange-cream sherbet at the fancy-food store and the brownies I made two days ago. Or a rare, fine, immortal glass of Irish Coffee.

This is a real triple threat: coffee, dessert, and liqueur all in
one, and what else can make that statement? To make Irish Coffee, you needn’t fuss with dessert, dessert plates, dessert forks, coffeepot, sugar bowl, creamer, demitasse cups, wee spoons, liqueur bottles, and liqueur glasses. You merely need Irish whisky, instant coffee, hot water, sugar, and whipping cream (which you can whip before dinner, if you like), and, to contain it, Irish whisky glasses. These are stemmed goblets holding seven to eight fluid ounces. (The stems are important, because they’d otherwise be too hot to hold.)

     IRISH COFFEE     

Put one and a half ounces of Irish whisky into each glass. Add one and a half teaspoons of granulated sugar. Add one and a half teaspoons of instant coffee. Fill to within half an inch of the brim with hot water and stir. Now, on top, float the whipped cream, which should be thick but not stiff. (One half of a cup of cream, before whipping, is about right for four Irish Coffees.)

And serve.

Obviously, the saving here in money, time, dishwashing, and wear and tear on the leg muscles is phenomenal. And, last but not least, people don’t sit around drinking Irish Coffee until the cock crows. Because it is rich, one is enough. It serves as a pleasant punctuation mark to the evening, and, because it also has a slight somniferous effect on many people, your guests may eventually go home.

Slainte! Not to mention
bon soir.

And so to the menus.

Company Menu No. 1

Chicken-Artichoke Casserole

Plain Baked Potatoes

Fancy Sliced Tomatoes (
here
)

Irish Coffee

     CHICKEN-ARTICHOKE CASSEROLE     

for 6

3-pound cut-up frying chicken (or equal weight of chicken pieces)

1½ teaspoons salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

½ teaspoon paprika

6 tablespoons butter

¼ pound button mushrooms, cut into large pieces

2 tablespoons flour

cup chicken broth

3 tablespoons sherry wine

12- to 15-ounce can artichoke hearts

Salt, pepper, and paprika the chicken pieces. Then brown them prettily in four tablespoons of the butter and put them in a big casserole. Now put the other two tablespoons of butter into the frying pan and sauté the mushrooms in it five minutes. Then sprinkle the flour over them and stir in the chicken broth and the
sherry wine. While this cooks five minutes, you may open the can of artichokes and arrange them between the chicken pieces. Then pour the mushroom-sherry sauce over them, cover, and bake at 375˚ for forty minutes.

You can fix this in the morning, or the day before.

Put your middle-sized baking potatoes in the oven twenty minutes before you put the casserole in, and things will come out even.

That chicken-artichoke arrangement is not only quite good, it’s very pretty. But I’d like to mention here that it is unwise to expect your company meals to look
precisely
like the company meals you see in the full-color food spreads everywhere. In this connection, I have news for you: Food photographers do not play fair and square. It was once my privilege to watch a beef stew being photographed in the studio of a major food photographer. It was a superb stew—the gravy glistening richly, the beef chunks brown and succulent and in beautiful juxtaposition to the bright carrots and the pearly onions. I can make a respectable beef stew myself, but my gravy is never that gorgeous, and my onions invariably sink as though torpedoed. I inquired about this and discovered that the gravy had been dyed, and the onions had been propped up on toothpicks! Moreover, that very same morning, they told me, they’d had to lacquer a lobster. There you have it.