The I Hate to Cook Book (30 page)

Add onion-soup mix to a good big ripe mashed avocado, with one tablespoon of lemon juice.

     OLIVE-OYSTER DIP     

You start, of course, with your package of cream cheese. Cream it with mayonnaise, a tablespoon at a time, until it’s smooth and thick, then add a small jar of chopped-up smoked oysters and half a cupful of minced ripe olives, a bit of garlic salt, and a dash of lemon.

Another good thing to remember, in the canapé line, is stuffed eggs. They are easy, and they always get eaten up, which is important. Leftover canapés are difficult to cope with except by following our enduring Leftover Rule (
here
).

     OLIVE EGGS     

Hard boil some eggs, devil the yolks as you customarily do—with mayonnaise, mustard, sugar, vinegar, salt, pepper—and put a small pimento-stuffed olive in each egg, too.

     GUSSIED EGGS     

Hard boil some eggs and cut them lengthwise in three wedges (which makes the eggs look fancier and go farther). Then, when you devil the yolks, add anchovy paste to taste, or chili sauce, or deviled ham. Or you can add curry to them and put a little caviar on top, which makes a very gussied egg indeed.

About that anchovy paste, incidentally. A tube of it will keep almost forever in your refrigerator. A friend of mine has one she’s kept for six years (her husband can’t stand anchovy paste), and it’s still going strong.

     HORSE-RADISH BREAD     

Combine two tablespoons of horse-radish with a quarter of a cup of butter. Spread on thin-sliced bread rounds.

     POTTED CHEESE     

3 8-ounce packages sharp processed cheese

1 pound bacon, fried crisp, crumbled, drained

1 bunch green onions, diced small

Mix it all up and put it in a pretty oven-proof bowl, then bake it at 400˚ for twenty minutes. Serve hot or cold, as you like, with crackers.

     PORTED CHEESE     

(No cooking at all.)

Grate or grind half a pound of any processed cheese, then mash it till it’s smooth. Add two or three tablespoons of port wine, put in as many caraway seeds as you like—enough so they’re noticeable, anyhow—then press it into a pretty jar you can serve from. Cover it tightly and store it in the refrigerator.

And so we come to another well-known nonessential—the snack in the wee small hours.

There is no reason, of course, why anyone should eat anything at this time except for babies on the 2:00 a.m. feeding. Yet people do. After a full dinner and a football game or a movie or a committee meeting or practically any other sort of evening activity, people eat.