The I Hate to Cook Book (9 page)
6 servings
2 cans tomato soup, condensed
½ can pea soup, condensed
1 can chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream
1 can crab meat (5 ounces), shrimp (4 ounces), or lobster (6.5 ounces)
¾ cup sherry
Heat everything but the wine in the top of your double boiler. Just before you serve it, add the sherry.
HONEST JOHN’S CLAM CHOWDER 
3 servings
(As a matter of fact, this isn’t exactly honest, because it doesn’t call for salt pork. But who has salt pork around these days besides butchers? The clams are canned, too, instead of fresh. But it tastes honest.)
2 slices bacon, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium potato, shredded on large-holed grater or thin-sliced
7-ounce can minced clams
2½ to 3 cups of milk
good sprinkling of salt and pepper
butter
Fry the chopped bacon and onion together till the onion is tender. Add the potato, the clam juice from the can, and enough water to cover the potato. Simmer till potato is tender—ten to fifteen minutes. Add the clams, the milk, and the salt and pepper, heat, and serve it with a good big chunk of butter melting in the middle.
That’s thirty. Of course, some months contain thirty-one days. But on the thirty-first, you eat out.
The Leftover
S
ome women can keep a leftover going like an eight-day clock. Their Sunday’s roast becomes Monday’s hash, which becomes Tuesday’s Stuffed Peppers, which eventually turn up as Tamale Pie, and so on, until it disappears or Daddy does. These people will even warm up stale cake and serve it with some sort of a sauce, as some sort of a pudding.
But when you hate to cook, you don’t do this. You just go around thinking you ought to. So, much as you dislike that little glass jar half full of Chicken à la King, you don’t throw it away, because that would be wasteful. Anyway, you read somewhere that
you can put spoonfuls of it into tiny three-cornered pastry affairs and serve them hot, as hors d’oeuvres.
Actually, you know, deep down, that you never will. You also know you won’t eat it yourself for lunch tomorrow because you won’t feel like it, and you know it won’t fit into tomorrow night’s dinner, which is going to be liver and bacon, and you know you can’t palm it off on Junior (kept piping hot in his little school-going thermos) because he wouldn’t even touch it last night when it was new. You know how Junior is about pimentos.
But still, you can’t quite bring yourself to dispose of it! So you put it in the refrigerator, and there it stays, moving slowly toward the rear as it is displaced by other little glass jars half full of leftover ham loaf and other things. And there it remains until refrigerator-cleaning day, at which time you gather it up along with its little fur-bearing friends, and, with a great lightening of spirit, throw it away.
Do you know the really basic trouble here? It is your guilt complex. This is the thing you have to lick. And it isn’t easy. We live in a cooking-happy age. You watch your friends re-doing their kitchens and hoarding their pennies for glamorous cooking equipment and new cookbooks called
Eggplant Comes to the Party
or
Let’s Waltz into the Kitchen
, and presently you to begin feel un-American.
Indeed, it is the cookbooks you already have that are to blame for your bad conscience and, hence, for your leftover problems. For instance, consider that two-thirds of a cupful of leftover creamed corn. They’ll tell you to use it as a base for something they call Scrumptious Stuffed Tomatoes. Mix some bread crumbs and chopped celery with the corn and season it well, they’ll say, with a fine vague wave of the hand, and then stuff this into your hollowed-out tomatoes and bake them.
Now, ideas like this are all very well for the lady who likes to cook. This is a challenge to her creative imagination. Further
more, she’ll know
how
to season it well (coriander? chervil?) and while the result may not be precisely Scrumptious, it will probably be reasonably okay.
However, if you hate to cook, you’ll do better to skip the creamed-corn gambit and simply slice those nice red tomatoes into thick chunks and spread them prettily on some nice green parsley or watercress and sprinkle them with salt and pepper and chopped chives and serve them forth. Because you’re not about to use much creative imagination on that stuffing, inasmuch as the whole idea didn’t send you very far to begin with; and your Scrumptious Stuffed Tomatoes are going to taste like tomatoes stuffed with leftover corn.
Then there is another thing these cookbooks do. They seem to consider
everything
a leftover, which you must do something with.
For instance, cake. This is like telling you what to do with your leftover whisky. Cake isn’t a leftover. Cake is cake, and it is either eaten or it isn’t eaten; and if the family didn’t go for that Mocha Frosting, you give the rest of the cake to the neighbor or to the lady downstairs before it gets stale. (Maybe
she’ll
make something out of it, but you won’t have to eat it. Maybe she’ll even throw it away, but if so, you won’t know about it, so it won’t hurt. Like what happened to that twenty-second batch of nameless kittens you finally had to take to the city pound, there are some things you don’t exactly want to know.) And certainly you don’t want to let the cake get stale so you can make a Stale-Cake Pudding for the family. They’re the ones who left so much of it the first time, remember?
Or cheese. Cookbooks will tell you what to do with your leftover cheese. But cheese isn’t a leftover; it’s a staple. If you’ll grate those odd bits and put them in a covered jar in your refrigerator,
toward the front
, you may remember to sprinkle it on things, sometimes, and use it for grilled cheese sandwiches. (Don’t be
lieve what they tell you about wrapping cheese in a cloth dipped in wine to keep it fresh, because this doesn’t work; it just wastes the wine. Vinegar, used the same way, is somewhat more satisfactory, but it is still an awful nuisance.)
And eggs! Most recipe books show tremendous concern about the egg white, if you didn’t use the white, or the egg yolk, if you didn’t use the yolk. There are four thousand things you can make and do with an egg white or an egg yolk, all of which call for more cooking and usually result in more leftovers, which is what you were trying to get away from in the first place.
The one thing they don’t mention is giving the egg yolk or the egg white to the dog. It’s very good for his complexion, and for cats’ complexions, too. What did that egg cost? No more than a nickel, probably, and half of that is two and a half cents, which would be cheap for a beauty treatment at twice the price.
Right here we’ve come to the heart of the matter. Your leftovers were never very expensive to start with. Does the wild rice get left over? Or the choice red out-of-season strawberries? No. It’s that dreary little mess of mixed vegetables, worth about six mills in a bull market. You have to think these things through.
Just one more word about the leftover before we get down to where the work is. Home Ec-sperts and other people who made straight A’s in Advanced Cream Sauce have gone so far as to rename leftovers “Plan-overs.” They actually want you to cook up a lot more of something than you’ll need, and then keep it around to ring exciting changes on, as they put it, through the weeks to come.
It’s true that certain people like certain things better the next day. Scalloped potatoes, when they’re fried in butter. Or potato salad. Or baked beans. Every family has its little ways. And it’s perfectly true that leftover Spanish Rice or Tamale Loaf makes an adequate stuffing for Baked Stuffed Green Peppers, if you get around to doing it before the Spanish Rice or Tamale Loaf starts looking disconsolate.
But when you hate to cook, don’t ever fall into the Plan-over Trap. You’ll end up hating yourself, too, as you think of that great pile of Something which you’ll have to plow through before you can once again face the world clear-eyed and empty-handed.
The word is this: Pare the recipe, if you need to, so that there is only enough for the meal you’re faced with. Then buy, as the French do, in small, niggling quantities. What is a lady profited if she gains two avocados for nineteen cents instead of one for a dime if she doesn’t need the second one and so lets it blacken away?
And the motto to paint on your refrigerator door is this:
WHEN IN DOUBT,
THROW IT OUT.
Just remember: if vegetables have been cooked twice, there aren’t enough vitamins left in them to dust a fiddle with. Furthermore, if your refrigerator is jam-packed with little jars, it will have to work too hard to keep things cold. Presently its arteries will harden, and you will have to pay for a service call—the price of which would more than buy a lovely dinner out for you and your husband, with red-coated servitors and soft music.
Finally, and possibly most important, all those leftovers are hard on the family’s morale when they open the refrigerator door. Wondering what’s for dinner, they begin to get a pretty grim idea, and presently they begin to wonder what’s with Mother. The inside of her icebox doesn’t look like the insides of the iceboxes they see in the magazine pictures, and Mother loses face.
Actually, the only sort of leftover you need to concern yourself with is meat. It takes more character than most of us have—even those of us who hate to cook—to throw out two or three pounds of cooked beef, lamb, ham, pork, or turkey. So let us consider the meat problem.
Before you do a thing with that great sullen chunk of protein, ask yourself a few questions:
Have you incorporated it into a dish of scalloped potatoes, with plenty of cheese on top?
Have you augmented it with a few slices of Swiss cheese from the delicatessen and served it forth as a Toasted Club Sandwich, in neat triangles surrounding a mound of coleslaw or fruit salad?
Have you re-presented it as an honest cold-cut platter, with deviled eggs in the middle, and ready-mix corn muffins on the side? It’s easy to forget the obvious.
And have you ground up a chunk of it with pickles and onions and celery and added some mayonnaise, as a spread for after-school sandwiches?
If you can truthfully answer yes to the foregoing, then, as the British say, you are for it. You are about to start cooking.
This is a good recipe you can make out of
any
leftover meat.
LET ’ER BUCK