The I Hate to Cook Book Read Online Free PDF Page B

the salami and the onions. Add them, plus the bacon you just cooked, to the soup. Parsley and pepper it up, and serve.
         BISQUE QUICK     
    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.

CHAPTER 2
The Leftover
    OR EVERY FAMILY NEEDS A DOG
    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 thatyou 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