The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken Read Free Book Online Page B

the vegetable kingdom, no matter what the botanists say. But the farther down the alphabet you go, through rutabagas, spinach, and turnips, the more hopeless they become, given all the butter and salt you’ve got.)
    Actually, the food experts know this, too, way down deep. You can tell they do, from the reliance they put on adjectives whenever they bump into a vegetable. “And with it serve a big bowl of tiny, buttery, fresh-from-the-garden beets!” they’ll cry. But they’re still only beets, and there’s no need to get so excited about it.
    Never make the mistake of combining two rather repulsive vegetables in the hope that any good will come of it.
Two wrongs never make a right
. Once I knew a lady who cooked big carrots and hollowed out their middles and filled the resultant canoes with canned peas.
    In order to make most vegetables fit to eat, you must cover up the basic taste of the vitamins with calories. You use butter, oil, sour cream, nuts, chopped bacon, mushrooms, and cheese, as well as lemon juice, vinegar, herbs, and a lot of other things that we shall come to presently.
    This is not only fattening, for the most part, but it is also a lot of trouble. You’re certainly not going to do it very often. There is no reason you should, either. The children must learn sooner or later that life isn’t all beer and skittles, and your husband knows it anyhow. It won’t hurt them a bit to eat their plain buttered vegetables at gunpoint, with a running commentary by you on what will happen to their teeth and complexions and bottoms if they don’t.
    Moreover, there is a certain social cachet to serving your vegetables plain. Indeed, if your entrée is in any way fancy, the
haute cuisine
crowd frowns on anything but the simplest vegetable as an accompaniment, which should be a load off your mind and off your back.
    So just gird your loins and serve that big bowl of tiny, buttery, fresh-from-the-garden beets, murmuring—if you care to—“After all, there’s nothing like good butter, salt, and coarse-ground pepper.” (Always be sure it’s coarse-ground, because a lot of people feel that anything peppered should look as though it has been fished out of a gravel pit.)
    However, just once in a while, when you are serving a very easy main dish, like something thawed, or when you yourself get so tired of plain vegetables that you cannot stand them any more, it is nice to know a few things to do.
    First of all, find a commercial seasoning you like, and add it to the melted butter. This is an easy way to improve vast hordes of vegetables.
    Second, you can also add a bouillon cube, or a teaspoon of instant bouillon, to the water you cook them in. This helps a bit, too.
    Third, the authorities maintain that a wee pinch of sugar, in addition to your other seasonings, brings out the flavor of any vegetable. The debatable point here is whether you want to bring it out or cover it up; but this is every girl’s own personal decision.
    Fourth, there is aneasy cheese sauce you can make and keep on hand to give a gentle assist to cauliflower, cabbage, asparagus, green beans, et cetera.
         EASY CHEESE SAUCE     
    1 pound sharp processed cheese, diced
    1½ cups evaporated milk (low-fat is okay)
    1½ teaspoons salt
    2 teaspoons dry mustard
    Melt the cheese in the top of your double boiler over hot water, add everything else, and stir it till it’s smooth and hot. Then pour it into a jar, cover it, and keep it in the refrigerator. When you want to use some of it, put the amount you want in the top of your double boiler again, thin it with a little milk, and heat it.
    Fifth, there is an easy fake hollandaise which is good with artichokes, asparagus, and whatever else you think you’d like hollandaise on.
         FAKE HOLLANDAISE     
    ¾ cup mayonnaise
    cup milk
    salt, pepper
    1 teaspoon lemon juice
    Cook the mayonnaise and milk together in the top of your double boiler for five minutes, stirring constantly.