Free The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken

doesn’t expand quite so much.
         CHEESE RICE     
    6 servings
    3 cups hot cooked rice
    cup grated Parmesan
    3 tablespoons melted butter
    dash of pepper
    Just toss these things together.
         RAISIN RICE     
    6–8 servings
    (Easy, and good with anything curried.)
    1cups uncooked rice
    1 teaspoon salt
    ¼ cup onion, thinly sliced
    ¼ cup slivered almonds
    2 tablespoons butter
    ¼ cup seedless raisins
    Cook the rice. While it cooks, sauté the onions and almonds in the butter till they’re a gentle brown. (You buy the almonds already toasted and slivered, of course, in cans at practically any grocer’s. If they’re the already-toasted kind, don’t recook them—add them later.) Then add the raisins, heat thoroughly, and when the rice is done cooking, mix everything together. Now taste it—it may need a little more salt.
    And finally we come, with a mild flourish of trumpets, to
         MRS. VANDERBILT’S COOK’S WILD RICE     
    6 ample servings
    (Nearly every wild-rice recipe you run into calls for mushrooms—which make an already ridiculously expensive dish more so—but this recipe doesn’t. It’s easy, too, and quite delicious, if I do say so myself.)
    1 cup wild rice
    3 cups boiling water
    salt
    1 middle-sized chopped onion (or 6 chopped green onions)
    stick of butter, melted
    ½ cup grated Parmesan
    6 strips bacon, fried and crumbled
    Wash the rice, being careful not to let one little platinum-plated grain go down the drain. Then add it, with the chopped onion, to the salted boiling water. Simmer this until the water is absorbed—about thirty-five minutes. Now mix in the melted butter and Parmesan. This will sit happily for hours in the top of your double boiler, if it has to. Just before you serve it, mix in most of the chopped bacon, and sprinkle the rest on top.

CHAPTER 5
Potluck Suppers
    OR HOW TO BRING THE WATER FOR THE LEMONADE
    D o you see that shaft of sunny sunshine cutting the kitchen murk? This, friends, is the Potluck Supper—quite the best invention since the restaurant.
    Potluck, of course, seldom means potluck. Once in a while, potluck means that your hostess hasn’t decided yet what she’s going to serve, and, in any case, doesn’t intend to knock herself out. Even so, you’ll find when you get there that she’s done a good bit more than throw another potato into the soup, and you needn’t think the family eats that high on the hog every day in the week, because they don’t.
    More often, however, potluck means a supper to which every lady brings a covered dish.
    Think of the advantages here!
    First, you need to cook
only one thing.
    Second, having cooked and brought your one thing, you don’t actually
owe
anyone a dinner, and you needn’t invite them to your house unless you feel like it.
    The one trouble with Potluck, when you hate to cook, is that you never can think of anything interesting to bring; and so you usually end up bringing a Covered Dish and hoping it stays covered.
    It is this situation that the recipes in this chapter are designed to ameliorate. They are a little different from the usual line of groceries, and most of them look and taste like more trouble than they were.
    First, however, a word of advice on how to handle yourself when a Potluck is being planned.
    Beware of the entrée.
The entrée is usually the most trouble, as well as the most expensive. So never volunteer for it. Instead, volunteer somebody else.
    “Ethel,
would
you make that marvelous goulash of yours?” you can say. The other ladies will probably join in—it would be rude not to, especially if they’ve ever tasted Ethel’s goulash—and while Ethel is modestly dusting her manicure on her lapel, you can murmur something about bringing a couple of your delectable
         LEFT BANK FRENCH LOAVES     
    2 loaves sour-dough French bread
    2 sticks softened butter
    1 package onion-soup mix
    You split the loaves in half, the long way. Then cream the onion-soup