"There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who don't cook out of and have NEVER cooked out of I Hate to Cook Book, and the other kind...the I Hate to Cook people consist mainly of those who find other things more interesting and less fattening, and so they do it as seldom as possible. Today there is an Annual Culinary Olympics, with hundreds of cooks from many countries ardently competing. But we who hate to cook have had our own Olympics for years, seeing who can get out of the kitchen the fastest and stay out the longest."

Peg Bracken

Philosopher's Chowder. Skinny Meatloaf. Fat Man's Shrimp. Immediate Fudge Cake. These are just a few of the beloved recipes from Peg Bracken's classic I Hate to Cook Book. Written in a time when women were expected to have full, delicious meals on the table for their families every night, Peg Bracken offered women who didn't revel in this obligation an alternative: quick, simple meals that took minimal effort but would still satisfy.

50 years later, times have certainly changed - but the appeal of The I Hate to Cook Book hasn't.

This book is for everyone, men and women alike, who wants to get from cooking hour to cocktail hour in as little time as possible.

The I Hate to Cook Book

50th Anniversary EditionBy Bracken, Peg

Grand Central Publishing

Copyright © 2010 Bracken, Peg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780446545921

CHAPTER 1

30 Day-by-Day Entrees

OR THE ROCK PILE

Never doubt it, there’s a long, long trail a-winding when you hate to cook. And never compute the number of meals you have to cook and set before the shining little faces of your loved ones in the course of a lifetime. This only staggers the imagination and raises the blood pressure. The way to face the future is to take it as Alcoholics Anonymous does: one day at a time.

This chapter contains recipes for thirty everyday main dishes. Some of them aren’t very exciting. In fact, some are pretty dull—just as a lot of recipes are in the other cookbooks, but the other cookbooks don’t admit it. And some of the recipes in this chapter are so—well, so simple—that they’d have any Cordon Bleu chef pounding his head with his omelet pan.

The thing about these recipes is this: they’re here! You don’t have to ferret them out of your huge, jolly, encyclopedic cookbook. And they’ll get you through the month! After all, who needs more than thirty recipes? You already have your own standard routines: the steak-roast-and-chop bit, the frozen-TV-dinner bit, the doctored-up-canned-beans bit, not to mention your mother’s favorite recipe for Carrot-Tapioca-Meat Loaf Surprise. And if somebody waves a dinner invitation, you leap like a trout to the fly. So, with these additional thirty, you’re in.

Now, the points that are special about them are these:

1. They all taste good.

2. They are all easy to make.

3. Each has been approved by representative women who hate to cook, and not one calls for a bouquet garni.

4. Some do two jobs. They involve either meat, fish, or chicken plus a vegetable, so all you need is bread of some kind, or meat, fish, or chicken and a starch, so all you need is a vegetable.

5. Many can be made ahead. (Of course, you won’t do this very often. When you hate to cook, you keep postponing it. But once in a while, you wake up full of fire. This is the time when you can lump dinner right in with the other dirty work you do around the house in the morning, and get it done.)

6. Most of them are quick to fix. Actually, you can’t trust the word “quick” any more. Some cookbooks, when they say “quick,” mean that you needn’t grind your own flour. Others mean that you can pour a can of tomato soup over a veal chop and call it Scallopini.

We must face facts. If a recipe calls for eleven different chopped ingredients and cream sauce and a cheese-topped meringue, you don’t call it “quick” if you hate to cook. On the other hand, that tomato soup on the veal chop will taste remarkably like tomato soup on a veal chop, and you can’t call it Scallopini.

The really jet-propelled recipes in this book are in Chapter 11. But here we take a middle-of-the-road path. Thawing and/or cooking time isn’t what bothers you most when you hate to cook; it’s preparation time, which, in these recipes, is mercifully short. For instance

SWEEP STEAK

4–6 servings

(So called because a couple of seasons ago, this recipe swept the country.)

2- to 3-pound round steak or pot roast

both 1-ounce packets in the package of onion-soup mix

Put the meat on a sheet of aluminum foil big enough to wrap it in. Sprinkle the onion-soup mix on top of it, fold the foil, airtight, around it, put it in a baking pan, and bake it at 300° for three hours or 200° for nine hours, it really doesn’t matter. You can open it up, if you like, an hour or so before it’s done, and surround it with potatoes and carrots.

STAYABED STEW

5–6 servings

(This is for those days when you’re en negligee, en bed, with a murder story and a box of bonbons, or possibly a good case of flu.)

Mix these things up in a casserole dish that has a tight lid

2 pounds beef stew meat, cubed

1 can of little tiny peas*

1 cup of sliced carrots

2 chopped onions

1 teaspoon salt, dash of pepper

1 can cream of tomato soup thinned with ½ can water (or celery or mushroom soup thinned likewise)

1 big raw potato, sliced

piece of bay leaf

Put the lid on and put the casserole in a 275° oven. Now go back to bed. It will cook happily all by itself and be done in five hours.

Incidentally, a word here about herbs and seasonings. These recipes don’t call for anything exotic that you buy a box of, use once, and never again. Curry powder, chili powder, oregano, basil, thyme, marjoram, and bay leaf are about as far out as we get. And if your family says, “What makes it taste so funny, Mommie?” whenever you use any herbs at all, you can omit them (although if you omit chili from chili or curry from curry, you don’t have much left, and you’d really do better to skip the whole thing).

But as a rule, don’t hesitate to cut the amount of a seasoning way down, or leave it out, when it’s one you know you don’t like. This goes for green pepper, pimento, and all that sort of thing, too. (I mention this only because we ladies who hate to cook are easily intimidated by recipes and recipe books, and we wouldn’t dream of substituting or omitting; we just walk past that particular recipe and never go back again.)

We must assess ourselves. I, by way of example, think rosemary is for remembrance, not for cooking, and the amount of rosemary I have omitted from various recipes would make your head swim. The dishes turned out quite all right, too.

PEDRO’S SPECIAL

3 ample servings

(Very easy; very good with beer; good even without it.)

1 pound ground round steak

1 chopped onion

1 garlic clove, minced

1 8-ounce can tomato sauce plus ? can tomato juice, beef broth, or water

¼ teaspoon oregano

2 tablespoons chili powder

1 16-ounce can kidney or pinto beans with liquid

1 medium-sized bag corn chips

a bit of lettuce

more chopped onion

Brown together, in a little oil, the ground meat, onions, and garlic. Stir in the tomato sauce, oregano, and chili powder. Now dust off a good-sized casserole, grease it, and alternate layers of this mixture with layers of beans and corn...