Doing it well in the Kitchen

Tips for the culinary inept and anyone else who needs a break from the heat

fruits-veggys
I'd like to kiss whoever the genius was who perfected salad in a bag. Watch the expiration dates and you can stock up for a week or two. Considering the variety available, all it takes is a little imagination to not wear our their welcome, just rotate dressing, cheese and assorted add-ins.

   At any given time I can think of at least 9,000 things I'd rather be doing than cooking - that's under normal weather conditions. Total brain fry occurs concerning meal preparation past 90 degrees. Forget trying to plan anything. The best I can do is cruise the refrigerated sections hoping to see something that looks good. The tactic works pretty well, think of all the amnesia victims who recover after seeing a face from the past.

   Fortunately most fruits and quite a few vegetables are best left in their natural state. Serve cheese with cheese, cold cuts and bakery bread. Several years ago a summer edition of Cosmo featured a lovely spread of sliced tomatoes, mozzarella and some kind of meat all neatly arranged on a platter decorated with basil leaves and drizzled with olive oil. I could handle that - minus the anchovies and capers.

   The plan was to substitute bacon bits and black olives - recipe tampering is vital to the sporting sense on this type of safari. In any case, knowing full well my production would never win a glossy award, I was comforted by Erma Bombeck's comments that if she should ever remarry she would hire a food photographer for the album. She also said she considered cookbooks some of the greatest fiction ever written. Bless you Erma.

   Try not to let the joy spreaders get you down. Advice about cooking in the morning and freezing in portions to breeze through summer is, of course, quite logical. It's just not going to happen. If the culinary inept were capable of applying logic in the kitchen, we wouldn't be culinary inept.

A particularly good combo is fresh spinach leaves decorated with hard-boiled eggs, Mandarin orange or Ruby Red grapefruit sections. Look for bags of spinach labeled pre-washed to eliminate that work. For the dressing, cut up (scissors easiest) about a pound of bacon into small pieces, fry, don't drain. Add sugar and vinegar, tasting along the way. Reheat before serving. A little chopped onion, fresh or dried, is a nice touch too.

I am now past the point where recipes with more than five ingredients give me hives, however my original instinct was right. There are thousands of more interesting (and cooler) ways to pass the time than spending it in the kitchen. I use the KISS (keep it simple sweetheart) system.

   The same dressing makes an excellent warm German-type potato salad and it's green-beans also great for zinging up plain old canned green beans.

   Fresh produce loses nutrients in transit, therefore, unless you grew or picked it yourself, you are doing the right thing by "cheating." Should anyone criticize you for doing things the easy way, know (and tell) that frozen or canned are processed immediately after harvest.

   Most fruit can be left in it's natural state. If you want to dress it up, there are plenty of packaged products to do the job. Or try mixing one 8 oz. jar marshmallow creme, one 8 oz. cream cheese and two tbs. orange juice. Cream the cream cheese (softened), add marshmallow creme and fold. After mixed together well, add OJ. To thin, add more OJ. Dip apple slices, kiwi slices, grapes or whatever type fruit into it - also can be folded into fruit salad or even fruit cocktail.