Cooking a la Bettina: A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband Revisited

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Chapter 19 (Bettina and the Expense Budget)

Introduction

Live within your means, and save as well as invest something.—Bettina

Food and finances—a potentially explosive combination!

Fortunately Bettina’s rather bland dinner is helped rather than hindered by a lively discussion about the household budget. All appears in order, and even Bob marvels how Bettina remains in the black despite the throngs of hungry neighbors constantly besieging the house.

But manage she does and, as Bob observes between mouthfuls of hot fudge cake, “This way seems to suit us to a T!”

Part 1

The Menu

Cold Ham

Green Peppers Stuffed With Rice

Butterhorns

Peach Butter

Hot Fudge Cake

Preparing the Meal

Cold Ham

Delightfully simple: purchase a chunk of pre-cooked ham, cut it up, and arrange the slices artistically on a plate. Easy peasy--in fact, I almost feel guilty about it.

Green Peppers

Bettina must be growing pygmy peppers in her garden because this recipe demands six to feed two people. Even more amazing, these half-dozen can apparently be stuffed with a mere half cup of rice (plus sauce, onions, and spices).

I have no idea where to obtain peppers the size of plums and, frankly, I’m not fool enough to try. At the supermarket I chose four of the smallest available and *shrug* they’ll simply have to do.

White rice mixed with cream sauce—could any stuffing be more bland? I tried a spoonful and, yes, it is extremely mild—like Pablum, in fact. With luck the peppers encasing the stuffing will add a bit of zip, though.

Trouble. I cleaned out and cut the bottoms off the four peppers and then realized I had only enough stuffing for two. I’m not quite sure how two stuffed peppers are going to be enough to feed the three of us, but perhaps we can draw straws [grin].

Feels a bit odd to just popping these peppers into the oven to bake—no sauce, no marinade, not even any water in the bottom of the pan. I can’t believe this is going to work but (as I so often remind myself when cooking a la Bettina) Mine is not to question why…

Butterhorns

Now these rolls should be fun to make. I’ve never had much luck with Bettina’s baking powder-based breadstuffs, but I do make yeast-risen doughs occasionally and have always had fairly good results.

Bettina’s recipe calls for compressed yeast cakes but, outside of specialty food stores, those are just not available anymore. Fortunately dry yeast is readily available and, after a little research on the Internet, I calculated that one envelope of powdered yeast dry is equivalent to one compressed cake.

No sifting required. Excellent!

No kneading of the dough, either...hmm.

Alas the dough supposedly requires four hours for its first rise. With dinner just four hours and thirty minutes away I’m beginning to believe this isn’t going to work—I (or rather the butterhorns) are facing a serious time crunch here.

[Approximately thirty minutes before dinner] Well the dough has completed its first rise, but getting these rolls on the table in time is akin now to Mission Impossible. I still have to roll out the dough, shape the rolls, let them rise a second time, and then bake in the oven for a good twenty minutes.

The dough broken into two lots and then formed into balls

One ball rolled into the size “of a large dinner plate”

“Cut into rectangles”

Each rectangle formed into a cylinder and placed, point side down, on a greased cookie sheet

Rise, damn you!

Just out of the oven…not picture-perfect rolls bakery rolls by any means. I certainly hope they taste better than they look.

Peach Butter

Peaches sliced and cooked with sugar—after the peppers the simplest Bettina recipe I’ve seen in a long time.

After skinning the peaches with a vegetable peeler I started the laborious process of cutting them “very fine”. Fortunately my common sense kicked in after just a few slices and I then hauled out my manual grater.

A real life saver!

After mixing the peach slices with sugar and letting them sit for twenty minutes it was time to cook them down. I’m a bit doubtful that twenty-five minutes of simmering is going to reduce these to pulp, but we’ll see.

Nope. Still more or less intact after the requisite cooking time.

Back on the stove…

Success—and with only five extra minutes of cooking time. These look perfect and, because I immediately put a top on the jar, are unlikely to discolor.

Hot Fudge Cake

This is a dish that has survived into the 21^st century—in fact, I made it from a modern recipe to a short time ago. The end result was basically a chocolate muffin swimming in fudge sauce—eye appealing and obviously well-suited to today’s palate.