Chapter 21 (A Rainy-Day Dinner)

Introduction

The secret is out.

Bob, everyone in his office, and probably the whole town now knows that Bettina saved Mrs. Dixon’s marriage by convincing her to rent a house and assume her God-given role as Wife and Homemaker.

“The only possible solution in that case,” Bob approves, showering his “good angel” with kisses before tucking into a rainy-day dinner of hash and cauliflower.

Part 1

The Menu

Browned Hash

Creamed Cauliflower

Date Muffins

Butter

Grapefruit Salad with Celery Seed Dressing

Apple Sauce Cake

Chocolate

Preparing the Meal

Browned Hash

Alas I had no leftover beef with which to make this. Doubtless Bettina used scraps from the Sunday roast, but I had no choice but to go out and purchase fresh beef from the supermarket.

Tri-tip seemed a reasonable choice and, since we’re in the middle of a heat wave, I decided to break with tradition and cook the beef in my decidedly modern Crock Pot.

Preparing the meat was simple enough—I just tossed it into the pot along with water and a little beef bouillon and let it simmer for 3-4 hours.

The potatoes too were easy: just boil, chill, and chop into cubes.

The first hint of trouble came when I tossed the beef and potatoes into the skillet and set about to fry them into a pancake of sorts.

Mistake #1—I used a non-stick skillet to fry the hash…God knows why as there was no chance of it developing the necessary crust on the pan’s ceramic lining.

Mistake #2—Pouring oil (lots of it) to the red-hot pan when the meat and potatoes refused to stick together. I didn’t get a snap of the enormous cloud of smoke that belched from the skillet, but it’s easy enough to visualize—think Indian smoke signals, or the firebombing of Dresden.

Mistake #3 (the biggest one of all)—Keeping the contents of the skillet on the burner three times longer than recommended. The stuff didn’t come close to browning—it shriveled, leaving me with a pan of frizzled cubes to serve up.

Creamed Cauliflower

Bettina’s recipe calls for a full head of cauliflower, but that seems like too much to be covered by a mere cup of sauce. Remembering that early-20^th century fruits and vegetable were inevitably smaller than today’s bouncers, I cut the head in half (or rather, snapped exactly half the segments off the stalk)

I’m not crazy about this vegetable, but the simplicity of its preparation is definitely a point in its favor—just boil in salted water until fork-tender.

The white sauce too proved to be a breeze. After undergoing Bettina’s intensive sauce-making course last week making a mere cup seemed like child’s play—I could probably do it now with my eyes shut.

Date Muffins

It seems a little strange to see date muffins and applesauce cake on the night’s menu. Too much fruit and/or carbs, in my opinion.

Happily the flour doesn’t need to be sifted this dish.

I’ve never cooked with or even eaten dates before…don’t they have seeds in them?

Yes

As always happens when I try to cut dried fruit, the bits stuck to each other, the knife, my fingers, etc. I tried dusting the bits of fruit with granulated sugar to keep them from clumping, but to no avail.

After mixing the batter I was instructed by the recipe to beat it for two minutes. Easier said than done.

Stringiest dough ever!

Added melted butter. Great. Now I have a stringy, greasy lump in the mixing bowl

Oddly enough no temperature was given for baking the muffins. I guessed (and it was a guess) that “moderate” (350 F) was appropriate.

Or maybe not. These muffins were supposed to bake for 20 minutes, but after just 15 they were indisputably “done”

Grapefruit Salad with Celery Seed Dressing

This salad is a no-go, at least the first part of it. Because of DH’s blood pressure meds I can’t serve grapefruit in any form—the only question is what to choose as a substitute…

Probably some sort of tart fruit salad—orange, maybe, or pineapple—would be the equivalent. But frankly, with so many fruit-based dishes already on the menu, I’m in the mood for something else. Bettina’s vegetable salad sound good—just slices of tomato and green pepper arranged on a lettuce leaf--and is supposed to go well with celery seed dressing.

Fortunately this salad dressing is a quick to make—no stovetop cooking required!

Very colorful, thanks to the paprika

Simply shake and serve. What could be easier?

Apple Sauce Cake

This cake is a good excuse for making homemade applesauce—a real treat I cooked a couple of months ago and promptly forgot about

The recipe calls for six apples but, as noted above, Bettina’s fruit tends to run smaller than mine. Given that fact I’m sure four modern apples will be more than enough.

A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband instructs cooks to always first core the apples first—a foolish waste of time, in my opinion. Trying to wrestle the core out of an uncut apple is almost impossible and leaves bruises on the fruit.

Four large apples cut into slices make for an amazing amount of pieces—so many, in fact, that I had to haul out my cast-iron bean pot to hold them all.

Took a long time (more than I had) to cook these down

Tried to speed the process up by using a potato masher

Worked great!

I left the cooked sauce warming on the back of the stove while I mixed up the batter. For whatever reason the recipe specified that the sauce had to be hot before being mixed into the muffin batter.

Looks and smells good

Into a parchment-covered pan and then the oven...

Chocolate

Chocolate? What kind of chocolate? Chocolate for drinking out of mugs, to spread on the cake, or what?

The menu doesn’t specify so, despite the maddening heat, I decided that hot chocolate would be taste good.

My, this brings back memories! Bettina prepared hot chocolate for the “pick me up supper” she and Bob ate on the night they returned from their honeymoon. A bottle of champagne or wine might have been more appropriate, but of course this was 1918—the eve of the 18^th Amendment and Federal Prohibition.

How It Looked

Dinner for two tonight as DH has to work late. Ordinarily I'd be disappointed by his absence, but given my doubts about that hash I'm rather relieved he won't be here to taste it!