Introduction
It’s Sunday, and what better way to kick off the new week
by inviting the lovebirds, Mr. and Mrs. Dixon, over for dinner? Despite the
Dixons’ cozy new domesticity in their cozy new house, Mr. Dixon accepts
Bettina’s invitation with alacrity. Perhaps his wife’s fumbling attempts at
cooking are harder on him than he realized?
Part 1
The
Menu
Iced
Cantaloupe
Veal
Birds
Boiled
New Potatoes
Gravy
Waxed
Beans
Butter
Sauce
Bread
and Butter
Salt
Wafers
Cake
with Chocolate Cream Frosting
Coffee
Preparing the Meal
Iced
Cantaloupe
Any more cantaloupe and I fear my skin may turn orange—obviously
this fruit is one of Bettina’s favorites.
I wasn’t sure melon grown and purchased in the waning
days of summer would be worth eating, but this one looked surprising good.
Now all that’s left to do is cut it into wedges and
plunk them in a bowl of chipped ice.
Veal
Birds
Not a lot of variety at the supermarket , veal-wise. In
fact I had a choice of exactly two cuts: osso bucco (a chunk with a round bone
smack in the center) or scaloppini (super-thin flaps of meat meant to be
breaded and fried).
But at least this narrow selection made the decision
easy—scaloppini was my only option even though the slices appeared much too
fragile to stuff.
Since I had no veal cuttings to grind up for the
stuffing I sacrificed one of the micro-thin steaks and tossed into my electric
chopper along with four slices of bacon. Then, as per the recipe, I cooked the
mixture for a few minutes, added some crumbs (generated by pulverizing day-old
bread in my electric blender),
and mixed in salt, pepper, and milk.
Stuffing the strips was a snap—I just laid out the
meat, plunked a spoonful of stuffing on top, and rolled it up like a burrito.
Tied
with butchers’ twine to keep it from unrolling
The
“birds” were to be sautéed; placed in a small casserole; seasoned with salt,
pepper, and a pat of butter; and baked for one hour.According to the account Bettina gave Mrs. Dixon she
split the cooking time in two: a forty-five minute period before church, a
short spell on the kitchen counter or table, and then back into the oven for
fifteen minutes.
Brrr. Given modern concerns about partially meat and
poultry—particularly when there’s stuffing involved—I can’t help but shiver.
Fortunately my veal rolls have a whole, unbroken hour in the oven to get their
act together, and then I plan to serve them immediately.
Boiled
New Potatoes
My gosh, I’m getting tired of these. Potatoes are, as
I’ve said, a Bob-and-Bettina staple, but I served plain boiled spuds at the
last meal and I believe the one before that.
Still, I was able to make it easier on myself by
cooking the potatoes early in the day and then, just before dinner, dumping
them in a serving dish and putting them in the oven to warm.
I’m not sure these drawn-out preparations were the
best treatment for potatoes I wasn’t crazy about eating in the first place…I’m
guessing they’ll be soggy by the time they make it to the table. But then, no
one will probably ever know as the family is as sick of tubers as I am and will
doubtless pass them by.
Gravy
A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband makes brewing
gravy sound so easy!
[Add] four tablespoons of water to two level
tablespoons of flour,
mix carefully, and gradually
pour into the stock in which the meat has been
cooked
Um, no. After twenty-two cooking lesson with Bettina I
know it won’t be that simple, so I
plan to use commercial gravy…from a jar [!]
Waxed
Beans
I couldn’t find wax beans at the supermarket—neither
fresh, frozen, nor canned. This was something of a disappointment as I’ve
always wanted to try them. In the end I was forced to buy green beans—not a bad
substitute, I guess, as supposedly they’re similar in taste to green despite
their lighter color.
I toyed with the idea of preparing these beans in my
thermal cooker, but in the end just boiling them on the stove seemed like a
less complicated process.
NOTE: after snapping off the ends of the beans I
realized they weren’t exactly newbies. That means DH, Son, and I will be
engaging in some post-prandial pulling of strings from between our teeth—hope
we have plenty of dental floss…
Head
Lettuce With Thousand Island Dressing
Mrs. Dixon literally begs Bettina for the salad dressing
recipe, and in fact it does sound very interesting.
Unfortunately the dressing requires two tablespoons of
Bettina-inspired, no-alarm chili sauce, and with none on hand I had no choice
but to brew up a batch.
Lots
of ingredients, of course. Happily I was able to get the tomatoes came straight
from our garden—the plants are producing overtime these days!
A
water bath for the tomatoes so I can get the skins off more easily
And
into the pot along with chopped onion, green pepper, and spices
Now
to simmer the heck out of this [“cook slowly until the mixture is very thick”]
In
the end the sauce came out quite well—but, as only two tablespoons are needed
for the dressing, I have to find some way of using up the rest!
The
dressing itself required any number of things besides the chili sauce: olive
oil; lemon, orange, and onion juice; spices; Worcestershire sauce; mustard; green
pepper; and parsley.
A
shake-and-serve dressing—whew!
Bread
and Butter
This was such a lavish meal I didn’t want to serve a
really good loaf of bread—I knew we’d be too stuffed to eat it!
Salt
Wafers
I’d never heard of such “wafers” before and secretly
hoped they’d turn out to be nothing more than soda crackers from a box.
Unfortunately, no. A quick search on the Internet revealed
that these salt wafers are a traditional Irish appetizer—and that Recipekey.com
has detailed instructions on just how to prepare them.
So feeling incredibly grumpy I began mixing up the
dough. But it didn’t take long for my interest to be piqued. Among other things
these wafers called for whole wheat flour and black pepper—clearly these are no ordinary crackers.
The
dry ingredients…
…mixed
with sour cream and butter. Oof—despite the whole wheat flour these wafers
don’t exactly meet heart-healthy standards
The
dough rolled out “paper-thin”
“…and
cut into saltine-size (2-inch squares)”
The
first batch of wafers was much too thick
The
second came out better, and I carefully picked out the most eye-appealing and
put them away for dinner
Cake
With Chocolate Cream Frosting
The recipe for this cake seemed a testament to
Bettina’s avowal that “a simple Sunday dinner [is] the kind I believe in!”
What could be difficult about a single-layer cake
spread with an icing made of powdered sugar and milk and dotted with
chocolates?
Well, to start with chocolate creams seem to have
vanished from the scene with the passing of the 20th century. I suppose I might
have purchased them at a specialty chocolate shop or located some on Amazon,
but too expensive, I thought. But at
$4.99 a half pound the chocolate truffles I substituted didn’t exactly come
cheap, either.
Making up the cake batter was simple although the egg
whites did have to be whipped and added separately.
The real problem was, as usual, my lack of a
proper-sized cake pan. I finally chose the smallest I had, stuffed it with
parchment paper, and poured the batter in. Unfortunately the bulky paper kept
the batter from evenly filling the pan, and the finished product looked
peculiar, to say the least.
(The
sight of this cake would probably throw the menfolk at Bettina’s table into
fits)
Unfortunately
the icing came out very thin, and I’d run out of powdered sugar with which to
thicken it. Spreading this goo on the cake would have been impossible, so I
poured it over the top and let gravity do the rest.
How It Looked
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