The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken Page A

party. (Well, you could, but you’d feel sort of silly.)
    So you look in your big fat cookbook and find so many complex-sounding affairs, which, as you taste them in your mind, don’t sound worth the trouble, that you shut the book quickly. Then you open this cookbook and find just a few: all carefully selected, made frequently by women who hate to cook as much as you do, and at least a couple of which may well set Ethel right back on her heels.
         BETTY’S COCKTAIL COOKIES     
    makes about 40
    Mix together
    ½ cup flour
    ¼ cup butter
    1 jar pimento or Cheddar cheese spread
    Now shape it into a neat roll, wrap it in waxed paper, and refrigerate it. When it’s firm, slice it as you would cookies, and bake them at 400˚ for ten minutes. (Don’t bother to grease the pan.)
         5 O’CLOCK BISCUITS     
    makes about 20
    1 package tube-type refrigerated biscuits
    1 can anchovy fillets or smoked oysters and the oil they’re in
    Cut the biscuits in half, and top each half with half a fillet of anchovy or a smoked oyster or chunk of same. Fold the biscuits over, and pinch the edges together. Brush the tops with the oil from the fish can, and bake at 450˚ for eight minutes.
         CHEESE WEDGES     
    makes about 40
    1 package tube-type refrigerated biscuits
    cup grated cheese
    ¼ cup melted butter
    Cut each biscuit into four little wedges, roll them in melted butter and grated cheese, then toast them in a 400˚ oven for about twelve minutes.
         PARTY PEG’S CHEESE STICKS     
    pastry dough
    Parmesan
    paprika (optional)
    Make your usual pastry recipe—or use a box of good pastry mix—and roll ’er out as far as she’ll go. Sprinkle a lot of Parmesan all over it, fold ’er over once, and roll ’er out again. Repeat this maneuver half a dozen times, using more Parmesan each time, of course. Then cut in strips, sprinkle with paprika, if you like, and bake at 400˚ for about ten minutes.
         CHEESE BALLS     
    (This is an every-girl-for-herself sort of thing.)
    Combine an 8-ounce package of cream cheese with jars of any processed cheese spreads you like—pimento, blue cheese, et cetera, plus any leftover odds and ends of cheese you have, grated. Then add sherry, grated onion, cream, Worcestershire, and/or whatever else you like, to taste.
    Form it into
small
balls, somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball, roll them in crushed nuts, and wrap them individually in aluminum foil before you store them in the refrigerator.
    These are not to hang on the Christmas tree, they are to bring forth, with crackers, for dropper-inners. Small balls are better than one big one, because they’re gone before they get that gnawed-at look.
         ONION ROUNDS     
    Slice an onion as thin as humanly possible. Then cut thin slices of bread into rounds, using a cooky cutter, butter them, put an onion slice on each, sprinkle grated cheese on top, and heat them slowly under the broiler until the cheese bubbles.
    The next two hors d’oeuvres are for those rare occasions when you feel you must be teddibly teddibly. The rest are for any time when you feel duty-bound.
         CAVIAR     
    Serve it ice-cold in its little pot, surrounded by hot buttered Melba toast. Or plain Melba toast. Or, for purists, water crackers. And if you are feeling so included, fill little dishes with chopped hard-boiled eggs, yellow onion (chopped fine), and sour cream (low-fat is okay, too).
         SHRIMP LEAVES     
    Simmer an artichoke in salted water, which also contains a cut garlic clove and a drop of olive oil, for forty minutes. Cool it.
    Then carefully remove the best leaves. On the tender edible end of each leaf, put a dot of mayonnaise very slightly flavored with curry. Now put a wee shrimp on the wee dot, and arrange the leaves on a platter.
         THE DIP     
    If you have a package of cream cheese in the house, you always have a dip in the house, because you can