Recipe Talk

I've been trying to find Peg Braken's "I HATE TO COOK BOOK" bean salad recipe. Anyone have that?

Thee-Bean Salad
Note: Adapted from Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook, and Sorority Cookbook, Blythe CA, 1970. This editor uses fresh-cooked beans and often adds soybeans to replace some of the garbanzos. This dish is indispensable for low-cholesterol dieters! Substitute some of the vinegar with some lime juice, add some cilantro and it becomes a Mexican salad. Make it into a Greek salad by adding some feta cheese and chopped kalamata olives. (These ideas from Moosewood Restaurant's Daily Special Cookbook.)

For the dressing:
2/3 cp cider vinegar
1/3 cp olive or vegetable oil
1/2 cp sugar
1 t salt
Tabasco to taste or cajun spices

For the vegetables:
1 can each green, kidney, and garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 green pepper, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed

1. Blend dressing ingredients well.
2. Pour over combined vegetables and mix well.
3. Better if refrigerated before serving.
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Perfect Rare Prime Rib for Two
The Dinner with the Frozen Heart

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If you have an overwhelming desire for warm, succulent, rare prime rib but an irresistible resistance to going out to a restaurant for it and if there are just two of you to eat this perfect prime rib, you have a small problem - you'll need a small piece of meat.

The problem with the problem is that preparing a small roast with that desired salty, crusty, flavorful outside and that gorgeous, beautifully rare inside is almost impossible if you use the conventional method.

Believe it or not there's a simple solution and here it is. Ask your favorite butcher to cut you 1 rib of beef. Take the roast home, wrap it in aluminum foil and freeze it. It must be wrapped and frozen because it must be cooked frozen.

About an hour and a half before you want to eat, take it out, unwrap it, and rub it all over with garlic and a little olive oil. Sprinkle it with some seasoning salt.

Stand the roast up in a baking pan, propped against two scrubbed and oiled baking potatoes, one on either side. Roast it at 400 degrees in a preheated oven for one hour and twenty-five minutes if you like it rare, 10 minutes more for medium rare. Let it stand for 5 minutes before you carve it. You'll have delicious prime rib and baked potatoes for two and there'll probably be enough left over for sandwiches as well.

See - now wasn't that simple?

Serve this with oven roasted asparagus (recipe follows). You'll have a juicy, rare prime rib, perfectly baked potatoes and wonderfully flavorful asparagus. A meal fit for a king!

OVEN ROASTED ASPARAGUS

Wash and break off the tough ends of the asparagus spears. Allow 6 spears per person. Rub the bottom of a jelly roll pan with extra virgin olive oil, place the asparagus on the pan and drizzle a little more oil on top. Roll the asparagus around a little to better coat it. Turn the oven up to 500 degrees when you take the prime rib out. Put the spears in the oven and roast for 8 minutes. They should still be a bit crunchy. That's all there is to it. Good friend Ann Rauch (Bigfork and Hilton Head) from whom I got the recipe topped the asparagus with toasted walnuts and canned, drained Mandarin Oranges for our Christmas party - beautiful and delicious. Ann says fresh small whole green beans are great this way too. Garnish the top of the beans with a little chopped red bell pepper or a few pimiento strips.

Add a simple salad dressed with extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar and a sprinkling of Cavenders Greek Seasoning (available at most grocery stores). And if you're bread eaters a couple warm French rolls would be delicious.

For an easy dessert to finish this great meal try tiny frozen cream puffs from your grocer's freezer case. Drizzle with hot fudge or caramel sauce.

You'll have a perfect meal and you won't even have to venture outside your kitchen door to get it.

Note: The Prime Rib idea came from the I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken.

Bon Appetit!
Martha