Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen

Nancy sent this one in. Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen seems to have lit the fire in her kitchen! She writes: I have an ancient cookbook titled "The I Hate To Cook Book". It looks like the Dead Sea Scrolls: it's a paper-back with brown, crispy pages which are crumbling at the edges and more than quite a few of the recipes have large grease stains on them (shows you how wonderfully often they were referred to). I checked the publishing date and it reads 1960! I know...I'm as old as Methuselah. The recipes in this cookbook are about as easy as you'll ever find, so if you are in the category of "cooking for dummies", this particular recipe will please you no end. This recipe is one that was so popular that I even took it to weekend get-aways with my husband's cousin and her husband. We two women stayed up all night chewing the fat, and when we saw the morning light sliding through the Venetian blinds in the kitchen, we took the partially devou...

This arrived as a comment, but since it is a full blown recipe - I am going to post it here. This one is from Nance, who lives in Pennsylvania, US and runs a new blog called Writing Late In The Game . She writes: Here's a hamburger recipe from Mary Hemingway (or so the cookbook said) who mentioned that it was Ernest's favorite Cuban dish. It quickly became the favorite of my entire family. I've been making it often for about 40 years. The ingredients sound as though they'd make a weird combination, but it turns out to taste marvelous, and it is easy to do and gets put together and cooked quickly. I don't know whether this is Kosher, or not, but a Jewish friend of mine ate it at a church supper one time and loved it, so hopefully it is. Nance PICADILLO This recipe calls for Pimientos to be stuffed in olives. It could be confusing as "Pimentos" is a term that is used to described Peppers. These peppers can be hot or just plain veggies. (In Israel they are av...

My youngest used to limit me to making plain white rice. He liked it, I was happy because it is easy to make and everyone was satisfied. Lately though he has been willing to accept a bit more "variety" in his rice. His taste buds seem to be changing. So I get a chance to experiment at times sometimes it works out well sometimes .. well we won't talk about it! Surprisingly enough, making good rice is not as simple as it first seems if you choose to start with the untouched rice. And indeed there are many types of rice to choose from. They are grown in different parts of the world and each not only will have a specific flavor (even served plain) to the discerning palette - each type really requires different amount of times to cook and get just right. For instance Persian rice needs less time than Indian Basmati Rice. Believe it or not if you do eat rice you will taste the difference in grains. (Picture above depicts Rice 'N Spice three-quarters complete. It was prepare...