Baked Potatoes

Ingredient
Potatoes, large, labeled Idaho and/or Russet

Steps
Preheat oven to 400.

Wash the potatoes: not with soap, but with running water and your fingers in case some of the dirt that makes them into potatoes is still on the skin.

Put the potatoes in the oven on the rack, and use a fork to poke one set of holes in each potato.

Check after 45 minutes.

If you can see that the skin is a bit puckered, they're probably done.

To test further, you can:

• Put on an oven mitt and squeeze one gently.  If it's feels soft like a baked potato, it's done.  If the skin is a bit hard, and feels like it's bending or breaking, it's definitely done.
• Take one out and cut it open.  If it looks like a baked potato, with a bit of flaking of the white part, it's done.

Salt and pepper will make it better.  Butter or sour cream or grated cheddar cheese, better still.

Breakfast sausage in the oven

Other moms cook sausage in one frying pan while cooking eggs in another.  I would burn everything.  All the sausage you have ever eaten at home came from a hot oven.

Ingredient
Breakfast sausage links, usually labeled "original" or "old-fashioned" rather than "maple" or other odd things

Steps
Preheat oven to 400.

Put sausage in a glass pan in one layer.

Put pan in oven.

Leave for 15 minutes.

Then you can either cut it open to see if it's brown all the way through, or leave it in until it looks very dark the way Mom does it and you know for sure it's brown before you take it out.

Cooking it to almost black would have worrisome implications if you ate sausage more than once every three months. Used very sparingly, I think it's great.

Added Fact
If you switch the oven to broil after cooking this way, so you can do toast, expect the toast to get done extra fast because the oven is extra hot.

Added Idea
Look up how to cook bacon in the oven.  You need a cookie sheet and aluminum foil, and it's quicker than sausage. I don't have a method yet, but I've done it, and it's almost as good as pan-cooked and much easier to do it for six or more people.

That thing with the ground beef

Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 can cream of mushroom soup in a can with a pull-top lid
1/2 of a soup can of milk
1 cup of rice (can be white/quicker or brown/better for you)

Equipment
A frying pan, a cooking pot with a lid, a big spoon or a metal spatula to stir with, a measuring cup, a stove

Ten fast meals that are better than pizza

1.  Buy a rotisserie chicken and stuff from the grocery salad bar.

2.  Corned beef hash from a can, with mandarin oranges.

3.  Kraft mac-n-cheese, with peas (because mom always serves them with peas).

4.  Scrambled eggs with rye bread toast and orange juice (because mom pretends that counts as fruit).

Things to eat in the introvert cave

This is about strategy for eating reasonably well while working like a lunatic. It's about buying things that are super easy, and it's kind of about only having a couple people in the house.

1.  Buy a cabbage and cut it in half and then into ribbons.  Put it in the fridge in two or more containers. While working, put one beside the computer.  Later, notice that it's gone.

2.  Buy three or four apples and always have peanut butter.  When hungry, slice up an apple and put it on a plate with two tablespoons of peanut butter.

3.  Buy a bakery loaf of rye bread or some kind of bread with nuts and/or dried fruit in it, and five ounces of goat cheese.  When hungry, saw off a slice of one and spread it with the other.

4. Buy hummus and a red pepper and a cucumber and some blue corn chips.  Make the vegetables into spears and eat half of them with two tablespoons of hummus.  Put the other half in the fridge so you can do it again tomorrow.  Next week, notice the chips and wish you'd remembered to eat them with the hummus that's now kind of dried out. Eat them without the hummus, unless you're Beau and eating like a goat.