And guess what?  It was updating this blog.  (See previous post about looming deadlines and encroaching tunnel vision.)

By way of apology . . . a recipe.  Not as mindless as some of my deadline standbys, but simple enough, and filling.

Scalloped Potatoes with Ham and Cheese

You need:

• 8 potatoes, peeled and sliced thin (I used russets, because they were on sale, but I expect that any kind would do.)
• 1 pound, more or less, sliced ham (enough to make one layer in a 13×9 serving dish, anyhow.  I used leftovers from a spiral-sliced cooked ham that was also on sale, but you could just go up to the deli counter and ask for a pound of Virginia ham, sliced thick.  No one says you have to put it all into sandwiches.)
• 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
• bread crumbs

Also:
2 cups of cream sauce, made thusly:

•     4 T (1/2 stick) butter
•     4 T flour
•     1 cup chicken stock (I usually make it up from a jar of chicken stock base that I keep handy, but this time I happened to have one of those plastic boxes of ready-to-go stock in the refrigerator)
•     1 cup cream or half-and-half (or milk, if that’s what you’ve got)
•     pinch of salt (if the stock you have on hand is of the low-sodium variety)
•     dash of white pepper (or regular pepper, if you don’t have white pepper and don’t mind pepper flecks in your cream sauce)
•     dash of nutmeg

Melt the butter in a largish frying pan.  Add the flour.  Stir it around over medium heat until blended; don’t let it get brown.
Add the chicken stock gradually, stirring to keep the mixture from getting lumpy.
Add the dairy liquid, and keep on stirring.
Add the salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
When the mixture starts to thicken, it’s ready to go.  (If you have to give it a scrape to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan, it’s thickened.)

The first things you do:

Cut the ham slices off the ham.  This job can be outsourced to somebody in the household who likes playing with knives, in return for letting them have some of the ham to eat right then.  (Your cats would love to help with this, but as yet — thankfully — they don’t have the necessary knife-wielding skills.)

Peel and slice all those potatoes.  You’re not as likely to be able to outsource this bit, unfortunately.

Make certain you’ve got the shredded cheese you remembered buying at the grocery store.  (If you don’t have the cheese, don’t fret.  The recipe is of sufficient goodness even without it.)  Also, do you have breadcrumbs?  If you don’t, you can make some right now in the food processor, if you’ve got a food processor — about 3 slices of bread should do the trick.

The next things you do:

Preheat the oven to 375 Fahrenheit and prep your 13×9 inch pan.  Grease it up with butter or Crisco, or use one of the cooking sprays, your choice.  Make sure you’ve got enough aluminum foil handy to cover the pan when the time comes.

Put your sliced potatoes in a layer (or a couple of overlapping layers, for best coverage) in the bottom of the 13×9 pan.  Put the sliced ham in a single layer on top of the potatoes.  Sprinkle the cup of shredded cheese on top of the ham.

Make the cream sauce, as described above.  When it’s thickened, pour it over the potatoes-ham-cheese layers.

And then:

Cover the 13×9 pan with aluminum foil.  (If it’s got its own lid, you don’t have to do this.)  Put the pan into the preheated oven and cook, covered, for an hour.

Then:

Remove the aluminum foil.  Sprinkle the dish with enough breadcrumbs to make a crust on top.  Put it back into the oven and cook uncovered for another 15-20 minutes, or until the breadcrumbs have gotten golden-brown and crispy.

And serve it forth.

(A further note:  The cream sauce recipe here is a good basic one, useful for making the creamed part of creamed onions, or for the gravy portion of biscuits-and-sausage-gravy (substituting fat from the cooked sausage for all or part of the butter), or for anything else that calls for a standard white sauce.)

Another meal that doesn’t require much in the way of effort, or of watching, or of thought, for those days when your supply of all three is directed elsewhere.  This one is really easy, if you have a crockpot, and even easier if you also have a food processor.

1 or 2 pounds of cut-up chicken, depending upon how much chicken you’ve got and how many people you’re going to feed.  Boneless chicken thighs are best for slow cooking.

1 large or 2 medium onions, finely chopped.  This is where the food processor comes in.  If you don’t have a food processor, chopping up the onion will take a couple of minutes longer.

1 jar Roland’s yellow curry paste.

1 can coconut milk (the kind for cooking, not the sweetened kind they sometimes sell to put into mixed drinks.)

Put the cut-up chicken, the chopped onion, and the curry paste into your slow cooker, and cook on high for 2-3 hours or on low for 5-6 hours.

Half an hour before you want to serve dinner, stir in the coconut milk.

Serve over rice, or with naan from the grocery store if your grocery store carries naan, or with whatever starch pleases you.

Or, what Hamburger Helper wants to be when it grows up.

Pasta with Sweet Sausage and Cream

8 sweet Italian sausages, removed from their casings
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 cups of heavy cream
2 tablespoons Cognac, optional
1 pound shell pasta

Place sausages and minced onion in a saucepan and cook over low heat until sausage is lightly browned. Break up the meat with a fork as it cooks, so it is crumbly. Add cream and cook until thickened. Heavy cream will never curdle, so it doesn’t matter if the cream comes to a low boil. It will thicken more quickly. Add cognac. Stir sauce gently through cooked pasta and serve.

This one is about as close to a no-brainer as a recipe can get.  When you’ve got a writing (or editing) job that absolutely has to get finished, plus a family that absolutely has to get fed — and deli-meat sandwiches or takeout Chinese for some reason aren’t in the cards — this dish will come through for you every time.

(Save it for emergencies, though, for your heart’s sake.  It’s not a dish you want to put on the table every day.)

Writing, considered as a profession, can be enormously satisfying.  However, it is seldom enormously profitable; and even those writers who have achieved mega-bestsellerdom have usually traveled on a long, arduous, and often stony-broke journey to reach that point.

Which is why most writers’ personal recipe collections are big on dishes that are cheap, nourishing, and tasty . . . primarily cheap.

Lentil soup, for example.  The only things you really need in order to make starving-writer lentil soup are a bag of lentils, about six or eight cups of cooking liquid, an onion, a bit of meat, and a bay leaf, and the meat and the bay leaf are optional.  The meat can be the last leftover bits of a ham, if you’re currently well-off enough to have had a ham; it can be pieces of kielbasa or smoked sausage; it can even be cut up store-brand hot dogs, if  hot dogs are all you can afford.  Once, because what I lacked at the time wasn’t money, but rather transportation to the grocery store, I used a pound of bacon, cut up into small pieces, because the bacon was what I had.  If you’re a vegetarian, you can leave the meat out completely, maybe throw in some diced carrots or potatoes along with the chopped onion.  Season it however you like.  Some people go with curry-style seasoning; I usually go with the abovementioned bay leaf and a bit of prepared horseradish, with a generous shot of soy sauce thrown in for savory saltiness.

Cook like it says on the lentil package, for however long it takes to get the soup to the consistency that you prefer.  A crockpot is good for this; so is a dutch oven on top of the stove.

This will feed one writer for several days, or one writer and family for an evening meal, with maybe a serving left over to warm up the day after.