Probably if a husband remarks, "Your gravy is cold," it is just as well for his wife to reply delightedly, "No colder than your beans."
Not awfully clever perhaps, but better than hurt feelings.
1. COOKING EMERGENCIES
Stale bread or cake can be freshened by plunging it into cold water and then setting it in the oven for a few minutes. It must be used at once.
Pieces of stale bread may be thoroughly dried in the oven, then put through the meat chopper and kept in a glass jar for covering croquettes, fried oysters, etc.
Pieces of meat which in appearance and quantity will not be suitable for a meal may often be used by arranging some vegetable on the same dish. The pieces can be warmed in gravy and wreathed with carrots or peas. Or they can be put through the grinder, packed into a mould lined with boiled rice and the whole heated. Or they can be chopped, put into ramakins, covered with potato crust and slightly browned. These are merely samples of the many ways in which vegetables can be made to conceal the fact that there is not meat enough for a main dish.
Left-over breakfast food of any of the cooked varieties can be made into delicate little cakes which will make up for the lack of a vegetable or do for a luncheon dessert. If there are about two cupfuls or less, mix with one egg and a saltspoonful of salt. Fry in very hot grease using about a dessertspoonful of batter for each cake. They will sputter and be hard to turn, but that merely indicates their good qualities.
If thickening remains lumpy instead of stirring smooth, strain it through a fine wire strainer.