Every great recipe starts with butter. 

Your two spices are salt and black pepper. Pepper should be used sparingly, but you can add as much salt as you want. Especially if a dish doesn’t turn out the way you expected.

For French toast, soak a couple slices of Wonder Bread in egg and milk. Fry them in a quarter stick of butter per slice and sprinkle granulated sugar on top when they’re done. I don’t care if all your friends put syrup on their French toast, in this house we use granulated sugar.

You know what else you can put granulated sugar in? Cake icing, if you run out of powdered sugar. It’s fine! Just a little crunchy. That’s how my mother used to make it.

Ragu in a jar is just as good as that homemade tomato sauce your friend’s mother makes. How many hours does she spend over a hot stove while I just dump the stuff in a pan and still have time to read that excerpt from The Thorn Birds in this month’s Cosmo?

The best spaghetti brand is Mueller’s because it’s German and from New Jersey, just like we are. Boil your Mueller’s spaghetti until it’s so soft that it falls apart when touched with a fork. Put a big hunk of butter and then the Ragu on it. You can add a little Kraft grated Parmesan out of the shake can if you want to get crazy.

There is nothing tastier than Liverwurst on a cracker – the dogs love it too. All you have to do is open up the package, and voila! Don’t make that face at me. If you don’t like it, you can put a little butter on it.

To make a salad, cut and wash some iceberg lettuce – just shake the wedge over the sink a few times, it’s fine if it’s still wet. If you want to get crazy you can also chop up a Jersey tomato.

Why are you trying to make salad dressing from scratch? There’s some perfectly good Wishbone in the cabinet.

To save calories, Woman’s Day says you can use a little lemon juice instead of dressing. That squeeze bottle of ReaLemon in the fridge should do the trick.

It’s a shame you don’t like sauerkraut. This new brand I found tastes even better than my mother’s. Maybe you don’t like it because you’re only half German. That was a joke! 

What do you mean, your friend’s mother’s muffin recipe says “make a well”? That’s a waste of time when Jacqueline Susann has a new novel out. Just mix the flour and eggs and everything together, really beat it vigorously.

Muffins are perfectly fine flat like that, just put butter on them. My mother’s were always sunken in and they tasted delicious. What do you expect, everything to look like it came out of a bakery?

Stop bugging me to make lasagna the way your friend’s mother makes it. There’s a perfectly good tray of Stouffer’s in the freezer.

Never mind lasagna – let me tell you how to make a very appetizing dinner. First, get some kind of beef, preferably a roast. Cook your meat rare, it really should be served “mooing” – don’t make that face at me, vegetarianism is for hippies and I won’t have it in this house. You can put a little salt and pepper on your meat if you must. Just don’t go too crazy with the pepper.

Next, your vegetables, and by that I mean potatoes. You can bake one per person or you can boil some little red potatoes or you can make instant mashed potatoes from one of the boxes in the cabinet, your choice. Put half a stick of butter and some salt on whichever one you make.

The only other vegetables worth serving are French cut green beans or asparagus. Buy them canned, or frozen if you want to get fancy, and boil until they fall apart. Serve with a stick of butter per person.

As a side dish, you can’t go wrong with Pillsbury crescent rolls fresh from the oven. Buttered, of course. 

Brownies make a great dessert. Just follow the instructions on the Duncan Hines box. Don’t forget the Liquid Chocolate Flavor Packet!

And there you have it, all the steps for a delicious dinner. If that’s what you want tonight, you’d better get started! Otherwise we have a couple of Swanson TV dinners in the freezer.

Lisa Borders is the author of the novels The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Her third novel, 20th Century Girl, will be published in 2025. Lisa’s short humor, essays and fiction have appeared in McSweeney’s, Points in Case, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review and other journals. She lives in Central Massachusetts with her partner and two rescue cats.