Uni cooking inspiration
As a university student who is inordinately lazy, my cooking is average at best. I can muster up a half decent spaghetti bolognese, or cook sausages on one of the 11 George Foremans in our kitchen, but it gets a bit samey after a while.

Now it being my first year, I also had something of a marijuana habit, and as a result I often had the munchies. And don't tell me why, but I had a craving for white sauce. You know the stuff you sometimes get on chicken? Basically a white wine and cream sauce, but it hadn't really occurred to me to make my own. So I went round our local Spar-a-like looking for something that would resemble a white wine sauce in both look, texture and taste. The closest I got was a tin of Heinz mushroom soup.

I also had the munchies for sausages, but then sausages and 'white wine sauce' don't really make a meal, so I thought I'd do it with spaghetti. Except I was very bored of spaghetti, having been cooking it with bolognese at least twice a week for a month. I quite like thin spaghetti though, and stumbled upon what I thought was thin spaghetti, in balls, like tagiatelli. It turned out to be vermicelli (rice noodles) but I was happy enough with that.

So I get home, have a spliff, and I'm really looking forward to a nice gooey dinner - gooey food really is the best when you're stoned, no?

I Foreman-ise my sausages, boil my vermicelli, and get ready for the mix. I sieve out the water from the vermicelli and what met my eyes was what looked like a bowl of very wet, colourless, opaque snot. I don't know if I overcooked it or what, but it did not look appetising. Despite this, I was very hungry, so I decided to proceed as normal.

Now, I feel I must make a point about tinned food at this point, which every student must go through - tinned food is, always, a lot worse of the inside than it looks from the outside. So I cracked open this tin of soup and peered inside, looking forward to a metal cannister of creamy, mushroomy goodness. But instead I was greeted by something resembling cornflour jelly, with a lovely ring of fat around the lid. My heart sank somewhat, and my stomach gurgled a bit more, so I just chucked it in the pan. It splatted in with the consistancy of barely set jelly, making a resounding 'thwack' as it hit the edges of the pan. Now in my inebriated state this did nothing to improve my thoughts about this food. But still, I persevered. I was splitting this food with a friend, and I know they wouldn't have been happy about ordering a Dominoes, again. I chopped up my cooked sausages - they were disturbingly cheap as well, something like 49p for 8 - and chucked them in. I brought it all to the boil, though boil is not really the word, it looked like someone had cooked the stuff they use on 'Get Your Own Back', that kiddy show with all the slime. Except it was a disturbingly bright white, and the vermicelli seemed to be helping this illusion, giving it an almost nuclear look.

So it's cooked, and it's ready to go. I spooned it into 2 bowls and placed them on the table. My friend looks at it with a barely concealed grimace and picks up her fork. I realise my situation is quite severe and get a spoon instead. What followed is something that I would rather forget. Remember that I was quite stoned.

Imagine someone has a really runny cold, stores up their snot for a while, and gives it to you in a bowl. That's what the vermicelli was like. Then imagine they drink a load of white gravy, eat a few dried mushroom pieces, and vomit it over the snot. Then imagine they take a nice dump on a bread board, slice it up into lovely mouth-sized morsels, and throw that in the bowl. Simmer for 10 minutes and it might approach what that meal was like. I actually struggled through a fair bit of it, but really it was a case of 'find the sausage', as the only (barely) edible piece of the meal.

I threw 90% of it in the bin, we went downstairs for another spliff, and 3 hours later I was starving and we ordered a Dominoes. So a happy ending, considering.
( Rookie You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel, Wed 23 May 2007, 20:26, Reply)