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| The compleat bachelor... |
Louis Shalako
With a heat wave of four or five days looming, the plan is to use the
microwave or eat cold foods.
I won't be doing a big roast for a while, or frozen lasagna or cabbage
rolls, which take over an hour in the oven. I probably won’t be doing spaghetti
sauce and boiling a big mess of noodles. I can do a pizza in eleven minutes, at
450 F. It might be better to avoid the labour-intensive cookery and just sit
here in my chair as much as possible, properly hydrating, or in my case, beerdrating.
My brand is 94.9 % water, ladies and gentlemen, and so that’s all right.
Tinned soup, chili, ravioli, flakes of ham and mayo for ham salad, tomorrow
I stop in and get some lunch meat, maybe a tomato. I have buns, cheese,
lettuce, mustard. I can microwave a potato. I can get freeze-dried soup for a
buck and a quarter. It used to be $0.39, but the bougies decided that poor people having too much money caused inflation...I picked up a rotisserie chicken this morning. I can handle
cold chicken, and heating up a tin of beans doesn't put a lot of heat into the
apartment. I can spend five bucks on a frozen entree...the tubs of deli salads,
potato and egg, creamy noodle salad, classic-creamy or deli-style coleslaw come
to mind, and they’re only $3.49 for the smaller sizes. What with being single
and all, I really don’t buy the bigger tubs as I can only it eat it so fast.
Quite frankly, I throw out enough food already.
Hot dogs don't take much to heat. A box of cheese crackers is always
good. A couple of junior cheeseburgers and small fries from Wendy's is less
than ten dollars, and the occasional little treat of fast food has its place.
An assorted cold cuts submarine from Subway will cost ten or eleven dollars, I
eat half for lunch and the other half for dinner...if the portable a/c is
inadequate, I can drag my mattress into the other room, or drag the a/c into
the front of the apartment and sleep on the couch.
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| It's those night-time temperatures that bother me. |
You know what I really want to do. I want to get one of them frozen shrimp rings, the ones with the little bowl of sauce in there and everything, and to hell with the cost.
If
you think it’s warm in the apartment, step outside. Try sleeping on the balcony—
I
can make stuffing mix by boiling the kettle. Or dried soup. I can get pho broth
and cut up some stuff, perhaps a few mushrooms in there as well, (I’m actually
making a list for tomorrow, so don’t forget to remind me to pick up a couple of
apples), and just let all that simmer on low heat, with rice noodles and some
of the shreds of chicken, stuff I pull off the rather small wings, the back
meat, maybe some cubes off one of the thighs or something. Right?
I
call it guerilla cookery.
I
could buy any number of cheeseburgers, bring them home and stick them in the
fridge. They do require some gentle attention in the microwave, I might do them
for forty-five seconds, let them sit for half a minute, and then flip them, and
do them for another thirty seconds. Wait again and then another few seconds—it depends
on the size of the burger, I suppose.
I
will be Frank with you, I will be Ernest if you prefer: but I never buy flakes
of chicken; the flakes of ham, and this is especially true, is (or are) salty
enough. The chicken, on the other hand, doesn’t taste like much at all.
This
morning I grabbed soup, a red pepper, a bag of barbecue flavoured potato chips.
I
grabbed a tin of sardines—I kid you not.
Here’s
a funny thing. If I boil corn on the cob, when it’s done, I simply turn it off
and pour off the hot water down the sink. All that excess heat goes down the
drain. Ah, but if I use the oven, all that excess heat stays in the apartment.
I
bought a beautiful head of Romaine lettuce this morning. Combine that with
onion, red pepper and tomato, it’s a nice salad, served with an Italian house
dressing with herbs, spices and that wonderful Parmesan cheese flavour.
Honestly,
ladies and gentlemen, you can cook on bits of moss and twigs, if it comes right
down to it. Back in the good old days, Tommies in the desert war did their ‘brew-ups’,
(making tea), using metal cans or buckets full of sand. Pour a little gasoline
in there, hit it with a match, and voila! You can at least boil water, which,
if one was careful, really didn’t even pick up much of the flavour of gasoline.
The Western Desert was very hot, and so this analogy is valid.
We can always live on candy bars and pepperettes from the local gas bar. Quite frankly, (or earnestly if you'd rather), these foods are very safe to eat, and probably ain't going to kill you.
It's not the heat, right. It's the humidity.
Stay #beerdrated and that is my advice.
END
Louis
Shalako has books and stories on Amazon.
Check out this other story here.
Thank
you for reading.
