Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Glenn's Tuna Surprise

250g macaroni or spaghetti
1 green pepper
1 small onion
1 tomato
1 small tin of flaked tuna
1 bottle of boiled and filtered water
1 tbsp curry powder
1 tsp lemon pepper
1tsp hot pepper flakes
1/2 tsp garlic salt

For best results, prepare after sundown and shut off power supply.

Serves one person and various critters.

1. Light kerosene stove and lantern. Attempt to light both stove and lantern with single match for higher degree of difficulty and sense of accomplishment. Avoid igniting trail of kerosene leading to fuel supply, if possible.

2. Scrape residual soot from lead pot and deposit soot on front of T-shirt. Empty bottle of water into pot and set on stove to boil.

3. Scrape covering of soot from chopping board and finely chop green pepper, onion, tomato and ants.

4. Open can of tuna and drain vegetable oil. Ensure fingers are coated with oil for maximum slickness. When transferring can to kitchen table, squeeze gently and launch can across room.

5. Watch can hit floor with sufficient force to spray contents on to nearest wall to impressive height of four feet. Compare design created with work of Jackson Pollock and consider leaving it for posterity.

6. Find can hidden behind box on floor and celebrate the tuna remaining in can.

7. Cook pasta for ten minutes or until desired tenderness reached. Mix vegetables and tuna with pasta and season with spices.

8. Scrape covering of soot from bowl and serve. Near end of meal, briefly consider whether anything might have crawled into can of tuna when it was on the floor.

9. Use screwdriver to scrape off tuna affixed to wall while humming theme songs from "Jaws" and "Flipper".

Bon appetit!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Outrageously funny....a true delight to anyone who cooks, even it that means only making peanut butter sandwiches.
I just had a dinner party at my house that involved about 20 guests [I invited 25 and 20 showed up, and stayed for the whole night]. This was the second time I had such an event, and as with the first, I went to my fav resto in Forest Hill Village -- Banfi by name --and ordered large trays of lasagna. This time it was 2 trays of sufficient size and weight to feed most of Caesar's Xth Legion. The real fun wasn't in the cooking, of course, but in the eating. And this time I avoided the near fiasco that occurred before.....I didn't drop the pan of lasagna on the kitchen floor. You see, the last time I was taking the pan out of the oven and simultaneously talking to Ron Silverton. My kitchen is about the size of a smallish closet found on a smallish ship plowing the Antarctic Seas [did you hear that that one sank?]. So being distracted by people, i.e., Ron, the oven [which is ancient and not reliable], and being anxious about getting food on the table to feed the ravenous hordes, I picked up the somewhat cumbersome aluminum pan by the sides using brand new oven mitts [my kids couldn't stand the greasy, stained monsters with asbestos hanging out of the holes that I always used]. Little did I know that these perfectly pretty oven mitts were cottony smooth to the point where they gripped nothing. As I lifted the awkward load of pasta, the entire pan simply slipped out of my hands and hit the floor "fair and square" as they say. I'm not sure who had the better look of shocked surprise -- Ron or me. We immediately started laughing. Yes, there was a series of Pollock-like tomato sauce streaks on the walls and cabinets, some of which remain to this day as an expression of artistic freedom. But the lasagna itself remained in tact and ready to serve, despite sitting hollus-bollus on the kitchen floor [still in the upright pan, not spread overturned all over the floor]. Actually, the free fall did the lasagna some good by tamping it down into a more solid mass. Pretty cool, eh, but not a recommended cooking feature. I swore Ron to secrecy at least for that evening, and we went on as if nothing had happened. No one complained; no one died; no unwarranted little greebly creatures got into the dense mass of lasagna during its brief stay on the kitchen floor...voila, another successful dinner hosted by the Perle Mesta of Forest Hill. The challenges of being a class A chef! Best as usual...victor