The Annals of Emergency Cookery

In my experience, most cookery books are written for people who have time on their hands and access to specialist shops. Anyone can cook in these conditions. A real cook is someone who can make something which will stop them starving at 11:30 on a Sunday night after several drinks with only those "things" which are always left in your cupboard.

These recipes were all discovered in "trying" conditions. When you can't really see the saucepan very well, or you can't leave the house because of your hangover, you're just too lazy to walk to the shops and you just don't care any more, or you've run out of cash and food, then is the time for Emergency Cookery. Emergency cookery is a little known or understood art - traditionally the specialty of the long-term single male on the slide, it has been ignored for years as unpleasant, unhealthy and masochistic. Move aside Delia Smith and "One is fun" - make way for the Cuisine of Cruelty.

Emergency Recipe Number One

Emergency Curry
Ingredients:
Method: Boil the rice with lots of curry powder.
Tips: This is particularly loathesome and goes a strange green colour. The rice will generally coagulate into some kind of gloopy mass because you were distracted by a particularly good episode of "Prisoner Cell Block H" while it was cooking. Usually if your standards are so low you will cook this then you won't mind eating it anyway.
Associated risks: Usually nothing worse than severe stomache pains

Emergency Recipe Number Two

Emergency Chille
Ingredients: Method: Boil rice. Heat other stuff. Mix.
Tips: This is slightly nicer than the curry but not much. Generally if you add enough spice you won't notice how horrible it is.
Associated risks: Severe stomache pains and other associated problems of the digestive tract

Emergency Recipe Number Three

Emergency "Dips"
Ingredients: Method: Take raw spaggetti - dip into "stuff" - eat.
Tips: This is a diet meal and if you concentrate hard you can pretend it's like a breadstick/dip combination that would be free in a decent restaurant. The choice of dips is up to you. Peanut butter is good and the spaggetti is perfect for scraping those last little bits from the jar. Mayonaisse is kind of OK - better if you can add some dried herbs - any herbs will do. Marmite is, frankly, nasty and you almost certainly won't be able to eat enough of this to fill you up.
Associated Risks: Minimal. Swelling of uncooked pasta in stomache may lead to queasiness


Emergency Recipe Number Four

Emergency breakfast cereal
Ingredients: Method: Pour boiling water into bowl. Insert tea-bag. Stir. Remove tea-bag. Add milk and cereal.
Tips: This is perfect for when you've not got enough milk to have cereal but your life is not quite at a low enough ebb to have cereal with water. You wouldn't think twice about drinking tea while eating cereal so why not combine the activities?
Associated Risks: Can lead to reflections on the state of your life. "What has brought me to this?" "Have I sunk so low?" "What happened to the days of wine and roses?" "I used to be a contendah!" etc.

Emergency Recipe Number Five

Emergency wheat-biscuit recipe
Ingredients: Method: Spread butter on wheetabix. Eat.
This is perfect for those times when you've run out of milk for cereal and bread for toast but you have wheetabix and margarine.
Associated Risks: Inhalation of flakes from the unmoistened wheetabix can lead to long term damage to throat and nasal passages. There is a possibility of dropping the foodstuff during this "choking stage".
More recipes to follow as my standards lower.

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