Cooking with Boys
Cooking with Boys
A Short story by Tim Smith
Cooking is a skill to be learned, as the next set of stories relate.
(Tim) I lived off campus with Reid Hodges, Randy Hoffman and Dan Thaden. We decided to save some money by doing our own cooking. Unfortunately, none of us had much experience with the culinary arts. After some discussion, they asked me to make the first meal; so I thought soup...sandwiches...and chips would be easy enough. I also made a nice garden salad, too.
Before going to the store, I made a list of the ingredients I would need: tomato soup, milk, bread, mayonnaise, tuna fish, potato chips, lettuce, tomatoes and salad dressing. At home, I set the table and prepared the meal. I put out chips, tuna fish sandwiches, tomato soup and a salad.
Dan took the first bite and spit it out. He loudly asked, "what did you put in the sandwich?" I told him I prepared it like my mother did by using tuna fish and mayonnaise. He said, "Show me the tuna fish can."
We went to the garbage can...rummaged through its contents...and pulled out the tin container. We looked at it, and on it was a picture of a cat.
(Editors Note: mom made mayonnaise sandwiches with some tuna fish.)
(Tim) Another memorable cooking experience occurred several years later in Vermillion. Terry had a penchant for taking recipes from the local paper and preparing a meal based on what he read. One night Terry prepared a concoction that tasted poorly, and so bad that neither Terry or I would eat it. Not only it taste bad but it smelled...horribly, so he put this cooked food (which was still inside an aluminum pan), and placed it out on the doorstep.
The next morning we looked outside, and saw a dead cat no more than 10 feet from the pan. It wasn't until a few days later that the local paper wrote a retraction on this recipe...because the ingredients were all wrong.
Continuing Saga (rebuttal from Terry)
It is true that I like to experiment with food, and I have been known to screw up one or two dinners. One of Elizabeth's best stories is around food preparation. As I was making hamburgers, and putting them onto the table, I said to her, "For our vegetables, we'll have potato chips." I don't know how many times she has told this story, but it still tickles her funny bone.
I think the worst experience, outside of the one Tim mentioned, was preparing dinner for the girls while mom and dad were away on vacation. I decided that I was going to make meatloaf, and instead of using traditional ingredients, I saw this recipe in the newspaper that substituted rice for bread crumbs. So, I got the ingredients together...mixed it according to the steps outlined in the paper...baked it...and finally let it cool.
I proudly placed this in front of the girls. One of them took a bite (Merida, I think), and yelled, "this stinks." Over the next few minutes, I only heard how bad the meatloaf was, and furthermore, they weren't even going to eat it. To be honest, it really was bad. Well, I now had to make something else, but I didn't want to waste any food, so I gave it to Smokey.
As the girls like to say years later, "it was so bad that Smokey wouldn't eat it."
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