Making great food is as easy as saying "Chef Seth" 10 times fast. Go ahead, give it a try. See how easy that was? Then you'll have no trouble making some of these classic recipes that I've invented by accident:
Crunchy Crawfish Surprise
Do your guests ever complain that your food tastes like mush? Well, they won't after this magical dish! Ingredients: 1 box of frozen crawfish acquired on sale, 1 can black beans, some rice, spice shelf, large pot.
Boil some rice in your large pot. Do not measure, as this will ruin the authenticity of the dish. Once the rice is cooked, add the frozen crawfish to the pot and stir vigorously to mix them in and get them warmed up. Drain the beans and add them to the pot, stirring vigorously.
Grab random spices from your spice shelf, and sprinkle them into the pot. Take the large plastic cumin bottle and just squeeze it to spray cumin onto the food; there is no such thing as too much cumin. Stir vigorously.
You will soon realize that you totally forgot to remove the shells from the crawfish, and all the vigorous stirring has resulted in shell shards spread throughout the dish. Surprise! This recipe is not recommended for people with soft gums or non-metal teeth.
Sweet and Evil Potatoes
If you have ever complained about being too busy to cook, this recipe is for you! Ingredients: sweet potatoes, short attention span.
Put your sweet potatoes on a tray to prepare them to be put into the
Open oven door, insert tray of potatoes, close oven door. Turn oven to 450. Some people will try to "pre-heat" an oven, but that sounds like more effort, and you're too busy. Do not set any sort of time; just leave the room and go watch a movie.
Some unspecified time later, after well over an hour has passed, you will realize that you are hungry and remember that you have potatoes in the oven. This is your cue to go open the oven door, where you can see that the sweet potatoes have spawned giant black crispy masses of evil. Note that sticky porous charcoal has formed in many small lumps on the potatoes and in large piles next to the potatoes. And yet somehow, when you open them up to eat them, they will be utterly delicious.
Flaming Hot Death
Ingredients: 2 chicken breasts, 4 tortillas, 1/2 package shredded cheddar cheese, 1 can black beans, 2 ears fresh corn, 3 frozen fishsticks, 5 slices white bread, 1 bottle world's hottest hot sauce, of which 5 drops is sufficient to flavor an entire vat of food.
Dice the chicken and sauté it in the pan. Open the hot sauce bottle and very carefully, out through the regulator cap, add 4 drops of hot sauce.
Upon hearing a "glug glug glug" noise, realize that regulator cap is missing, and you have just added a third of a bottle of hot sauce to your dinner. Add corn to reduce spiciness. Notice that the fumes from your dinner are causing your eyes to sting and your nose to run.
Add black beans to reduce spiciness. Taste a very small bite of the food, drink a glass of water and realize more help is needed. Rip up tortillas and add them. Taste again, drink extra glass of water and realize food is still inedible. Panic. Quickly thaw fishsticks and add them. Taste again, drink more water. Add the bread, ripped up. Stir vigorously.
The food should now be almost edible. Add the cheese, and it should go from inedible to merely the hottest thing you've ever eaten.
The only thing I haven't figured out is why nobody ever wants to join me for leftovers.
Seth Brown is the author of "Rhode Island Curiosities," the creator of GodToVerse.com and a master chef. His column appears weekly in the Transcript and weakly on his Web site, www.RisingPun.com.
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