Second round of journal entries!

TOPIC: Describe your craziest restaurant or meal at home experience. If you don't have a particularly "crazy" experience, describe your most memorable experience in one of these situations. You can include a discussion of foods you like, don't like, how you feel about food in general, or anything else related that you'd like to add.

Robinson

Here is the thing, leave your 10 year-old child alone at home. Add to this the message: “Mom and Dad will be very late, the food is ready and you just have to heat it up, like I taught you. Be careful with the fire, kisses.” Yes, we didn’t have a microwave back then (or it wasn’t so common, though), so I needed to play chef. Now put your brain to work and imagine a child with Bobby’s World in his head pretending to be a cook. It couldn’t work, right? Definitely!

The task was so simple, just put the pans on the stove and wait till it is ready. But no, the “fantastic” child would play the TV Show and would teach the audience how to prepare a delicious meal. Instead of just pretend cooking, this “marvelous” child would really add more ingredients to the food. Innocently, he served himself some of his “great meal” and when he tasted it, his mouth was on fire, he added salt, more salt to the food and ruined it. Oh my God, so now what? Yes, great idea genius! How to solve this puzzle? If he knew “The sound of music” at that time, he would start singing “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”, but he didn’t and this fact couldn’t avoid him really adding sugar to his dish. Result: I can’t even describe it and I don’t want to remember the taste of it.

He discovered the bittersweet taste, but in the worst and wrong way, because bittersweet is good, not his, the real bittersweet made by a real Chef. By the end of that day, the food was in trash and he was in bed, not grounded, because his parents never discovered his adventure, he was smart enough and threw that away, there was little food that even his parents couldn’t taste it, if it was something good. So he ate his delicious dish and later on he drank liters of water, like a camel. And the rest in the pans was now garbage. That very night, he discovered the obvious: he wasn’t born to be a Chef. Again, it didn’t stop him from trying a couple of more times.

Evandro

I like cooking! I wouldn't say I have a "crazy" cooking experience at home. I already had some particular experiences. My biggest problem when I'm in the kitchen is certainly the mess and the dirt. Currently I'm working on solving this problem cause my mom doesn't like messes. She always says "Oh! You made too much of a mess!". I respond, "Well, how can I cook without making a mess? It's impossible". It was impossible, not now. I usually do it myself, but sometimes I have an auxiliary, my sister. I like when she helps me. It simplifies my work. She doesn't like helping me a lot in the kitchen, but she is getting used to it. 

Returning to the experiences. I'm gonna describe my last madness. A month ago I made a cake for my sister to take to her school. I took the cake recipe and thought, "It's hard", and it was. Well, I was doing it with no problems, suddenly I raised the beater of the mixer, but I forgot to turn off the mixer, so the cake batter exploded all over the kitchen. Fortunately my mom wasn't at home, so I cleaned it on time. Even with less batter than normal the cake was great!!!

There is one more experience. I made a pizza, but not a common pizza, it was different. I can't remember why it was different, but it was. First problem with the pizza:  I didn't have the fillings. But okay. Other problem, I didn't have anything to stretch the dough, so it was really thick. Last problem, the quantity. While I was cooking I forgot that just I would eat the pizza. I made pizza probably for ten people, so I threw away lots of food, and I don't like throwing away food, because there are many people in the world that don't have food. Anyway, the pizza was horrible.

I know that these experiences are not really crazy, but they were funny. Currently, with the strike, I'm cooking almost every day, and sometimes I try to do something different. Maybe something super crazy will arise!

Yuri

Well, the most memorable dinner that comes to my mind right now is Christmas supper last year: we decided to do something different that year, and went to Guaratuba to spend Christmas there. So on Christmas Eve, we were looking for some place to have a good supper, but we started looking for it too late in the afternoon, and all the good places were either closed, or too expensive, or simply not appealing to our taste. So we ended up in a hot dog buffet and ordered some hot dogs and sandwiches. I don't quite remember what I ate there - as a vegetarian, I must have arranged something; I think I ordered a big X-salada, with everything I could think of, and gave the meat to my brothers. It wasn't particularly memorable, but it was funny as hell, as we were there eating and talking about how other people were having nice, formal family suppers at home or in a fancy restaurant, while we were there, in that god-forsaken hot dog buffet in some corner in a strange city, eating sandwiches with our hands.

The meal that would come the closest to being 'crazy' will need some additional information: there's a modern eating ethic/ideology/practice called Freeganism. It consists, basically, of searching for and consuming discarded food, such as leftovers in mall centers or edible packaged food in markets' dumpsters. 

Well, guess who was a frequent practitioner of this thing?

Yes, you're right, me and my friends.

So one time we were in Shopping Curitiba stalking and crawling and hunting for food, lurking in the shadows & stuff, and we managed to get a good deal of french fries, salad, rice and beans, and even two huge steaks. Such joy. But, Alas! disgrace struck us terribly that night: one of my friends snatched a plateful of french fries from a table apparently empty and began eating it with the others; I, thinking it to be too good to be true, didn't dare to touch one of the fries.

Guess what? The former owners of the fries came back to the table, and seeing their food stolen, got pissed off and mad. Seems that they simply had left the table for some minutes, went to the toilets or something, and didn't leave anything in the table to mark it as theirs. They - Big Mama, Bigger Papa and Little Boy - glared at us for some instants, and then Big Mama came to us. My friend who first got hold of the fries stepped up and apologized and stuff, and offered to buy another plate for them, but she was far more concerned with dumping her prejudices on him. So she just yelled it away and left with her minions. For us, it was heaven, because we thought that the bear that she had for a husband would get violent and break our necks. But fortunately, not a single bone was broken that day.

So what's the moral here? I'll tell you: when there's too much food lying all alone on a table, doubt it, and doubt it twice. It's better to lose a free meal than to get yourself into trouble.

And that's all for today, folks.

Igor

My craziest meal at home experience happened when I was alone at home, and I decided to invent some recipe with every food I could think of. So I prepared an instant noodles pack, and added everything I could, like cheese, ham, corn, hamburger patty, and something similar to heavy cream. It was nothing but disgusting, the taste was terrible, but I was hungry, so I ate it.

About foods I like, well, I love pasta, lasagna, gnocchi, everything made of potatoes, pancake, chocolate, ice cream, desserts in general, and all of these caloric things, hahaha. I like Italian, Japanese and Mexican food. Being healthier, I like some fruits too, like strawberry, grape, apple, melon, watermelon, orange, tangerine, plum, mulberry, cashew, etc. I don’t like banana, mango, avocado and most types of salad. There is something I must change, I have to eat salad. I have to! But I really don’t like it, for me it tastes just like grass!

And I love to cook. I’m not that bad like it seemed before! I can make good recipes, mainly cakes, pies and some desserts. Being pretentious, my chocolate cake is just delicious, hahaha.

Pri

I’ve always hated to cook, because of my childhood experience with my mom in the kitchen. She usually makes a huge mess every time she cooks, it’s terrible. And, as my family rule is: if I cook I don’t wash, imagine who had to wash and clean up all my mom’s mess?? Yes, my siblings and me. And we usually spent long hours cleaning everything.

However I don’t remember so many crazy experiences. But I can tell one I clearly remember.

When I was 10-12 yo, my parents went to work and I stayed alone at home. My sister was 17, and she worked all day long as well as my brother. So, the rule was: when my parents got home I should have made coffee, and boiled the milk and cleaned up the kitchen. So, one day I invited a friend of mine to watch TV at my home, it was cold and rainy, so we couldn’t play outside.

So, at almost 6 pm my friend and me start to get hungry, and I didn’t have anything to eat at home, so I said to my friend I could make a mush that my grandmother used to make for me. It is a special kid dish I used to love (and still love) it is a chocolate mush made with milk, cornstarch, and chocolate. It’s mixed very well, put it in a pan, and boiled until it’s smooth. During the winter, it’s a perfect childish dessert.

She was very brave, so she accepted the challenge to eat my mush. But, I had to prepare coffee and also boil milk… When we are grown up, we get messy doing many things at the same time, so imagine a pre-teen trying to do everything?

So, I dropped coffee all over the sink, the milk overflows on the oven, and my mush got burnt and he cornstarch wouldn’t solve. It wasn’t a good experience, and my reputation went down, because my friend told everybody that my mush sucks…